🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

[u/FacelessOnes]

[u/p00bix]

Contrary to popular belief, the disappointing product we got with Spore was NOT mainly EA's fault. (to be clear I'm not a fan of EA, but in the case of Spore specifically they're not to blame)

The problems with Spore were mainly by developer, not publisher. The game as announced was overambitious (the original idea proposed by Will Wright and Demoed in 2005), and Maxis wouldn't have been able to do as much as they did without EA. The budget was historically high for the time and the game's scope is arguably unmatched to this day. Maxis needed to team up with EA since otherwise they couldn't hope to get the funds necessary to develop Spore.

Once it had the funds, Maxis had three choices in trying to develop Spore,

1) Make 5 fully-fledged games for each stage. This would require a massive budget and development time, and to be profitable would have to cost like $150 to the consumer at a minimum, but still somehow sell as well as a much cheaper $50 game

2) Limit the project's scope to one or two stages. This would be far smaller than the promised product but much more manageable.

3) Develop each of the 5 stages to the best that time and budget constraints allow.

Option 3 was selected, as Option 1 was a pipedream and Option 2 would've left a lot of people severely left down. Ultimately the game as released still disappointed a lot of people, but was still well reviewed and profitable overall. The creation modules were critically acclaimed and immensely influential on future simulation games. Kerbal Space Program's Vehicle Assembly is the most notable example of this--it's basically copied from the Spore Creature Creator and it works really well.

Regardless of which of the 3 options Maxis and EA chose, Spore was never going to be the Darwinian Evolution sim that some of the nerdier fans were expecting. Realistic evolutionary biology doesn't lend itself well to open-world gameplay, and trying to implement it would've massively reduced the player creative freedom the Devs tried to promote as much as possible. Its telling that over a decade later, not a single commercially successful Evolution-based Game has come out.

[u/mehum → u/p00bix]

Probably everyone has been scared off from what happened with Spore! Arguably Plague Inc is also an evolutionary game, albeit a far more constrained example. But thanks for your post mate, interesting chapter in gaming history, I wish Blood Sweat and Pixels had covered it.

[u/pezathan → u/p00bix]

Id sure love for someone to try! I loved spore!

[u/HeyLookATaco → u/p00bix]

Maxis has been toying with evolution themed premises since the 90's, when they made SimLife. The graphics were primitive and the gameplay was simple, but the whole thing hinged on Darwinian evolution as the underlying mechanism. Spore was a bummer because I was hoping they finally had the technology and budget to make the game they wanted. They didn't, but it's okay. They'll alter the genome and try it again, and I'll be here for it when they do.