I’m here in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference.
This morning Will Wright gave his session. Will’s sessions at the conference are always standing room only – he’s a very entertaining and creative guy and almost always has something to say that pushes the boundaries of the industry. In fact, I usually miss his talks because people start lining up for them before the previous round of sessions has ended, and by the time I show up there’s no more room. But today the previous session I attended happened to be in the same room as Will’s talk, so I just kept my seat.
The title of his talk was “The Future of Content”. As soon as he started he admitted that he wasn’t really going to talk about that. He’d just given the conference organizers a vague title because they were pressuring him for a name.
Instead, he did a leisurely, hour-long demonstration of his next title.
Oh. My. God.
Now bear in mind that this was a room filled with several hundred professional game developers. Personally I’ve been in the industry for ten years. As a group we tend to be fairly resistant to hype about new titles. Things that get called “revolutionary” almost never are.
But … Oh. My. God.
It’s called “Spore”. It starts off with you playing a microscopic organism in a tide pool. You swim around and eat stuff. Stuff tries to eat you. If you accumulate enough energy you can lay an egg. This gives you access to a creature editor that lets you improve the next generation of microbe.
The cool thing about this is that the whole simulation is physics-based. You can actually tinker with the organism’s “skeleton” to create different swimming mechanics that are procedurally generated by the simulation. It’s a very cool little evolutionary toy.
But it gets better.
Once you get big enough the view switches from 2-D to 3-D. Now you’re playing a fish-like creature in an undersea habitat. You’re still swimming around and competing and evolving. And eventually you can develop legs and move out onto the land. And everything still is physics-based. The simulation reverse-engineers a walk cycle for your creature based on its leg configuration for example. Very cool.
Even cooler is where the other creatures in your world come from. Every time a player creates a new creature, it gets uploaded to the Spore server. So when the game needs to populate a new ecosystem, it draws from this huge pool of thousands and thousands of user-engineered creatures.
(You can play offline too, using Maxis-supplied content on the CD.)
Okay, wow, at this point I was already really impressed. A complete evolution sim with seamless downloads of user-generated content. Very impressive.
But it gets better.
If you can evolve your species’ brain so its large enough, they develop sentience. Now their physical form is locked, but you can begin playing around with their culture. You can give them tools (also user-created) and wage wars with rival tribes using an RTS-like interface.
But it gets better.
Once you’ve progressed far enough in the tribal phase you can start building cities. Now instead of an RTS, you’re playing Sim City, building roads and buildings, trying to create an efficient city for your creatures to live in. And still all the content is completely user-editable. You can create your own buildings, or download buildings made by other people from the internet.
But it gets better.
Once your city is big enough the game turns into Civilization. Now you’re competing with rival cities across the globe. You build little military units and fight it out for global domination. Again, you can use standard units, create your own, or download what someone else has made. And everything is still physics-based.
But it gets better.
Once you conquer the globe you can build a spaceship. You can pull back away from the planet and see your entire solar system. You can go to other planets and establish colonies, terreform them, and populate them with creatures from your homeworld.
But it gets better.
Once you have enough colonies in your solar system you can develop an interstellar drive. Now you can pull the view back again and see your solar system and the hundreds of other solar systems around it. You can travel to these other systems. These systems (if you’re connected to the internet) will be solar systems developed by other players. (You’re not competing against them in real time. Your computer is just using their content for it’s simulation.)
Now the real game begins.
Now you can do a whole bunch of different things. Fight interstellar wars. Make first contact with primitive aliens. Tinker with evolution on different worlds. Blow up planets. Spread civilization throughout the universe. Ultimately you can pull the camera back far enough to see your entire galaxy at once.
Transitions between the different levels are all seamless. It’s like watching the old “Powers of Ten” movie. You can literally zoom smoothly from the galaxy view right back down to a tidepool on some alien world.
I haven’t been this amazed by a game since I first played the original Civilization back in the early 90’s. And believe me, I’m a very hard guy to impress.
Will got a standing ovation.
He’s going to sell MILLIONS.
