Spore was re-designed to ful-fill many player’s wishes

If you visit The Simemperor, you’ll find a new interview with Will Wright.  While hardly any new information on Spore was shared, he does give insight of the development as well as a few other interesting tidbits

One of his answers that caught me by surprise is that he had the team redesign a few parts of Spore to allow players to create their own creatures from the fan-made drawings that they were designing.  I can only assume that the GamingSteve Community played an important role in this!

You’re doing extensive online marketing for Spore, including the Sporepedia and a deal with YouTube to upload videos. How did you get to that point?

It used to be that we would do the game, somebody else would design the box, the marketing people would own the Web site, and they would basically figure out how to use it as an elaborate advertisement. Back with SimCity, we started to see our fans forming online communities. They wanted to contact each other and share content or strategies, and we realized these players were becoming our codevelopers. With Spore, we had some fan sites, now several years old, where people were making drawings of the creatures they wanted to build. We would look at these creatures and go, Okay, can they make this or not? We actually redesigned the game to enable as many of these creations as we could. The player is the customer, and if what the customer wants to do is create stuff, and they’re showing us the stuff they want to create, that’s what we’re going to serve.

The Simemperor – Spore – Will Wright | Fast Company