Spore is the greatest game that never was. Clear as day, I remember the wonder the pitch instilled in me as a young'un. It was to be a true simulation like The Sims, not just of daily life, but of the history of all life—life as everything from a unicellular amoeba to a spacefaring alien of my own design, all realized in exacting detail.
That was the idea, or the one overhyped fans ran with, anyway. The game we got is not that. It's more of a sci-fi minigame collection with an impressive, if cartoony, character creation engine tacked on. But as an interview-stuffed oral history from Design Room explains, that was always the idea.
"Will [Wright] said from the jump that this was going to be a lot of little minigames. Just nobody listened," gameplay designer Jenna Chalmers told Design Room. "Everybody knew him for these really rich, robust simulations, and wanted all the depth and the richness … people heard what they wanted to hear."
Admittedly, this perception of Spore as some sort of mythical super-game didn't materialize out of thin air. When The Sims designer and PC gaming mastermind Wi...
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