David Thomas

Video Game Examiner
David Thomas is a nationally syndicated videogame journalist, critic and teacher. He co-authored the Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual, so he knows that PONG is written in uppercase and that it wasn’t the first videogame. His current favorite game of all time is Rock Band.

  

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The Making of Spore

June 16, 4:49 PM
by David Thomas, Video Game Examiner
 
 
Forget your Halo 2s and Grand Theft Autos. The biggest game in the history of gaming will be Spore.

Maybe.

The brainchild of Will Wright, creator of SimCity and the Sims , Spore promises to change the way people think about, and maybe even make, games.

How else to describe a game that starts with your controlling a microorganism and slowly evolving it through a variety of stages culminating in control of a spacefaring master race?  Decisions you make about your creatures while they slink around the slime of some primordial ocean influence what they look like and how they live when they jump into their rocket ships countless millenia later.  Imagine a game that starts like Pac-Man and ends like Civilization and you start to get a whiff of the scope of this magnum opus.


Or, maybe this game will tank and, while Wright will retain his well-deserved reputations as mad genius, he might lose some credibility in the commercial game department.


That's why insights into the shape, design and development of the game remains such an interesting soap opera for gamers to follow.

Dean Takahashi over at VentureBeat has a nose for news. And his Q&A with Spore's Lucy Bradshaw demonstrates he's sniffed out another story worth reading, including teaser that raises the anticipation for the game's September 7th launch date.
Topics: games , interviews
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