Spores - from primordial soup to conquering the galaxy

To date, eleven years ago, the creator of the Sims series launched its most ambitious game ever.

Video game designer Will Wright has achieved notable success with the SimCity and The Sims series. Seeking a new challenge in his career, Wright tackled an ambitious project called SimEverything in the early 21st century. The idea was to give the player the ability to play with the entire galaxy.

Five years later, a game called Spore was introduced, a title considered by many to be the successor to the Sims series. The game has captured attention and won awards at various fairs, and the key to its ambition has been in the procedural generation of content.

Back then, randomly created content was a rare occurrence in games, so the promise of different worlds, characters, and scenarios every time the game was launched sounded very appealing and a bit unbelievable. In addition, Spore has been promoted as an MMO single-player game where players can share content with one another.


Spore came out today eleven years ago and really offered some very interesting mechanics. The game was divided into five stages. It first went through the cellular phase, then the phase of beings, tribes, civilization, and finally - the space phase in which we explored other planets. Not all stages were equally interesting and that was exactly the biggest objection to the game. There was also a lack of any kind of story, which was later corrected in the expansion.

Yet the uniqueness of Spore was manifested in the creation of different beings and the creation of community in an unknown world. The last segment of the game offered space exploration while we couldn't even imagine that we would one day play games like No Man's Sky.


Unfortunately, Spore, as a PC exclusive, also had technical issues. At first, Electronic Arts decided to distribute the game with SecuROM protection, which meant that the game could be installed on only three computers. After the players' objection, that number was increased to five, but dissatisfaction did not decline. The matter also ended up in court, and protection was eventually removed at the end of the same year. Today Spore is distributed without any protection on GOG.

Although the anti-piracy controversy has hurt the image of the game, sales have not fallen short. In the first two weeks, the Spore was sold in two million copies. Admittedly, it later turned out that Spore had failed to grow into a major franchise. This was followed by the expansion of Galactic Adventures, several spin-off titles for consoles, and the 2011 RPG title Darkspore. A movie adaptation was also mentioned, but in the end it was nothing.


Interestingly, though, Spore inspired a community of players, so the free Thrive game was born. There is also a very active community of modders around the game.