Are you worried that even Sims fanatics will be daunted or even confused by the seemingly infinite possibilities of Spore?

Much of the development team on Spore had previously worked on the The Sims and SimCity line of products so there is quite a bit of knowledge and influence carried over from those franchises. For The Sims and SimCity players, playing Spore should feel familiar because of the infinite possibilities found in those games. As a sandbox game, The Sims allowed players to add a mixture of ingredients such as personality, relationships, and motives into their world producing emergent and oftentimes surprising results. In SimCity, the placement of zones, tax distribution and utility management contribute to its very large possibility space. Spore is in the same vein in that it requests limited controlled inputs from the player to output a great deal of possibilities and experiences that is strictly unique to the player and to his story. Ideally, The Sims fanatics will be the least daunted by Spore, because as a strategy/simulation game, The Sims is one of the deepest found in this genre.

The scope of ideas behind Spore is incredibly daunting and distilling them down into simple game mechanics for the player is what the team strives to do everyday. Taking a microscopic cell and evolving it into an intergalactic space-faring race, while interacting with thousands of creations along the way is conceptually a monumental undertaking. Ultimately, Spore is going to be consumed by the fans, and the fans and the community will be apart of its evolution and development, populating and pollinating each others’ universes and also ours.

You can find a new interview with Thomas Vu, producer of Spore at Play.tm.  He explains how the online aspect of the game works thru pollination, the possibilities with Spore and how it is similiar to The Sims and SimCity, the art design of the game, the fact that this game does have a true ending, and what is in store for Maxis after Spore.

Read the Interview