A visit with Spore’s Orange County developers at E3

July 16th, 2008, 2:01 pm · 1 Comment · posted by Tamara Chuang, a.k.a. The Gadgetress

Tamara “Gadgetress” Chuang One of the most anticipated games this year, Spore, isn’t on E3’s show floor. But inside game publisher Electronic Arts’ private suite, Spore is playable, if you can get past Stephen Lim and Thomas Vu, who are from the game’s developer Maxis.

Lim (pictured on far right) and Vu (pictured on near right) were super enthused to talk about Spore, which seems like it’s been in the works for eons. Spore’s Stephem Lim, from Maxis Spore’s Thomas Vu led the team that created the planets in the game. Or maybe their excitement was from discovering that we were all from Orange County? Lim is from Fullerton and Vu from Anaheim. They both live in the Bay Area now, but their families are still here. No, they didn’t know each other when living in OC.

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Watch the E3 video interview with Spore developers Stephen Lim and Thomas Vu
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Vu is a producer for the game and was in charge of a team that created Spore planets. To promote the game, they also got cool business cards with eight different creatures. Lim, the Development Director on Spore, showed me his (click image for larger view):

But back to the game plus 10 screen shots and a VIDEO! …Spore is another gift from Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims. He first mentioned the game at a Game Developer’s Conference in 2005 and it’s finally getting released on Sept. 7. Similar to The Sims, Spore requires players to build and create. But instead of a house or city, Spore is all about creating a universe starting in the primordial ooze of a single-cell organism.

“It’s called a massively single-player online game because it’s only one player,” but so many other people contribute to the game play, explained Vu.

Less than a month ago, the company released “Spore Creature Creator,” a $10 software tool that lets users create spectacular creatures that can later be added to the individual games. A limited free version is online. To date, nearly 2 million creatures have been created and added to the Sporepedia — or more than the number of different types of organisms in the real world, said Lim.

Watch the scratchy video of my interview with Lim and Vu.

You’ll be able to choose from hundreds and thousands of creatures created by players around the world. And you can tweak them, too.
You also choose a planet, some which look more like Earth, others — not so much
After you watch your organism grow into a creature, it’ll roam the planet along with thousands of other creatures from the Sporepedia. Lim said that they just dropped 2,000 creatures into the world. He’s not sure what the maximum number of Spore species can be in the game.
Your creature develops characteristics based on how you control its growth. If it’s trying to eat other organisms, it’ll become a carnivore.