Some years ago, I was doing a short contract gig on TSO, where I met, worked with and shared some instructive lunches with Will Wright. While having frenzied meetings about TSO, I noticed he would have occasional meetings with a garage squad of developers on some seeekrit project. What he told me convinced me he was batshit crazy.

The idea was a computer game version of what I knew as the Power of Ten. You would start off as a bacterium, and experience the full-scale of reality from the cellular level to that of viewing galaxies. This is all good and well if you’re trying to score the oft-stoned philosophy chick at the local coffee shop, but as far as serious, doable game design ideas, we’re talking about a serious five bagger.

Today I was humbled, as Will Wright revealed not just the idea, but a mesmerising prototype to a packed and enthusiastically cheering GDC crowd. Which is to say, sometimes, you don’t throw away the five-baggers.

Gamespot gives us one overview, although 1Up gives a more compelling depiction, describing how the gameplay changes you move from the cellular level on through the evolutionary stages of your little environment.

Spore touches upon a wide array of gameplay concepts as the action evolves alongside the player’s creature. Wright revealed six different themes of gameplay: tidepool, evolution, tribal, city, civilization and invasion. Each of these modes draws upon its influences while remaining stylistically consistent with the rest of the game.

* Tidepool phase: In the game’s initial state, the action most resembles a sort of free-form Pac-Man. There’s also a strong hint of Super NES classic E.V.O. and quirky GameCube cult favorite Cubivore; fighting and consuming other creatures allows you to adjust the form and abilities of your creature.
* Evolution phase: Once your creature begins to grow and take on a distinct physical form, the game switches to a more Diablo-like feel. With its emphasis on battling other creatures to strengthen yourself while making forays away from your safe haven, this section is very much about growth and development.
* Tribal phase: When your creation has achieved a satisfying level of physical development, you can focus on its mental acuity. At this point, you relinquish control of an individual and instead move to a streamlined RTS interface, caring for an entire tribe of your homebrewed beasties, giving them tools, food and slowly upgrading their state of existence. Think Populous.
* City phase: Here the game becomes more like Wright’s own SimCity, with emphasis resting primarily on building up the technology, architecture and infrastructure of your race’s dwellings.
* Civ phase: Once your city is established, you can zoom out to the global scale. Here your people begin seeking out other cultures in a Civilization-style experience. Interfacing with the rest of the world can be tackled in many ways, be it militaristically or diplomatically; on foot, in boats or by airship. Ultimately, however, the goal is for your creatures to conquer the planet.
* Invasion phase: Once the world is your oyster, you can move on to other worlds in your solar system to colonize or terraform. And beyond that you’ll find other solar systems, scattered throughout a beautifully-rendered galaxy in which planets lurk among dust clouds and black holes spew ejecta. Here you set forth to make contact with other planets.

But that’s not the cool part.

The cool part is that Will Wright is focusing the whole thing on procedurally created critters, which players can create with amazing tools. For example, when evolving your pet in the evolution phase, you can make an absolutely sick variety of animals with a simple drag and drop interface. Examples shown included a 3 legged snake, a beast with 17 beaks and a single eye, and an animal that looked to have 24 legs, half of which were little legs which shot off the sides of the bigger legs.

And all of them were perfectly animated. The animations were created procedurally by computer algorithm, as was everything else. Their skins were algorithmically blended instead of hand-painted textures. You decided what form and function the critter would take, and the game would procedurally generate the rest.

While the rest of us designers are freaking out about the staggering cost of content, Will Wright creates a game where a fully textured and animated player-created mobile takes less than 1K of memory.

Will cited the demo scene as a core influence in what he was doing, and there are many useful outputs of this. One is that, if you are connected to the Internet, the game will populate your worlds with the player created content that other players have generated. If your world lacks predators, it will hit the Maxis library for a compelling predator and drop it in your world space. At the end of the game, when flying around in a UFO from planet to planet, the other planets you visit will be copies of other player’s worlds. Which is to say that Will managed to capture one of the most compelling parts of the MMO experience – the creativity of other people – without actually forcing you to log in and deal with them.

Will the game work? Will it live up to it’s incredible promise? Given the sheer ambition of it, it’s still hard to say. But in terms of sheer, ridiculous ambition, there really has been nothing like it before. And it’s mere existence is reaffirming in a GDC otherwise filled with me-too ideas and jaded cynicism.

Original comments thread is here.