Creative people are just so FUNKY, what with their creative minds always doing something jazzy like funking up a jazzy idea and giving it their own crazy creative jazz-funk funky twist…
Too bad they’re all lazy hippies who drain society of money while the rest of us MAKE $#!* HAPPEN.
(Not before July 2007)
The official word is that Spore wont be released before July 2007. Everyone try to remember Episode III when Vader sees that he is “more machine than man” and yells “Nooooooooooooooo!” That is what I just did.
The only time I was more excited for a video game release was Super Mario Bros. 3. I felt a homesickness and longing for that game and my life felt complete the day I received it for my birthday. What an incredible reaction to marketing…
Hopefully the following can give you that same reaction:
I took my seat. There were little holes in the ceiling, with light behind them, to simulate stars. The walls of the hut were decorated with models of creatures that other players had designed. The lights went down and the game began in the drop of water. “O.K., so we start, and I’m trying to survive here—whoops the guy wants to eat me.†Wright narrated the game in the first person, and he seemed to be having fun. Using the creature editor, he put together a part-reptilian, part-avian creature, with yellow and purple stripes, four spindly legs, and talons at the end of its arms; it looked both cute and fierce. “O.K., now I have to survive and eat—whoops, I’m going to run away from that guy. Whoops, not that way—this is a harsh world right now.†His creature ate another creature’s egg. “O.K., now that I’ve eaten I feel like mating,†and he located a mate the computer had generated for him. The creatures went at it, discreetly, behind a puff of smoke, to the sound of smooth jazz. “Procedurally generated mating,†Wright said, with a smoker’s chuckle.
Wright hurtled through the levels, evolution moving at hyperspeed as his creature acquired houses, tools, weapons, vehicles, and cities. While he was narrating his creature’s adventures, Wright was also explaining how, in passing through the different levels of the game, the player would be progressing through the history of video games: from the arcade games, like Pac-Man, to Miyamoto’s Super Mario, to the first-person shooters. At the tribal level you are playing a Peter Molyneux-style God game, and at the global level you are playing Sid Meier’s Civilization. Finally, Wright reached the status of intergalactic god, with the power to visit other worlds. “Now we’re going to go over to this place, which you can tell by the sliders has intelligent life on it, and this is actually a moon, a moon of this gas giant here. O.K., this is an alien civilization and there are a lot of different things I can do here diplomatically—I can actually use fireworks. O.K., they seem to like that. Actually, now they’re starting to worship me as a god. So I might decide to pick one of these guys up.†A tractor beam came down from his spaceship and sucked up one of the creatures. The natives started shooting at him. “Oops. They were upset by that.â€
At a certain point in the performance, the crazy ambition of Spore became clear: Wright was proposing to simulate the limitless possibility of life itself. The simulation falls between Darwinism and intelligent design, into new conceptual territory. Wright had worked out the algorithm for life, as described by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.†Dennett writes, “Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature. . . . Can it really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance?†The old dream of the M.I.T. hackers who came up with Spacewar—to re-create life on a computer—was coming true forty years later, right here in the Spore Hut, in the form of a spindly, striped creature that looked a little like Will Wright himself.
After Wright’s encounter with the other planet, he pulled back to reveal a vast galaxy of other worlds, some computer generated, some created by other players in the game who had reached the status of intergalactic gods—“more worlds than any player could visit in his lifetime,†he said. As people in the audience gasped at the vastness of the possibility space, Wright’s spaceship zoomed into the interstellar sandbox, looking for an uninhabited planet to colonize, just as young Will had promised his father he would.