Spore is one of the best games ever made. Fact. It’s the brainchild of genius developer Will Wright, who has twice previously shifted the entire face of gaming, first with SimCity, and then again with The Sims. Spore is the next evolutionary epoch in the man’s legacy, but will it reach the same super heights of his previous titles. Will it sell?
Not bloody likely! In fact, despite its truly awesome premise, Spore could tank. It could be gaming’s Titanic, a technological marvel defeated by its own grandiose nature. Let us explain…
Spore aims to simulate the entire evolution of life. Gamers are given a planet and asked to play God, customizing, modifying and personalizing a range of critters from their microscopic phase right through to their super-intelligent, anal-probing, space-travelling end. Each user’s planet is unique, with near limitless design options for their organism creations, not to mention the exponential differentiation that occurs from the ability to interbreed species.
Finally, users can upload their critters to a virtual galaxy, where other players can download them to populate their own planets. Cool stuff, hey? We had an opportunity to sit down with Will Wright and get a personal tour of his vision and it is arguably the most impressive project developed anywhere in the world, on any format. It truly is a futuristic, mind-blowing stuff. But regardless of that, Spore is still a tough sell.
Here’s the long and short of it: as a result of many reasons we will detail below, Spore has plonked itself right between the mainstream and the gamer audiences, but could end up attracting neither.
Take The Sims: it is humongous. It’s so big that the series’ publisher, EA, has given it its own label within the corporation: we now have EA Games, EA Sports, EA Casual and The Sims. For a company that packs such mega-selling franchises as Need for Speed and FIFA, this is some statement to The Sims pulling power. However, it was not gamers who carried the series to such massive heights. The Sims, its sequel, and their ludicrous numbers of expansion packs are the textbook definition of ‘mainstream’ in terms of both gameplay, and marketing. And once the brand took hold, it soared. Therefore you could argue that hugely anticipated The Sims 3, which is only a mere six months away from release, is already chewing chunks out of Spore’s potential audience
