The evolution sim that was never meant to be.
Original Source:
Spore: An oral history by Jay Castello / Designroom (free registration required)
16 Jun 2026 01:34
But spore was awesome though
16 Jun 2026 01:39
I mean, they did have some interesting ideas early on that I was surprised didn't make the cut.
https://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes
16 Jun 2026 02:13
So long as you turned on Stellaris when you got to the space stage
16 Jun 2026 02:37
I played the simple shape demo of the creature world.
It was
vastly superior to the crap they launched. It had an actual ecosystem, but admittedly led to you dying a lot at low tiers because you were the equivalent of a meal worm.
16 Jun 2026 03:10
Bullshit.
EA did what they’ve been doing for 30 years: buy a competing game studio, release a few token cash grab titles under their beloved name, then shut down the studio and lay off all the developers. EA mediocritized
Will Wright’s original vision for Spore, and trashed the last SimCity game with their always-online, closed architecture and slapdash support.
The really insidious part is that EA does make fun games, but they have remade the industry in their image: closed source, online only, DRM-infested, yearly release, day-one “expansion”, cash grab software that inspires none of the community and creativity that used to foster legendary franchises. And, they’ve killed countless game studios to create a quasi-monopoly to do it with.
I am still bitter over what they did to Maxis. I will never buy another EA game for as long as I live.
16 Jun 2026 03:11
I think some of the love for Spore is rose-tinted glasses. It's ultimately kind of a shallow game. The sim aspects are not very well fleshed out, and 90% of the content of the game is really in the space age.
16 Jun 2026 03:17
"Closed source" is reaching. As much as I think Doom shows why it should be desirable, let alone not taboo, it's always been the industry standard and applies to 99.99% of games.
16 Jun 2026 04:56
Electronic Arts deserves every bad thing that happens to them. Vulture capitalists.
Fuck EA.
16 Jun 2026 05:26
We know this.
We've known this for decades.
Why is this now news?
Slow news day?
16 Jun 2026 05:34
Every creature on the box art is impossible in-game one way or another.
16 Jun 2026 05:37
Spore devs say the evolution game's previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making
Not often they just casually admit to false advertising like that.
16 Jun 2026 06:22
It had the depth of a cup of spilt coffee, once you've played through it once there's no additional content to experience.
16 Jun 2026 07:00
The devs didn't handle marketing.
16 Jun 2026 07:55
The only fantastical promise about the game I ever remember reading was the animations were supposed to be kinesthetic based on how you made your creatures; kinda like how GTA's Euphoria physics engine works.
And as far as I had read regarding that, they were struggling with it and had to abandon it at the behest of management not giving them more time to figure it out.
16 Jun 2026 08:01