If you’re like me, you’re really looking forward to the new game that Will Wright is working on, called Spore. It’s basically “SimEverything” - you start out as a microscopic organism, evolve until you get larger and larger, leave the oceans, become sentient, form a culture, build a village, grow to a city, take over the planet, expand through the solar system, and eventually explore other systems and galaxies - which are populated with content from other players’ games. The demo he ran at the 2005 GDC has finally surfaced online, and you can now watch a a 30-minute demo guided by Will Wright, which is good, since the official website isn’t very interesting yet.
Followup: One more video (maybe the same thing, I haven’t watched yet), an hour-long video of Will Wright discussing Spore.
I'm a 30-year-old 
This demo pretty much blew my mind when I saw it, and I showed it to a number of the people I work with. I like how as they demo progresses, people start applauding when he just zooms out.
The remarkable thing about it is how he grounds very complex ideas and concepts about emergent gameplay in well-understood gameplay models. Like, this stage is like Pac-man, and this is like Diablo II, and this is like Populous, etc.
Of course, it’ll be a tremendous bitch to debug and balance, and it’s concerning that his entire demo only showed about two different creatures in-game, so it’s definitely not as far along as it looked in that demo. Not sure when we’ll see it, but it should sell crazy well when it hits, so long as it’s easy enough to get to the sandbox-y late game.
And yeah - the hour long video is the same thing.
March 13th, 2006 at 6:04 pm