Spore, the world’s most eagerly anticipated video game ever, releases this weekend.
I wrote it.
Or rather, I wrote all the dialog and some of the situations in the space game, which is the last— the ultimate, if you will— of five interlinked games that make up Spore. (There’s not a lot of call for dialog in most of the games, since characters won’t yet have evolved language.)
When you encounter some fifteen-eyed, twenty-tentacled Purple People Eater lecturing you from the command center of its UFO, you’re talking to me, baby!
Faithful readers may recall, earlier in the year, my mention of a Mystery Project. Spore was it.
Spore was designed by Will Wright, who had earlier created The Sims, which is the world’s most popular computer game ever. Spore is a game about evolution, vetted by actual scientists, in which you start as a single-celled animal in a droplet of water. You then progress through the stages of being a rather more efficient single-celled organism, after which you crawl out on land, become the dominant species, evolve intelligence, become a tribal society, develop civilization, and eventually space travel, after which you roar out into the galaxy.
And by galaxy, I mean galaxy. You get an entire galaxy, every star and its planets and orbiting body, as your sandbox.
I have to say that Will, Lucy, Kip, Jenna, Eric, and the other folks at Maxis were pretty darn smart to get themselves a science fiction writer to write the science fiction parts.
The original name for the game was “Sim Everything.” Which it is.
I’m really proud to be a part of it.
Buy it! Then write to Will Wright and tell him how wonderful the dialog was.
