Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, arrived at The Apple Store, Regent Street yesterday to demonstrate his latest game Spore before a packed audience of keen Mac gamers.
Spore – set to be released on the Mac and iPhone tomorrow – promises to be Wright’s most ambitious game to-date. The game enables players to create their own custom life-form, which begins as a single-cell organism, and develops into a social creature within a busy world; dedicated gamers can take their custom life-form into an advanced civilization that reaches out to the stars and meets other civilizations.
Discussing his inspiration for the game, Will Wright said: “I grew up in the 1960’s, with a very optimistic view of the future. The film 2001 had a big impact on me, with its view of alien intelligence and homicidal robots. Later in life I retained these fascinations. When I was young it seemed natural that we would have bases on the moon. It was really interesting to me later in life to see this future not evolve."
He also revealed some interesting tit-bits about his development process. Wright said: " Before I do anything I mock up the box for the game both the front and the back. I show it to my team and I say: “this is the game I want to build”. I even go as far as to do the system specs." Not an easy task seeing as planning began on Spore seven years ago, and was in physical development for five years.
Apple is often accused of showing little interest in gaming, which is why it's interesting to see someone like Will Wright giving a demonstration at the Apple Store. But some of the things he said about the nature of Spore could provide a clue as to why Apple has shown such an interest in the game, the key is "creativity", something that is always close to the heart of Apple.
Will Wright likened the game to Star Wars, and talked about he difference between story and play. "Star Wars itself is a story, but there are elements from it that you can deconstruct and turn into play." Things like lightsabres, spaceships and Yoda. Wright continued: "my favourite play experiences are generative, in that the concept of play leads to generating a story. Players love making content".
It may be this nature of creating your own story that has been behind the enormous success of Will Wright's other programs: Sim City and The Sims.
Some of the millions of creatures that have been created in the Spore universe
Wright also talked about the importance of the Spore Creature Creator. He said: "We tried to raise the tools so that players could create better content. We ended up teaching the computer to do the job of the artist. It would stand over your shoulder and instantly bring things to life. Our highest criteria was to make the tools fun. It had to be entertaining enough that I’d keep using it. Even if I didn't care about the output."
It turns out that Spore Creature Creator has exceeded their expectations for creating life forms to be used in the Spore universe. Wright said their original aim was to get 100,000 life forms in the three months between Spore Creature Creator and the launch of Spore itself. They ended up getting this amount in just 22 hours, within a week they had over a million creatures and in 18 days fans of Spore had made over three million creatures. Will Wright said: "this is interesting because there are only around one-and-a-half million species on Earth". He also, lightheartedly said: "the way we see it, God created all life on earth in seven days, so Spore fans equal 38 per cent of God's output".
Wright finished by saying: "I see Spore as an intersection between science and creativity. The most important lesson is that anyone can be creative. With a few days and mouse clicks a Spore gamer can create something worthy of a Pixar artist”.
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