Spore Creature Creator Will Be Released Ahead of Spore Game

Posted on February 19, 2008

Before the much-discussed Spore game arrives a Spore Creature Creator stand-alone will be released for free. Wired's Chris Kohler thinks Spore is gong to be "massive." He might be right especially if the creature creator gets people fired up about Spore. Kohler says Maxis wants people to get to the Space phase of the game - you can see the different phases described here in a Wikipedia entry for Spore.

As we walked into Maxis' offices in Emeryville, there were giant posters up all over the walls that iterated the designers' mission statement. They might have been placed there for the benefit of visiting journalists, but I got the feeling they were a semi-permanent installation, meant to remind team members every time they walked by that they want players to be able to get all the way to the "space" portion of the game without feeling frustrated.
This was reflected in other design choices. Rather than force the player to start at the "cell" level, you can instead select between any of the five different parts of the game right from the start. While this is certainly sure to be a controversial decision -- it takes a lot away from the sense of growth and expansion that I believed the game would have if it forced you to start from the beginning -- it'll let anybody jump in wherever they feel most comfortable.

There is a lot of hype behind Spore but as everyone knows Will Wright has been one of the most successful game developers. It has been a very long time coming but many gamers will want to play Spore once it arrives -- which will be September 7th. As Ars Technica suggests the creature creator may very help to rope in new players. It is not clear how much sooner than September 7th the creature creator will be released.