- Spore devs say the evolution game's previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making, and they 'built a fantasy in people's minds that was unachievable' - 14 June 2026
Spore is the greatest game that never was. Clear as day, I remember the wonder the pitch instilled in me as a young'un. It was to be a true simulation like The Sims, not just of daily life, but of the history of all life— life as everything from a unicellular amoeba to a spacefaring alien of my own design, all realized in exacting detail... Read more.
- In October 2025, a full 205 months after the ill-fated life sim Spore first launched, someone walked into a store, found an old DVD copy on a shelf, and bought it - 20 November 2025
Spore might be one of the highest-profile disappointments in all of PC gaming , but it's also a game I have a huge soft spot for. It was the first game I ever begged my parents to preorder for me (for my birthday at the ripe age of 8), and I adored it endlessly back when I had no concept of what anyone else expected it to be. These days, I find myself longing instead for the evolution sim Spore promised to be rather than the minigame mishmash it ended up as, but maybe all I need is a set of fresh eyes. Lucky me, there's at least one newcomer to the game somewhere out there... Read more.
- After years of silence, the legendary life sim Spore has crawled back to life like a 3-eyed amphibian emerging from a primordial alien sea - 1 October 2024
Spore was a pretty big deal back in the day, a life-sim RTS from famed Sims studio Maxis that gave players the opportunity to guide the evolution of a species from primordial soup to interstellar exploration. It was huge, ambitious, and unique, and alas, it was not great: The ideas behind it were bold, but the actual gameplay was pretty flat. We said in a 2018 retrospective that "in many ways, Spore was No Man’s Sky before No Man’s Sky"—minus the redemption arc... Read more.
- Forget Civilization 7, I want a new Spore game already - 24 December 2023
Spore is unequivocally the greatest god game I've ever played, and I'll say it with my whole simulation-loving heart. Maxis, the genius developer behind The Sims, created its unique real-time strategy game back in 2008 when I was practically still an evolving little microscopic organism myself. As a child obsessed with The Sims and Zoo Tycoon, it wasn't long before I lost hundreds of hours to Spore that could've been spent playing outside. I'm now ready to lose even more, over a decade later. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This Spore dragon a player created was so complex it couldn't be saved
- Spore + DLC sale - 12 April 2021
Save on DLC and the base game until April 19th. SALE PAGE
- Have You Played… Spore? - 19 January 2021
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Spore is several games in one, none of which are particularly impressive on their own. It’s life sim meets strategy, where you grow a tiny organism with a little snappy mouth into a horrible monstrosity you made look like a penis because you’re hilarious. Eventually that penis will become a spacefaring species trying to traverse and spread throughout the galaxy. (more…)
- Five of the Best: Character Creators - 24 January 2020
Five of the Best is a weekly series about the parts of games we overlook. We've discussed a diverse bunch: crowds, hubs, potions, mountains, hands... They're the things we take for granted while we play but then, years later, find lodged in our brains. It's only then we begin to appreciate how important they were. So let's celebrate them. Today... Character creators! How long do you spend in them? Do you pick a premade face and just breeze through? Do you pick a template, tinker a bit and then settle? Or do you adjust absolutely everything, take all evening and it still doesn't look right? I feel your pain. Read more
- I still wish Spore was good, but a decade later it's a slog - 1 November 2018
In Reinstall , we revisit a game from the past and see what kind of experience it gives us now. It's not a re-review, more just a snapshot of what it's like to play this game now. Back in 2008, Spore was a source of daft community character creation joy, incredibly uneven ambition and a massive row about the digital rights management software EA insisted on using at launch. In many ways, Spore was No Man’s Sky before No Man’s Sky.  There are two Spore experiences I remember clearly from 2008. One was waddling around on land for the first time after graduating from the Cell stage to the Creature stage, and the other was the row about DRM. But the experience of actually playing any of it has faded and been replaced by the sense that it was one of those games that just didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Booting it up a decade later (or rather, boot…
- Spore and Sims creator Will Wright unveils Proxi - 20 March 2018
Will Wright led creation of SimCity and later The Sims, then he made the very ambitious evolution-themed simulation Spore. He's someone who thinks rather big. And he's unveiled a new game called Proxi, the mobile version of which is due late 2018 (no other platforms are named). It's a simulation based around creating an artificial intelligence from your memories and then building a world out of them. Here's Wright's lofty pitch: Read more…
- Midweek Madness - SPORE , 75% Off - 21 March 2017
Save 75% on the SPORE series during this week's Midweek Madness*! *Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time
- It s Time For Spore 2 - 19 October 2016
