In 2005, we first sat down with Maxis chief designer Will Wright--creator of SimCity and The Sims--to discuss his evolutionary epic Spore. Shortly thereafter, we said of the game in the pages of NEWSWEEK, "Non-gamers often ask when videogames are finally going to get their 'Citizen Kane.' But when Spore ships sometime next year, this infant medium might receive its Torah, its 'Origin of Species' and its '2001: A Space Odyssey' all rolled into one." Ignore the somewhat breathless prose and reflect for a moment upon the game's original ship date: sometime in 2006. But when we consider the scope of the gameplay (it's Pac-Man at the bottom of the evolutionary food chain, and "Star Trek" at the top); the magnitude of its technical ambition (large slices of Spore are procedurally generated, from the creatures animations to the musical score); and the challenge of designing a simple-yet-flexible interface to control it all (Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are among its influences), we're loath to begrudge Wright and his team at Maxis the time they needed to get it just right.

You'll feel the same way after you read our world exclusive interview with Will Wright. We caught up with him last week via phone, a couple of days before he and his corporate overlords at Electronic Arts settled on the date of September 7th, 2008 to release the PC, Mac, DS and mobile phone versions of Spore. Even though we only spoke for just under 40 minutes, Wright dropped so much science that we had to break the Q&A into two parts, both of which will run today. In Part I, Wright explains in greater detail why the game has taken so much longer than he originally anticipated; how his team hit on social networking as the metaphor for navigating the vast amount of user generated content that Spore will almost certainly inspire; and whether there was any pressure from EA execs to ship the game before its time. Read on.

When we first met in your office to talk seriously about this game it was some time in 2005. It's now 2008, and you guys are finally set to announce a release date. What happened? What's been taking so long in making this game?

Oh gosh. It was so many challenges to overcome. A lot of them initially were technical challenges: procedural animation; can we do these levels of detail enough to have zoom on the models; etc. Once we nailed most of those, it became a very large design challenge. And probably the biggest design challenge was keeping it very accessible to players so that every bit of the game was intuitive, easy and approachable. At the same time, we were going to mix all these genres, so we wanted to have one kind of control scheme, camera scheme, feedback system, rewards, across these different game genres. That probably overall was the biggest challenge, I think.

We've had all the game levels up and running for quite a while now. Initially it felt like five different games kind of stuck together. We basically did pass after pass, bringing these things into alignment, kind of like aligning the Intercontinental railway, digging into the rails with a sledgehammer, slowly getting closer and closer and closer until pretty soon it's a seamless fit across the rail.

At the tide pool level, the gameplay is 2-D, then the game moves into areas where the gameplay is 3-D. Maybe that's a bit easier transition to make with a mouse and keyboard than with a console controller, but can you talk about some of the things that you did to overcome the difficulty of creating a unified control system that could easily transition the player from stage to stage?

Well, part of it is we wanted stuff that players learn in one stage to basically be their early tutorial for the next stage. Even when you're in the 2-D cell stage, the way you learn to move and make your cell do things mirrors the next phase of the game where you're actually in 3-D. So the controls, we'll have them mapped that way. The editors--the same concepts that we use in the 3-D creature editor are still represented in the cell editor, but just in two dimensions. It's the same language that the player learns for how to manipulate things.

Also, there are some kind of broad concepts that go across the whole game that came in fairly late, after we got a sense of the entire thing, having to do with how we show your pollinated content. Every time you make something in the game you get a card; it gets pollinated to our servers so that we can get it to other players. We had to give players kind of a way of understanding that system. That at any time in the game they can hit a button, bring up their browser and browse the entire universe of content. They can look at what their friends have made; they can subscribe to Sporecasts, they can make buddy lists; they can tag content. We took a lot of the dynamics we saw going on the Web--especially social networking sites--and tried use that language to convey to the players how this all works.

What is "pollinated content"?

Whenever you make something in the game, a very compressed representation gets sent to our servers. As you play the game our servers are continually sending you new content for your world to fill out your ecosystem; your galaxy; opponents; cities; vehicles; whatever-it's being drawn from our database of content that other players have made.

