Spore

Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse video game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released September 5, 2008 in Europe, Japan, South America and New Zealand, and was released on September 7, 2008 in North America and Asia Pacific territories. The game can also be directly downloaded from Electronic Arts.

Features

Spore allows players to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a space faring culture. The game is broken up into consistent and dependent ‘phases’, where the end of one ‘phase’ affects the initial condition of the next phase for the player. Every phase has its own style of play and becomes increasingly complicated as players progress through the game. Players are allowed to accelerate or skip phases altogether. Some phases feature optional missions; when the player completes a mission, they are granted a bonus, such as a new ability. Also, players can ‘respawn’ their species at home base in the case that all the player’s creations are destroyed. Spore is known as a ‘massively single-player online game’ as the creations developed by players will be entered automatically into a central database and catalogued and rated for quality and then re-distributed to populate other players’ games. Furthermore, players can visit other players’ planets upon reaching the space phase. Here, players can interact with other players’ species, tribes and civilizations. Additionally, via a ‘MySpore’ page, players can receive statistics on how their creatures are faring in other players’ games. Personalities of the species created by the user are dependent on how the user has played them. The game platform is Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and iPod. It has a single player mode and falls under the genre of god game, life simulation and real-time strategy.