Trees that grow from seeds you plant? Easy. 18 quintillion planets? Whatever. If you want to talk about videogames’ most ambitious endeavors, there’s only one contender for the top spot. Spore , released in 2008, let players control a species they created from single cell organism all the way through to becoming space explorers. That included designing everything from the huts you lived in during the tribe stage, to the spaceships you used to careen around the galaxy near the game’s conclusion. Most importantly, it let you craft exactly what kind of weirdo you’d be taking to the stars, whether six-limbed, beady-eyed monstrosities or fleshky daleks or Homer Simpson , and then it populated your world with everyone else’s creations automatically, so that each planet was filled with delightful, handmade surprises. Spore was a marvel. It’s crying out for a…
- Mirror's Edge, Spore, and The Saboteur are now on GOG - 22 September 2016
Mirror's Edge Catalyst was good, but not quite as good as we all hoped it would be: As close to a definitive version of a Mirror's Edge game as we're likely to get, Samuel wrote in his review , despite retaining some of the first game's issues. If you don't happen to be familiar with those issues, you might want to point yourself at GOG, which now has Mirror's Edge and two other not-exactly-recent EA releases, all of them currently on sale. That means the original Mirror's Edge for $10, the Spore Collection for $12, and The Saboteur for $10. Mirror's Edge is probably the marquee game in the list, but Spore is the real deal: The regular price of Mirror's Edge and The Saboteur is the same on GOG as it is on Origin, but GOG's Spore Collection normally lists for $30, while the combined cost of the Spore titles on Origin (which doesn't offer them in a bundle) is a whopping $70. GOG's listing…
- Midweek Madness - SPORE , 75% Off - 6 September 2016
Save 75% on SPORE™ during this week's Midweek Madness*! From Single Cell to Galactic God, evolve your creature in a universe of your own creations. Play through Spore's five evolutionary stages: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Each stage has its own unique style, challenges, and goals. *Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time
- The most ambitious PC games - 14 July 2016
Every game is ambitious. It s not easy to turn a beautiful idea into a finished, playable game as developers have said time and again, sometimes it feels almost impossible. As miraculous as finishing any game might be, not all games are created equal. Some stretch the boundaries of technology to their breaking point. Others take a leap into the unknown with new design schools, often so effectively that years later, it s hard to remember them ever having to be invented. Think, for example, of Monkey Island s Three Trials structure, as used by almost every adventure afterwards. Or its sequel s Four Map Pieces , as later picked up by BioWare. And sometimes, both art and science combine to push the envelope and we get something truly, impossibly special. Here are our picks for the top 20 ignoring the very early games that had to prove computers could handle gaming at all. For more on some o…
- Daily Deal - SPORE , 75% Off - 13 December 2014
Today's Deal: Save 75% on SPORE™ !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
- Daily Deal - SPORE™, 75% Off - 4 June 2014
Today's Deal: Save 75% on SPORE™ !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time
- Former Civilization IV Lead On Mars Game, Revitalizing RTS - 2 May 2014
Mohawk Games is an excellent name for a company. And so it is that former Civilization IV lead designer and Spore man Soren Johnson approaches me sporting the company haircut. It’s a recent trim job for the old headshrub, he tells me, but he wears it well. However, the brain beneath the mohawk – the mind behind some of strategy gaming’s greatest greats – is the real main attraction here. Johnson’s goal is to design “core strategy games” in conjunction with Civ V art director Dorian Newcomb and in partnership with Galactic Civilizations (no relation) developer Stardock . First on the docket? A still unnamed Mars economy RTS with no units and 13 different resource types. Is it madness? Probably, but it’s the good kind, the kind that drives a man to shave off most of his hair before a business conference, the kind that sounds wicked fun when…
- The Suite Science: Paul Weir Talks Generative Music - 20 November 2013
This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills . When Paul Weir gave a talk at GDC 2011 about GRAMPS, the generative audio system he designed for Eidos Montreal’s Thief, the games press took notice. Not so much of the contents, though, or indeed the subject, just Thief. Here, finally, was a chance to get something on this oh so secretive game. Maybe, while prattling on about ‘sounds’ and stuff, he’d toss them a headline or two, get ‘em some clicks. Suspecting as much, Weir recommended to his audience that anyone just there for Thief nooz should probably leave the room. Some people did. We can often seem deaf to game audio in the same way we’re blind to animation. Maybe it’s because the best examples of both are so natural and chameleonic that they b…
- Soren Song: Civ IV Designer Founds Mohawk Games - 6 November 2013
Soren Johnson is a clever man. He was a programmer on Civilization 3, the lead designer on Civilization IV, and then he moved over to Maxis to work on Spore. Now he’s building himself a new home by founding Mohawk Games, a studio dedicated to creating “core strategy games”. (more…)
- Daily Deal - SPORE, 75% Off - 18 April 2013
Today's Deal: Save 75% on SPORE ! Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
