E3: Sims man goes megalomaniac

Many people at E3 are hailing Will Wright's Spore as potentially the biggest thing since, well, The Sims - which was created by, yes, Will Wright. So to grab a quick demo session behind closed doors with Will was quite a coup.

Basically, it's a life simulator where you start off as a single-celled organism and work your way up until you're controlling entire planets - or galaxies even. To me, it looked baffling difficult how you could monitor the development of entire species while keeping track of, say, the atmosphere on another planet.

But Will was adamant it would all make sense when it ships for PC in autumn 2006 - and who I am to argue? The graphics are fairly rudimentary at this point but the interface seemed relatively intuitive. The clever thing is the game can upload the creatures (or planets, etc) you create to a central server for distribution, where it will also grab other players' animals for integration into your universe.

"What we learned from watching people playing The Sims is that people love creating content and they also love sharing content that other players made," said Will. "Some people might want to go around collecting the weird creatures that get created. Others might want to conquer the galaxy. That way the game is very open-ended."