Will Wright's latest genre-bending game started out with the title Sim Everything - an appropriate name considering the game's ambitious design documentation. It eventually moved on to its release name Spore breaking free of the Sim franchise and forging a new legacy all its own. The game will allow players to create life in its most basic components and then mold their creations to their liking through an evolutionary cycle. Will Wright apotheosized into a "game god" through his creation of the Sim series that began with SimCity but Spore may be the culmination of what he's been working towards through every Sim game to date.

We were able to get some new screenshots from Spore publisher Electronic Arts and lumped in some of the old ones for the gallery in case you haven't seen them yet.

View the Spore slide show (20 images)

The EA spiel on Spore reads like this:

"The next evolution in gaming is upon us. From the mind of Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, comes SPORE, an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space."

"Begin your odyssey at the dawn of life as a simple microbe just trying to survive, then use the fun, intuitive Editors to evolve the creature from its microscopic origins into an intelligent, tool-using race. Guide your species as it builds (and the player designs) villages, buildings, cities, and vehicles. Along the way to becoming a global civilization you can choose whether to hunt or forage, attack or trade, be nice or play rough!"

"All the action takes place in a huge, lush world populated with creatures evolved by other players and shared over SPORE's central servers. When it's ready, your one-time pond scum launches into space in its UFO on a grand voyage of discovery, planet forming, or destruction! As you explore and play in this limitless universe of unique worlds, your personal Sporepedia tracks all the creatures you've met and places you've visited."

Spore is one of those games about which I get a little less excited every time I hear something about it. When I first saw it in 2005 it was shockingly impressive but as time goes by you sort of get used to the ideas of the game and they become less "evolutionary". When I see new information surface on it now my reaction is, "Hey that's great. It's still not out yet though, huh." The technology behind the game is undeniably amazing but I read up on all the "procedural generation" and "interactive skeleton-driven dynamic deformations" last year. This year I'd like to play it for myself. A game this big can't - and shouldn't - be rushed but the gaming industry moves fast and ideas that sounded groundbreaking a few years ago become commonplace today. Having said that there are no other games that do what Spore promises and no one is going to beat Will Wright and Maxis to the punch on this one.

Still, I can't help thinking back to Black & White. It, too, promised big things for gaming and came from the mind of an out-of-the-box game designer Peter Molyneux. While it delivered on many of those promises it also fell short of others. After about a week of playing Black & White and describing it to my wife it occurred to me, "Wait, this isn't a game. This is work." Everything we've seen on Spore supports the claims that it will be an incredible experience and could redefine the term "game" in an interactive space but it's my policy to grow more and more suspicious about games the longer they remain in development. I learned this lesson after I saw Team Fortress 2 at E3 in 1999 and came back telling everyone how great it was going to be. Back then it was based on the bleeding-edge technology of the Quake II engine but has seen a radical redesign from that first technology demonstration. TF2 looks likes it's on track but remember that it still isn't out yet.

Spore is nowhere near the vaporware level of Team Fortress 2 or Duke Nukem Forever but it does feel like we've been hearing about it for a long time. I want games to be good and move forward so I hope that it's as amazing as EA keeps telling everyone it is, but I won't be convinced until I'm playing a retail copy of my own. It's hard enough to create a good game in the tried-and-true genres let alone breaking ground with undefined concepts. While I cheer for Will Wright and what he's doing I'm secretly preparing for the worst and hoping to be surprised. Spore has a scheduled release date of March 3, 2008 for PC.

Also check out the Spore trailer from Leipzig here.

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