Bing Gordon is the chief creative officer and an executive VP at Electronic Arts which enables him to follow the work around Spore closely. Gamasutra sat down with him and asked him a bunch of questions, a few of them had Spore content.
Spore has more innovations than The Sims did. So, Spore is important because it might create a new division for EA, but for sure what it’s doing is getting our feet wet in trying to do a Web 2.0 game.
In other news EBgames.com has once more changed their ETA for Spore from 2/18/2008 to 3/3/2008.
More Spore info is around the corner. The game is being featured in this month’s Game Informer magazine and June’s issue of Gamepro. The former having an interview with Chaim Gingold, one of Spore’s lead designers.
Will Wright recently attended the 2007 New Yorker Conference which had the theme “2012: Stories from the Near Future”; the segment was recorded on tape! After a brief presentation of Will by John Seabrook the man himself start presenting Spore for the crowd. What you first notice is that graphics seems more polished. We’ll also get to see the very first moments when a comet crashes into a planet to spur life. Furthermore the tide pool, creature and space phases are shown and Will also talks about the concepts of terraforming planets and affecting their climates.
Will is at the end of the conference segment interview by John Seabrook on different topics, but mainly the theme of the happening. One question that was particularly interesting was the decision behind the cartoonish look of Spore and why it wasn’t made more realistic. It provided a very interesting answer!
Note that when the release date is discussed you should bare in mind that this was conducted before the latest info on that topic.
Popular Science has conducted a huge 7-page long interview with Will dubbed The Wright Stuff. It covers everything from his interest in the Soviet space program to what he wanted to be when he grew up. It does cover Spore with numerous questions but nothing new of major importance is revealed. As always he has a lot to say about everything so it’s a very interesting and entertaining read!
Watch Will Wright talk Spore and The Sims on the Colbert Report. Very entertaining! (And Will confirms the release span we’ve been hearing for a while now, second half of 2007)
PC Gamer met with Senior Producer Morgan Roarty and asked him some questions about the Spore vehicle editor. The good guys at PC Gamer were kind enough to put in online for those of us not able to get the paper version.
PCG: What are the main components of the vehicle editor?
Morgan Roarty: It’s similar to the creature editor, where you start with a body that has a spine in it and you put pieces on it like a Mr. Potato Head doll. The difference with the vehicle editor is that all vehicles have a chassis [as the main piece on which the vehicle is built].
More info can be obtained in this forum thread. Thanks to Lualmoba for the heads up.
Joystiq grabbed a hold on two of the guys from the Spore production team for some questioning. The designer for the in-game editors Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker who works with the procedural animation team and the creature level. The questions are mainly about pre-production and how the project has evolved since then.
CH: …now we’re clearly out of pre-production and into production and headed towards ship, and now we have a really clear idea of what the game is, and we’re just trying to get it done.
Just a quick note. Joystiq claims that maxis.com has been re-branded since pointing to thesims.com for the last month or so. The latter is true, but the web site itself has looked like it does now for quite some time before the brief re-targetting.
A few weeks ago we reported about the article in The New York Times featuring Will Wright. Today The New Yorker published a 4-page article covering a big span of interesting facts and tidbits, talking mainly about Will Wright. His life, achievements and the journey towards where he stand today. There are some mentions about Spore there too, mainly on the fourth and last page.
The old dream of the M.I.T. hackers who came up with Spacewar—to re-create life on a computer—was coming true forty years later, right here in the Spore Hut, in the form of a spindly, striped creature that looked a little like Will Wright himself.
It’s a very extensive article. So put on a kettle and bunker up with some snacks.
While news is scarce we continue to find old gems that we completely missed. This is an interview with Will Wright over at IGN in August where they talk about possible expansions, Spore on consoles and underwater cities. Maxis have a sound history with bringing loads of expansions since The Sims entered the scene and it looks like Spore will be getting some expansion action as well.
IGN: Have you thought about how expansions will be handled for Spore?
Will Wright: We’ve thought a little about that. When you’re making a game, you start out with all these ideas. Then as the deadline draws near, you have to start cutting stuff out. And that stuff is the first content you want to get into expansions.
IGN asks Will what his favourite part of the game is, what do you think yours will be?
In lack of some real exciting news like the announcement of a Spore demo or the 2011th sighting of Elvis, after his death, you might be interested in some Saturday snacks. Bagunk has an interview with Jenova Chen, one of the Spore designers and creator of probably the coolest flash game ever, called flOw. A game very similar to the first stage in Spore. And may we guess one of the reasons he was hired on the team? Anyway, the interview revolves entirely around flash and flOw - and it case you’ve missed it altogether, here it is.
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