by gSathe
Okay, now you already know what Spore is. If you don’t, it’s highly unlikely that you’d be here… You do know what it is right? Otherwise check the link out already! What’s interesting to see therefore is that the creature creator, which represents less than a quarter of the game, generated such response. Nearly a million creatures in a week, a quarter of a million of which were created on day one itself, shows that there is definitely a lot of hype around the game.
So much hype in fact, that I’m quite scared. When I see hype to this level, I think to myself, Lair, Heavenly Sword, Haze… It’s a good thing that Spore isn’t coming out for the PS3 or I’d be labelled a fanboy by now! And it’s probably a good thing that it isn’t being made by Molyneux either, since we’re on the subject of hype.
Frankly though, while I had a lot of fun with the Creature Creator, I’m still not very stoked about Spore. It looks fun and feels simple enough to fiddle with, which was fine for the creature creation phase… But there has to be more to the game right? Unfortunately, with the ‘more mainstream than mainstream’ approach which seems to be taking place here, it’s hard to say what the rest of the game will be like without sounding needlessly antagonistic. So let me say instead — I tremble, with delicious anticipation and awful dread. Because it could go either way right now, and I refuse to get my hopes up for what could be a sappy return to the play-doh days, which I would like to think are behind me.
What we have to consider though, is that the million creatures created weren’t made by a million different people. The number of copies of the creature creator, and the demo, aren’t nearly as high, and so we can say that while Spore is definitely going to be big, specially in terms of mainstream visibility, it isn’t a Halo, a GTA, or even a Metal Gear. Those are games for gamers, and they still do sell bigger than those made for a more casual market, which the creature creator at least is.
The rest of Spore however incorporates enough elements that even the core gaming audience is likely to get on board, and while the game is only aimed for PC users at this point, the DS already has a creature creator coming and there is serious talk about releasing Spore on the Wii even if not on the other systems.
Now one more thing to look at is that the creator of Spore is Will Wright, the man who gave us the Sims. The Sims games were, like many aspects of Spore, non-games, with nothing to do, really, except exercise your aesthetic musle. Which is pleasing enough, and clearly sells, because the Sims games have been amongst the best selling games in recent days. When a gamer oriented title launches, it wipes the Sims clear off the map, but then once the hype fades the sales charts quickly go back to being dominated by the Sims.These games, and presumably Spore, win out because they are easy to pick up, with simple, intuitive command interfaces which mean that you don’t have to be a gamer to play the game, and lack the story oriented pacing of other, “normal” games, allowing a casual player to explore and manipulate the game world at his/her own pace and define the storytelling experience on his/her own. What this means, in short, is that Spore is in many ways the Wii of games. It’s casual. It’s, in its own way, revolutionary. But it doesn’t want to do anything spectacular with that. Instead it is willing to make itself cute and cuddly, and present itself to the mainstream with dancing purple dinosaurs - in space! And it’s bound to sell, and be picked up in huge numbers by a mainstream audience, and as soon as the hype fades, these people would have gotten bored of their copy of Spore and the disc won’t find use again.
But by that point those same people would have already told all their friends about how great Spore is, and five more copies of the disc would have moved, with virus-like efficiency.
Which is not to say that Spore is not (hopefully) a good game. What we’ve seen of it so far shows originality, shows that it is unique and shows that there is still hope for the PC in gaming beyond just the MMORPG, and the behemoth of World of Warcraft. As the PC’s only “MMOFPS” (I hope that term doesn’t catch on!) it’s new and heck, it looks great, sounds great, and making monsters in the creature creator is just so goddamn fun that I can’t wait to see how the rest of the game plays out. Curiosity will sell Spore as much as the hype will, but it is likely going to go a long way in bringing more people to PC gaming, which can’t be a bad thing, even if they stop playing once the novelty wears off.
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