Spore Could Spread to Consoles, More

Wright envisions an expansive future for his new game.

There are few games as ambitious as Spore, Will Wright's first full game after the massively successful The Sims. Where his previous game gave you people and asked you to live their lives, Spore, which was inspired by classic edu-pic Powers Of Ten and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, puts you in the role of the Creator, where all life is at your command. PC gamers have been abuzz about the game since it was unveiled earlier this year. Now Wright is looking beyond that platform.

"We're going to do the PC game first," Wright told the Guardian this week, "but what we're trying to launch is an entire franchise that will be all across platforms."

Rather than bringing cut-down versions of the game to lesser platforms, Wright envisions a more all-encompassing approach that will use each system's strong points:

"You might be playing part of the game on a handheld platform; you might be playing the entire game but more avatar-based on a console."

So which systems is he thinking of bringing Spore to? Nothing specific has been announced yet, but Wright joins the throngs of people who are excited about Nintendo's new system and its motion-sensing controller.

"Something like the Wii offers a lot of interesting creative opportunities for the [in-game] editors, with its controller," he said. "That's been one of the ongoing problems with consoles: they don't have a mouse. A console controller makes you want the game to be avatar-based - that's why [real-time strategy] games suck on consoles."

Spore will be out for PC sometime during 2007.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games