From Mr. Potato Head to a cosmic '70s documentary, Spore's creators share how it came to be

Me beautiful Spores

I don't tend to think of Spore as a game that really came from any one person, moreso an omnipresent entity that just somehow installs itself on your computer. This is hogwash, of course, as it was made by creator The Sims Will Wright during his tenure at Maxis.

It wasn't just him that made it either, there were plenty of people involved, and as part of a wonderfully put together oral history over at the Design Room, they all shared how the creature creator game dubbed Spore partially came to be. As it turns out, according to designer and lead engineer Chris Hecker, the first idea was born out of Wright wanting to "do the Powers of 10." The Powers of 10 is a documentary from 1977 that starts by looking at a couple having a picnic before zooming out further and further into the universe; you can already see the groundwork for Spore's framework in this format.

"The anthropic principle, the Copernican principle [...] the Great Filter — there are all these conceptual frameworks that inspired Spore," Wright explains. "At the same time, we wanted to make an homage to these different game genres. The first one being Pac-Man, the next one being a first-person shooter (or eater), then an RTS, then eventually a 4X space game."

Hecker in kind jokingly quipped, "We'll just take [a bunch] of the best video games ever and smash them all into one video game. What could possibly go wrong?" A lot! We all know that Spore was quite an imperfect game, with Wright even acknowledging that himself, saying, "Probably the biggest criticism of Spore, which I totally accept, is that it felt like five separate games that were kind of stuck together. Which it pretty much was."

The most compelling of these elements was of course the actual creature creation bits where you can Frankensteinianly mish and mash all manner of body parts to craft a critter of your own. This was no easy task to design though, with designer Chaim Gingold recalling, "[Animator John Cimino] was basically giving me his expert practice as an artist, and I was like, Right, we need to get people to be able to do that without necessarily teaching them how to do all of that.

"And that's where the idea [came from to make it] more like Mr. Potato Head. But talking about Mr. Potato Head kind of pissed a lot of people off because they were like, We're not making Mr. Potato Head. That's too simple and dumb. […] I think I mostly pissed off Chris Hecker, but other people too."

Ultimately it did have to be treated as something more complicated than Mr. Potato Head, as Hecker noted that typically designing a creature that looks and moves correctly is something that would be done "by a professional in a tool that costs thousands of dollars and takes months and months and months. But we had to do it in real time when the player stuck a new arm on the guy."

Even still, that Mr. Potato Head quality certainly feels true even now, and even if the end result of the entirety of Spore wasn't some flawless experience, you can feel that influence of Powers of 10 too. The whole oral history is worth a read, as it goes into plenty of other complications the game went through over the years too.