Creatures (artificial Life Series) - History

History

Originally conceived as a desktop pet with a brain, Grand later incorporated inspiration from The Planiverse to pitch a "little computer ewoks" game, like the game Little Computer People. He later wished to include references to an "English" or Norse mythology, to try to make the world more internally consistent, but found that the team wanted to make the game into a conventional adventure game. He later decided to scale back on the mythology aspects of the game, focusing instead on the artificial life point - eventually presenting the game as an artificial pet hobby, which provided some of the impetus to include genetics in the creatures. Creatures was developed as a consumer product by Millennium, and was released by Mindscape in 1996. The program was instantly successful, and an online community of players soon formed, swapping Norns, creating new objects for Albia, sharing tips on how to play the game and anecdotes about unexpected evolutionary changes that they had seen, and even creating new breeds of Norn. At one point, the Creatures online community was the largest of its type.

In 1996, Creatures won an EMMA Award. Based on sales of 500,000 copies of Creatures from 1996 through to the second quarter of 1998, it was estimated that at that time, there was a possible global population of up to five million norns.

Development of Creatures 2 began in Q3 1997. In 1998, the video games division of Millennium was sold to Sony Entertainment while those working on alife and Creatures formed a new company called Cyberlife Technology. Along with continued work on the Creatures titles, the company did work for industry and the British Ministry of Defence, famously attempting to teach live organisms to fly virtual fighter jets.

In the late 1990s, Grand left Cyberlife to form Cyberlife Research and focus on the production of new alife technologies, including work on a robotic life form he called Lucy as well as writing books about his research. The remainder of the company was renamed Creature Labs, and focused on video game development.

Sequels to Creatures, including Creatures 2, Creatures 3 and the small-children's games Creatures Adventures and Creatures Playground, were released by Creature Labs in subsequent years. Creatures Adventures won an EMMA Award in 2000. Creatures Playground was exhibited at E3 and nominated for a BAFTA award in 2000. The final major Creatures release, Docking Station, was made available for download from the company's web site in 2001.

Development was suspended on future Creatures games on March 20, 2003, when Creature Labs ceased operations, but development and trademark rights have since been purchased by a company named Gameware Development, Ltd. Gameware has revived the Creatures Developer Network, the shop, the forums, the Docking Station server, and have released many before-purchasable tools and add-ons for free.

Gameware staff that previously worked on Creatures developed a convergent media game for the BBC called BAMZOOKi.

In 2004, the Creatures games have been re-released in combination packs under the names Creatures: The Albian Years (C1, C2), Creatures Exodus (C3, DS) and Creatures Village (CA, CP). The Albian Years, and Exodus include the separate games, whereas Village has merged Adventures and Playground into a single game.

Kutoka Interactive, a Canadian children's software company, has created releases of Creatures Exodus (Kutoka) and Creatures Village (Kutoka Kids) that are compatible with both Apple's Mac OS X and Windows XP. They were released on 30 September 2005, and can be purchased either directly from Kutoka or from other online stores.

In November 2009, GOG.com announced that they were offering Creatures: The Albian Years, Creatures Exodus and Creatures Village for sale on their site as digital downloads.

In 2011, Fishing Cactus announced they were developing Creatures 4, to be demonstrated at that year's GamesCom. A second demonstration was exhibited at the 2012 GamesCom. Creatures 4 appeared at the 2012 Paris Games Week.