![]() The underhand conspiracies of Evolutions! are a story for another day. Rather than declare the pursuit of a Spore successor futile, a group emerged from the shenanigans willing to make the dream a reality: an open-source team of evolution enthusiasts under the thread’s original poster.Ĭould they succeed where Spore had failed? Could an open-source project make an EA-beating AAA game?īy all accounts it should have died straight away. Many were hurt, but some took a different view. The fraudster soon came clean, breaking only the hearts of the most gullible. From the start people found inaccuracies in the “screenshots”, evidence of their origin in a graphics program. Had the company even known about Evolutions!, they’d have taken it about as seriously as DRM complaints. Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. The screenshots were, of course, fake.įew were fooled by what transpired to be a hoax, meant to convince EA they had competition in the hope they’d panic and roll out Spore 2. Fans wanted the true Spore, and at first glance, they had it. Screenshots alone of an alternative were sure to make waves. EA promised fans one thing and delivered something else, regardless of its quality. To this day, everyone decries Spore’s wasted potential. Spore is still a terrific game, but it’s nothing compared to what could have been. And excluding the continual presence of editors, the tribal and civilisation stages were just plain boring. We all remember the awkward heart-infused mating dance. The real tragedy is that these amazing elements had to share space with…less desirable parts. Even the music was revolutionary, incorporating procedural elements with the involvement of Brian Eno, an ambient music legend. Make no mistake, Spore is still a technical marvel – no game has ever come close to the strides it made in procedural animation, and the creature creator is an amazing feat of game design. Rumours may be exaggerated, but it’s clear Wright’s dream didn’t coalesce quite as he wished. Ex-Maxis employees have on occasion described a rift in the development team between those who valued realism, like Wright, and those who wanted commercial viability, often blamed for the game’s childishness. Even Will Wright, the creative mind behind Spore’s original concept, admitted the finished product veered too far towards casual players. What can I say that almighty Spode hasn’t heard a million times? Billed as an evolution-focused god game, events in Spore’s development rendered it an intensely simplified series of minigames. To understand why screenshots alone incited a raucous, you have to understand Spore. Even this discussion ends with the tantalising muse of an open-source team rising to the occasion, foreshadowing what would come. Although a forum glitch many moons ago destroyed the original thread, remnants still hide at the internet’s edges. Screenshots posted on the Spore forums flaunted a worm’s evolutionary path with a powerful editor and adaptation system, accompanied by descriptions of a game called Evolutions!. The Thrive project began nearly seven years ago, when a group of disillusioned Spore fans found the Holy Grail – a realistic evolutionary simulation game to rival the might of EA. Let’s travel to the primordial swamp of 2009 and witness the fateful encounter which sparked this whole mess, shall we? As if one person, or even a group of people, could ever actually have a tangible game when this is so obviously ridi-wait… Anyone with half a brain cell can tell there’s no chance of it ever progressing beyond a lunatic’s pipe dream. If today someone said they intended to create a spiritual Spore successor with volunteer contributions and no income, you’d probably keel over laughing before pointing them to the nearest psychotherapy ward. Its founding motive was to fix the mistakes of Spore, the product of a major game studio. ![]() ![]() Why? Thrive is an open-source game created by online volunteers with no funding, which aims to accurately simulate evolution. ![]() This makes me a maniac with no understanding of probability, productivity or plausibility. I’m Oliver Lugg, also known as Oliveriver within Revolutionary Games, the team behind Thrive. Welcome to the ludicrously improbable world of Thrive. It was written seven years into the development of a game that wasn’t supposed to survive one month.
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