Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xanderlewis 738 days ago
Cool!

Possibly off topic, but: what did you work on for Spore? Was it around the time of the now (in?)famous E3 demo in ~2006, or closer to the final release? The final game seemed to differ significantly from what many of us were hoping for, and I never really heard much of a story of what happened in between.
1 comments
chaimgingold 738 days ago
The main thing I did was design the Editors (like the Creature Creator), but I initially joined as an intern in 2001 and did some really fun divergent prototypes for Will Wright while the project was in a nascent state, and a bunch of other stuff during development.

There's a whole book to be written about Spore (but I'm done writing books for now), but the simple answer is that the difference between "hoping for" and "final" product encompasses a lot of what makes software and game development (or really any creative project for that matter) interesting. Especially when multiple people are involved. And that is part of what sparked this project, which took over a decade to research and write.

(Also, many years ago I wrote a chapter for another MIT Press book about some early Spore history. It's reproduced on this deprecated blog: http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...)

link
xanderlewis 738 days ago
Thanks. I should add that I did enjoy the final game very much; it was just quite different to what was demoed.

I’ll probably be buying your book!

link
chaimgingold 738 days ago
Thank you!

Not to be defensive, but I want to say more about this because I think it's a fascinating subject with Spore in particular and games, software, and technology generally. My take is that Will Wright had a very exciting vision but visions are just that: not real. They are inherently nebulous and everyone on the team (and many many people beyond it) had their own idea on what Spore would be or turn into. We converged on something and negotiated with one another and many constraints, social and technical, and arrived at something. It didn't help that part of the game's marketing appeal was a bit Rorschach-y in the first place and capitalized on the exciting but vague promise of Will Wright (Sim-) + Universe (-Everything).

link