Development of Spore - History and Development

History and Development

Spore was originally a working title, suggested by Maxis developer Ocean Quigley, for the game which was first referred to by the general public as SimEverything. Even though SimEverything was a first choice name for Wright, the title Spore stuck. Wright adding it also freed him from the preconceptions another Sim title would have brought, saying "...Not putting 'Sim' in front of it was very refreshing to me. It feels like it wants to be breaking out into a completely different thing than what Sim was."

Spore's development began in 2000, around the time that development began for The Sims Online. The earliest version was inspired by the SETI Project, as Wright admitted, "The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore." Spore's design documents were published in an issue of Wired in 2004 as a layout portraying the cycle of evolution, unbeknownst to the magazine and the general public at that time. At the 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC), Spore was first revealed and demonstrated to the public during a speech on procedural generation.

It was officially unveiled two months later at E3 2005, the industry's annual trade show. GDC 2006 featured two Spore related talks, Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore and Spore: Preproduction Through Prototyping. A video released on YouTube shows "unedited footage of Spore that will be going to TV networks covering E3 2006", and includes an overhauled creature editor, a first look at the texturing tools, as well as glimpses at other aspects of the game. Such things were discussed on G4's Attack of the Show numerous times. Will Wright has said that the game was also influenced by many TV shows, films and toys, such as Lego and Star Wars. By E3 2007, the game's look had changed again, with major changes to the graphical style. The Sporepedia was inspired by Web 2.0.

At the Digital Illusions CE, Wright playfully introduced four designers according to their design team personas, dubbing designer and senior art director Quigley as The Scientist, Chaim Gingold as The Toymaker, Jenna Chalmers as The Mastermind, Alex Hutchinson as The Cowboy, and himself as The Traffic Cop. Quigley revealed at the Summit the difficulty of making the editors (the creature and vehicle editors in particular) extremely accessible, stating it was like "art directing a million incompetents... don’t have good sense as to what makes a good character, so you have to put in all these techniques and tools, so when they do something, it looks good."

The New York Times reported a projected development cost of twenty million United States dollars on October 10, 2006.

In April 2007, Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson joined EA Maxis to work on Spore. Soon after, some video game sites theorized that this news indicated that the release of Spore might slip to 2008. A projected 2008 release was revealed three weeks later at an EA conference call, corroborating the speculation that a significant amount of development was still left to be completed. In a GameVideos interview with Garnett Lee, Wright explained, "I credit him with, basically, you know, being able to present that has that many, ah, strategic possibilities but not have it being overwhelming from a gameplay mechanic sense."

By July 2007, the game was a complete, fully featured alpha build undergoing closed play testing. On August 23, 2007, a closed door demonstration of a playable build was featured at Games Convention 2007 in Leipzig, Germany.

At the 2008 Digital Illusions CE, Electronic Arts CEO John Ricitiello stated, "It's probably the greatest creative risk maybe going on in the game industry today...I believe it's going to be one of the greatest franchises in our industry and will rival World of Warcraft or The Sims or Rock Band. It's going to be right up there."

Promotion and advertising were ramped up in May and June 2008, as the YouTube Spore channel opened, new trailers focusing on each phase along with developer interviews were released, and the Creature Creator was released, allowing players to upload their creations to the revamped official site.

Will Wright announced at E3 2008 that National Geographic would do a television documentary on Spore, as scientists use the game to explain real-life biological, physical, and evolutionary science; this is the same documentary that will be included with Spore: Galactic Edition. He also announced a partnership with SETI, taking part in the Celebrating Science 2008 activity on July 16, 2008, where Spore betas were available for play.

On August 14, 2008, Spore was declared to have gone gold.