Buzz strong on new 'Spore' game The man behind the Sims and SimCity is about to unleash his latest creation. BY ELLEN LEE Contra Costa Times In the beginning, there was SimCity. Published in 1989, it became a best-selling computer game, spawning a generation of players who spent hours upon hours obsessively constructing cities and empires from the ground up. Then came the Sims and the Sims 2, virtual games about everyday life with characters who go to work, raise families and sometimes accidentally (or purposefully) set their homes on fire. The franchise is ranked the No. 1 best-selling computer game in history, translated in more than 17 languages, selling more than 54 million copies and raking in nearly $600 million in sales, according to NPD Group Inc. Now the man behind the Sims and SimCity, legendary designer Will Wright, is about to unleash his latest creation, a game wildly anticipated by the $10 billion gaming industry. Not set for release until next fall, the project has already begun to garner buzz. Called "Spore," it gives "the game of life" new meaning. In short, players begin as a single cell, then evolve, build a civilization and ultimately blast off into space to colonize (or wreak havoc or destroy) other planets. Players have control over the creature from its first breath, advancing the species by adding legs, wings, horns and other body parts. As the creature develops intelligence, it builds homes, communities and spaceships. Survival of the fittest is at play: fail to find a mate and the creature won't live beyond its generation; if its puny little legs can't run fast enough, it could be eaten by a predator. Wright at first conceived the game as "Sim Everything." "From the Sims, we tried to bring the idea (of letting) everything in the game be created by the player," he said. But at the same time, Spore is a whole new animal for Wright. The game is ambitious, creating a new mold for how games are made and designed, but that's not surprising coming from the 45-year-old co-founder of Emeryville-based computer game maker Maxis, now owned by Electronic Arts. With Spore, Wright "is being more ambitious than everyone else in the business," said Gordon Wolton, a longtime game producer who spent two years with Wright as the executive producer of Sims Online. "If there's a theme to Will, that's one of the themes, reaching beyond where the rest of us would have stopped." Spore, added Wolton, is "going to redefine again what a Will Wright game is. He will create another genre." Just as he did with SimCity and the Sims, Wright started the project several years ago with copious amounts of research. A voracious reader with a longtime interest in astronomy and astrobiology, Wright devoured academic journals and just about anything he could read on the SETI project, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI involves more than 100 scientists at the SETI Institute and countless amateurs who scan the heavens for signs of alien life. He then asked a programmer to develop a prototype, but soon realized that the game faced a critical technical challenge: They had to develop the technology to teach the computer to figure out how a player's creature would behave based on the combination of body parts, tools and needs that the player gives it. Give an animal wings and it has to know how to fly; but add wings to a heavy animal and the computer has to know it won't be able to get off the ground. "The computer has to analyze, 'How many legs does it have? Does it have hands? What are its senses?' The computer has to calculate the behavior at a much lower level," Wright said. "On the technology side, we had to invent things that didn't exist before." But the effect is striking, reflecting Wright's well-known quirky humor and style: Players can create cuddly Care Bear types to monsters straight out of a B-horror film. And it doesn't end there. An online component allows creatures that players invent to be entered into a main database. The database will distribute creatures and planets to other players' games. "It's so large no one player could explore it all," Wright said. "I figure, assuming we sell 1 million copies and you spend one hour in every world before going to the next one, it would take something like 20 years (to explore it all) without stopping or sleeping." http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/entertainment/12487479.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
