April Fool’s at spore.com

Yesterday the official site posted the following press notice:

Spore is a game that inspires self expression through creativity yet links untold numbers of people together from around the world through sharing their creations online. We have found ways to enhance that experience by allowing players to email a screenshot of their creation to a friend directly from the game or upload a video directly to the web. Spore allows people to connect instantly in ways that have never been done before. Yet, for our incredibly creative team, this still wasn’t enough.

Our procedurally generated systems learn each player’s style and match the content to that specific person. For several months now, a side team has been working on ways to use this same technology to match players to each other, rather than just to the content. Our systems can analyze play style, aesthetic preferences, time spent creating versus playing, and more and then maps that against the data from other players to find a match. The surprising discovery in our focus group testing was that this is most often a love match.

Maxis is currently in discussions with several well-known dating sites to integrate our player matching system into the format of a dating system creating SporeDate. Since this program is being designed for the most dedicated fans, we are bringing the news to you here first. Starting today, we will choose players for our pilot program of SporeDate at random from our list of newsletter subscribers. So if you haven’t signed up, please do so today. We are truly excited to bring this new innovation to light and look forward to seeing you all on SporeDate!

Spore: more than just a game, it’s a way of life.

Love is in the air. Everywhere I look around…