Soon players could unlock the mysteries of the interstellar drive, at which point, they could zoom out even more. Wright went on his merry way, his home solar system shrinking to a speck of white light, and soon his screen was filled with a myriad of star clusters, constellations, quasars, and more. At this point in the game, the mouse pointer becomes like a SETI device, and you could mouse over the cosmos listening for radio waves. After a few moments, Wright located some intelligence in the form of radio signals and then zoomed his UFO over to the target system.
Spore populates the universe with creatures and cities created by players from all over. There's almost nothing in the world that wasn't at some point created by another player. Wright discovered someone else's civilization, a curious four-legged race who carried tridents and lived in cities with pointed walls and towers. What happened next was entirely up to Wright: he decided to try to communicate with the other species using a bizarre Close Encounters style mini-game. His UFO played music and waited for the aliens to respond.
They responded by shooting him with lasers. What followed was a crazy War of the Worlds space invasion shootout, with Wright's UFO blasting the city with ray guns while missiles and lasers bounced off his ship. It wasn't going well, so Wright flew up into space and then fired off the ultimate weapon. Suddenly, the alien planet exploded in a cataclysmic orgy of molten destruction, forming a new ring of asteroids around the sun. "There goes my reputation as a non-violent game designer," Wright quipped.
Using the UFO, you can conquer whole new worlds...
Bacteria to Galactic God
What's unique about Spore is that unlike many other 'sandbox' titles, the game starts out very focused. Players begin the game very goal-oriented: they just need to survive the different phases of life, starting from the most simplistic form of all. Then, once they've gotten familiar with the editors and every stage of a life form's development, they're turned loose with a UFO and the ability to simply play with whole species, worlds, and solar systems.
In the process players can play out whatever science-fiction cliché they want. Invasion? Supervision? Uplifting? First Contact? Abduction/Cross-Breeding? Diplomacy? The game is what players make of it.
The important thing to take away from this is not "Will Wright is making a cool game," but the way that he is making the game. He's sidestepped the whole idea of massive teams of content creators in favor of a system of building games based on player-content and emergence. The results are stunning.
At the end of his talk Wright pointed out that the hardest part of making this game was not the act of making it, but his own imagination. For a while he didn't think it was possible. Then, once he got over that, he went big. He encouraged everyone else in the room to do the same -- not to be intimidated by what everyone is saying about the next generation of content -- but just to go out and make great games!
