One of my real aspirations of this is I wanna see interstellar wars between Care Bears and Klingons.

Will Wright is a man of creative genius. If you’ve ever played Sim City, The Sims or any of the Sim games, you’ve played a game created by Will Wright. You may ask, “So what if I played them? What makes them so important?” Sim City is considered to be one of the most influential games ever. It was the first game to feature an open ended play system where the player neither won nor lost. And, as a result, started a new paradigm in gaming. The Sims is the greatest selling PC game ever. To date it has sold 16 million copies worldwide, and that doesn’t include sales figures of it’s 7 different expansions. Needless to say, when Will Wright announces a new project, the video game world listens.

And indeed Will Wright is working on a new project. Well, it’s not exactly new, as we have known about it for the past few years. But, it still looks like it’s going to be amazing nonetheless. The gem that Will has in the pipeline is called Spore. Althought Will has been the face of this game when it comes to presenting and demonstrating it, the Spore title was originally created Ocean Quigley, a developer at Maxis. Before that, the game’s original title was Sim Everything (Thanks to Slartibartfast over at GamingSteve for bringing my error to my attention.) EA slates a release during the second half of this year.

Spore is “god like” sim game that allows players to form a civilization starting at the microscopic level. They start as a mollecule, and evolve from there. They next form a microbe, which evolves into a creature. They then form a group of these creatures creating a tribe. Multiple tribes come together to form a city and multiple cities come together to form a civilization. Once the civilization phase is complete the space and terraforming phase begins where players can explore other civilizations created by other players, or terraform their own planet. All throughout the evolution the player has to opportunity to modify and tweak pretty much every aspect of what they created. The game looks to be extremely open ended with limitless possibilities.

I stumbled across a link to a great article about Will Wright’s SXSW (South by Southwest) keynote posted yesterday on Wonderland.

Keynote dicussion and gameplay footage after the jump.

The underlying theme in Wright’s keynote speech is the use of story. He talked about how story can detract from a game. His stance is pretty much that story can cause games to be linear, and the more rigid the story the greater the amount of control is taken from the player. However, he goes on to say that games are about storytelling. In games that are very open ended like GTA and The Sims, he found that people were converting their actions in game into a linear story and relaying them that way. He goes into far more detail than I would like to describe here, but I find his take on the topic to be intriguing, and I would definitely suggest a read over of the article.

The later part of his keynote was a demonstration of Spore. What I find awesome about the game is how they’ve managed to abstract a great ammount of the details from the player. A player need not be concerned with every minute detail of what they are creating. They form a basic representation of what they want and the computer takes care of all of the little things, like how the legs attach to the body of a creature, how it walks, eats, dances, moves, etc. This allows the player to spend more time enjoying the game than creating it. I loved The Sims, but one of the biggest problems I had with the game was the micromanagement involved with getting the sim through their day. I hate micromanagement (but I love Starcraft, go figure.) I hope Spore eliminates a great deal of this.

Wright also demonstrated the vastness of the universe. This game is going to be truly revolutionary in it’s scale. To go from a molecule to being an entity in a solar system is pretty tough to wrap your head around. Wright calls spore an “amplifier of imagination” I couldn’t agree with him more.

There is alot more to the article. I suggest giving it a read. Wright makes a lot a really great points when it comes to the importance and potential pitfalls of story in games.

Spore at Wikipedia

Here is a link to video of the presentation.

Here is video of the presentation, I haven’t watched it yet as it is blocked from work. So, I hope it is awesome.

Also, here is a video the game being demonstrated by Wright himself at GDC 05. This is what originally piqued my interest in the game a couple years ago.