I first heard of Will Wright's Spore project around a year ago on a TED talk , where he presented a multi phase evolutionary world simulator, starting from a single celled creature, through evolution, establishment of tribes, culture, and ultimately expanding into space. The vision was very compelling, and the demo was very impressive - the software, even in its unfinished form, seemed to make something as complex as building your own creature very intuitive and simple.
Fast forward to mid 2008, and there is currently a lot of buzz about Spore, due to be released in September. In order to drum up excitement, EA have done two very clever things:-
(1) The creature creator part of Spore has been released early for £5 (which is redeemable against the full product when it arrives). For those of us to tight to pay even this sum can download a cut down creature creator (still very capable, but with a smaller selection of eyes, legs etc to choose from).
(2) Once you've designed your creature, the creature creator allows you to create your own movies, and automatically upload to YouTube. So, YouTube has become swamped with Spore creatures. As all of these uploaded creatures look very cool indeed, this is the best free marketing you could hope for. In the not too distant future, I suspect that many other software companies might start to do something similar.
Needless to say, I've created my own creature, Sandra Pl'tangue. Hope you like her.
Perhaps it says something about the sorts of friends I have, but you are the third of my friends to dangle this in front of me.
Posted by: Squiddie at June 23, 2008 05:39 PM