Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped.

Video of the hour long talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw

One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales.

Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims.

So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game.
Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously.

That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri...

>The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005

>What I learned about content from the Sims.

>…and why it’s driven me to procedural methods.

>…And what I now plan to do with them.

>Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005.

>Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”.

>Introduction

>Will Wright started his talk by saying that he wanted to show this to the game developer community first, before a commercial show like E3.

[...]

Here's my favorite feature that never made it into the final game, which is still a hardcore AI problem ;) :

>Procedural Mating

>Mating calls. Listen for answers. Approach a compatible mate (same type of body you just created) in a nest. Get a good response.

>Procedural mating: Animals squawk and crawl over each other in allkinds of ways, then find something that works, and start humping.

>Rewarded for mating by laying an egg.

>Player rewarded for reproducing: the currency of the game. Go into edit mode to spend currency to buy features and edit the next generation. You have to start saving up for brains, which are expensive. Think of it as a college education fund.

And I love his vignette through the lands of Pokemon, Neopets, dinosaurs, and deep into the star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called “Care a Lot”:

>Make the editor a toy.

>Make portability of content transparent to the player. Game downloads content automatically, without requiring user to visit a web site or download it themselves.

>Most other evolution games don’t make you feel like you own the creature.

>Pokemon, Neopets, Care Bears. Give kids a sense of ownership and mastery over the facts and details of the characters.

>Loved dinosaurs as a kid. Knew the rock-scissors-paper of different species of dinosaurs, which was something his mom didn’t know. Mastery of facts.

>Which Care Bear are you?

>Care bears. Started as greeting cards. Found a web app that categorizes your personality: Which Care Bear are you? Each care bear has special abilities. Care bear have cousins, that aren’t even bears. Care bears live in a star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called “Care a Lot”. If they fall out of the clouds, they land in the “Forest of Feelings” (Kingdom of Caring). Forest of Feelings is over the earth. So the Earth must be the “Kingdom of people who don’t give a shit”.

Spore is an homage to many other games:

>There’s a rule that you don’t mix genres. Always wanted to break that rule.

>Homage to many different games at different levels:

>Tidepool: Pacman.

>Evolution: Diablo.

>Tribal: Populous.

>City: SimCity.

>Civ: Risk/Civ.

>20% of the best of those games. 40% of the game experience is really just aesthetic, appreciating the content.

>A different editor associated with each level.

Also:

>Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.)

Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired:

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*6s2...

And of course the 1977 film "Powers of 10" was a big influence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general:

>Advice: If you have a weird idea that’s so outside of the box, don’t forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to.

>Epilogue:

>For more about how Spore was designed and developed, check out A Brief History of Spore by Chaim Gingold:

>A Brief History of Spore

http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...

>This essay was written part way through Spore’s development, and summarizes one of the biggest transitions the project made — unknown to many — from what could have been a SimEarth like game/science toy to a capital-G computer Game. It tells how Spore made some of its early, and most crucial, navigational decisions down the branches of design possibility, to use Will’s own language. I feel like a discussion of how Spore turned out versus audience and developer expectations is a whole other story that should be distilled and told, but this is not the place for that.

>There’s also the Joystiq interviews Spore’s Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker:

https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-13-joystiq-interviews-spore...

>On the first day of the Montreal International Game Summit, Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker presented a keynote on the topic of “advanced prototyping,” specifically as to how it pertains to Spore, the game that currently occupies their time over at EA/Maxis. The same talk, given at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, was rated higher than any other presentation, including Will Wright’s, their boss’s. Before the keynote, Joystiq had a chance to chat with both Chaim and Chris, and discuss their impetus for joining Maxis, the evolution of Spore, and the relationship between Maxis and EA.

>And don’t miss Chaim Gingold’s talk about Spore’s Magic Crayons:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/527/SPORE-s-Magic