IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 32

the players create life itself-starting
with ooze-dwelling, one-celled creatures
that learn, grow, and evolve into intelligent beings with advanced cultures and
technologies, able to conquer their planets and outer space.
Computer gamers everywhere have
eagerly awaited Wright's latest project
since he began talking about it in 2000.
Spore is finally due to be released this
month, more than a year behind schedule. Wright attributes its recent delays
to localization, the process of tailoring
the game to different countries and languages. Others around the Maxis office
cite the boss's high expectations. Wright
concedes their point but shrugs it off.
"For games, it is a long time, but for me
it's not a big deal," he says, sipping coffee
in his cluttered corner office. "I'd rather
spend a couple of extra years and have it
be a big seller than short it by a year or
two and have it be mediocre."
Spore is anything but. Other games
may look and sound better, but few games
are as original as this one. It offers players far more choice and open-ended play
than any game before it. If Spore lives
up to its creator's vision, it will likely be
heralded as one of those milestones that
redefines what a game can be-just as
Doom, a first-person shooter game, pioneered fast-action multiplayer competition in 1993 and Guitar Hero delivered the
thrill of music performance by introducing a guitar-shaped controller.
The anticipation-and pressure-is
high. "I call Wright a genius because he
truly is one of the most innovative developers out there," writes one gaming blogger.
"Spore...is creating an entirely new genre."

he game unfolds through
five stages, each of which
riffs on an established genre
of play. It starts, fittingly, in a
two-dimensional world, with

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * SEptEmbEr 2008

a single-celled organism that gobbles
up microbes and plants to accrue DNA
points. Once the spore collects enough
DNA, an editing palette pops up that lets
you design the next evolutionary stage of
the creature's body. Your creature is then
thrown into a three-dimensional environment where it must dodge predators
and find a partner with which to reproduce. By the third stage, your creature is
fully evolved and you switch to controlling its entire tribe, as you would in realtime strategy games like Electronic Arts'
Command & Conquer.
Next up is the civilization phase, in
which you can assemble vehicles and
buildings to bring your tribe's city to life,
in the spirit of SimCity or Civilization. If
you succeed in conquering your planet
and avoiding an enemy takeover, you
graduate to the fifth and final level: outer
space. Here the object is to fight off invaders and take over other planets.
Developing a game in which the players create all the key parts-the characters, buildings, and vehicles-poses an
obvious conundrum: "There's no content," says Maxis technology fellow Chris
Hecker. "Initially, the problem was, well,
what is [Spore] supposed to be?"
When you boot up most games for the
first time, you're immediately immersed
in an existing world, complete with a cast
of characters who behave in predetermined ways. Perhaps the game has treelined streets or castles with dungeons
and moats. Maybe colonies of dwarves
and trolls populate those worlds, or
maybe gangsters do. These objects are all
encoded in the game's original software
exactly as the developers envisioned and
animated them.
In Spore, that model doesn't apply.
Almost nothing exists until the player
makes choices about each object's shape
and texture. To enable that design process, the relatively small team of 20 art-

ists and seven programmers created a
palette of editing tools. They think of it as
an "artist in a box" or, as Maxis software
engineer Colin Andrews puts it, "Mr.
Potato Head on steroids." Maxis released
a stripped-down version of the tool palette, known as the Creature Creator, on
16 June to build buzz for the game. Eight
days later, early adopters had created
more than a million creatures.
To understand why the Creature
Creator is so compelling, consider its
incredible flexibility. Say a player wants
to make a building. Spore provides a
menu of architectural elements to tinker
with: windows, doors, that kind of thing.
The player clicks and drags the pieces
onto a base structure and can stretch or
shrink them along several axes. From
the game's perspective, each building's design is simply a list of instructions; when the player is finished tinkering, those instructions direct the game
engine to generate an image of the building and place it within the Spore world.
Simple enough.
Then there's the process of making a
creature, which offers a whole other level
of variety and complexity. For instance,
each creature can have any number of
features and appendages-eyes, mouths,
legs, feet-which can be stretched and
curled like clay into outlandish shapes.
But that indeterminacy presents an
unusual problem: how exactly does a
game company write software that generates realistic movements for "an eightlegged, two-headed thing with four
mouths and no neck?" Wright says. "We
don't know what we're animating."
To convincingly evoke even the
wackiest animal a player could design,
the game code had to be able to apply
the knowledge of a human animator, on
the fly-the ability to understand body
language and subtle facial expressions
and then to encapsulate those qualities
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008