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No more Spore in '07
Will Wright's ambitious evolution/civilization/creature creation title is now being targeted for Spring 2008.
By Tor Thorsen, GameSpot
Posted May 8, 2007 5:44 pm PT

Though console owners will have a cornucopia of titles to choose from this fall, PC gamers were looking forward to one in particular. Spore, the hugely ambitious new project from Sims creator Will Wright, was slated to be out later this year, and was presumed by many to be one of Electronic Arts' tentpole holiday releases.

Well, presume no longer. Today during a post-earnings report conference call with analysts, newly re-installed EA CEO John Riccitiello shattered many-a-gamer's dreams by announcing that Spore is no longer on the publisher's 2008 fiscal year calendar, which ends on March 31, 2008.

"Spore is a title we have enormous confidence in," Riccitiello told analysts. "I've had the chance to review the title three times in my short return to the EA and it looks fantastic. I will also tell you that its release will be right up [to] the bubble in Q4 [of fiscal '08], if not sometime in early fiscal '09 so we don't feel comfortable in forecasting it." No specific mention was made of the DS version of the game.

As is often the case with high-profile titles, quality control concerns were behind the delay. "We're focusing on quality to make sure we build a franchise that feels more like The Sims, a franchise that we hope...to see around for some time in the future." Riccitiello promised, hinting the publisher has big plans for the property.

The latest Game Informer reports that Spore has been "delayed indefinitely", but reached for comment today, Electronic Arts says that "Spore has slipped out of fiscal 08 and into fiscal 09". Either way you cut it, it means that the game we've all been waiting to play on our computers isn't coming anytime soon.

Electronic Arts announced on January 15, 2008 that the Mac OS X version would be released on the same day as the PC version. The announcement was timed to coincide with the MacWorld Conference & Expo 2008, with Spore running on Macs.

On December 20, 2007 Wired News gave Spore the second place in its annual list of vaporware awards — that is, an award to projects that have been prolonged too much already. The first place was awarded to Duke Nukem Forever.

https://www.spore.com/screenshots.php?movieID=7&play=hi

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When we talked about the game back in '05, you spoke about procedurally generated music. Where did that end up?

Well, that was one of the things I was really at the outset very skeptical of because I never really heard any decent procedurally generated music. At some point in the project, though--probably right around then--we hooked up with Brian Eno who ended up working with us on the procedural score. So actually we ended up with over probably--about half of our music is now procedurally generated within the game based upon things you make.

We found it was so fun,  we've actually built this little kind of harness where Brian and our sound engineer could play around with the underlying levers on the procedural engine. This is one of those things that became so fun to play with, we decided we had to surface it the player. So in the game right now, when you're designing a city, one of the things that we allow you to do is open this little device and compose your own theme song for your city--

Wow.

--and it's actually using the procedural generator. So I can hit the "roll the dice button," and it generates a new procedural melody with rhythm, or I can actually grab the notes, and if I want to even put in my own tune on the notes. We've basically turned the procedural music generation into its own little toy and embedded that within the game as well.