Now, it's also trying to pick stuff that's appropriate for your game level. You don't want kick-ass creatures killing you right at the very beginning of the creature game. But the player also has a lot of control over that stuff. I can make a buddy list, and it will try to put my buddy's content in my universe at a higher priority. I can subscribe to Sporecasts, which are aggregations of content that players have decided to basically organize themselves. Also, when I get a card for a piece of content--whether it be mine or somebody else's--at any time I can open that card and leave a comment on the card, and the person who made that content will get the comment. It's like a guest book for every card. So the idea is that there's going to be a running community discussion group based around the content where every piece of content is its own thread discussion. Then we add things like Flickr tagging of content and stuff like that so that people can search what is probably going to be a very large database of content.

We've put a lot of functions in because this is unknown territory for a game, this type of sharing of content. Yet looking at The Sims, that was the thing you know people enjoyed almost as much as the game itself--sitting there playing, organizing, collecting the stuff that other players were making for the game. For them, that actually became a good bit of the gameplay of the Sims: people aggregating, collecting, browsing, and then using that content for things like storytelling.

It's always fascinating talking to you about Spore, but hearing you say this now, the scope of what you're doing along multiple axes seems even greater than it did originally. There are multiple game types. There's procedurally generated content. In 2005, you were already talking about the idea of a massively single-player game. But it seems like at some point in the process, you guys ended up building a Sporebook or MySpore into the game--which is another axis of complication for you as the developers--in order to simplify Spore for the players.

Yeah, that was pretty much it. In some sense we were pushing in three dimensions at once, and with each one trying to kind of push the boundary out farther than it had been pushed [previously], so we ended up hitting a lot of very unexplored territory. But even though it is unexplored, you want it to make sense to the player. You don't want to come up to a player, and say, "Here's some brand new thing you've never heard of. Let us explain it to you".

What you want to do is find some metaphor for the players to wrap their minds around it right off the bat. That's where looking at things like social networking sites became a really good model, a communication tool for us to make it really clear to a player what a Sporecast was, or what a buddy list was, or what tagging of content was. These are terms that a lot of our players will already understand in different kind of arenas. It's just hasn't really been applied to games before.

Even though you're not working day to day on the Sims anymore, it seems like this could be extremely applicable to Sims 3 whenever that might come out.

Yeah, this happens with all of our games. A lot of what The Sims expansion packs became was based upon us watching what people did with The Sims 1. A lot of what The Sims 2 became was based on what we saw people doing with the Sims 1. A lot of what the Sims 1 became, was based on what people were doing with the Sims City.

Every game is a learning experience you build upon. At some point you could have build something that seems to be in the right area then you give it to the players, they do something really remarkable with it, and it opens new vistas that you want to explore the next time around. It's almost this back and forth ping pong where we jump in this new space, explore it as thoroughly as we can, then we can use players, and the players transform it, and decorate it into something remarkable, which clearly shows us the next door to go through.

At what point in the process did you guys hit on the social networking metaphor as the way to approach the pollinated content part of the game?

I think a lot of that has to do with Caryl Shaw and her team. She's running the content pollination team. We actually first started looking at things like collaborative filtering on sites like Amazon, in terms of "How can we organize this content, and sort it, and find content that would be relevant or interesting to you?"

At the simplest level, when a piece of content comes in we actually do a feature analysis of the content. For instance, if I took a City Hall from my city, it can look at other content that thematically matches that City Hall, and suggest that to me. "Oh, maybe you'd like to buy these buildings because they kind of match the City Hall We've seen other players connect these buildings to that style of City Hall." At the first level, we had the computer trying to do an aesthetic categorization of these things. So right off the bat we were looking at things like Amazon's collaborative filtering; or any site that's dealing with a lot of content. Then we started looking at other things like Flickr tagging. When you're dealing with user generated content, there's been a lot of exploration in different formats on the Web already, and so the mechanisms, the way people think about that is somewhat familiar.

That's happened throughout most of our games. You know SimCity if you look at the very first SimCity the rough metaphor was a paint program. There was a palette of tools on the side, and you had this landscape as a canvas that you were painting on, so in some sense you know SimCity was already taking a metaphor from the very early paint programs. The players could come up to it and say, "Oh, I see it's like MacPaint."

How did you harmonize the different metaphors for each of the five stages of existence--tide pool, creature, city, etc.--which each have not only their own gameplay, but their own interface metaphors?How do you harmonize those, both in terms of the controls and the player experience?

We wanted to bring those metaphors as much into alignment as possible. There was always this dramatic tension between, say, this level wanting a particular set of controls, but that was inconsistent with the next level or the previous level. That probably remains the biggest design challenge: how do we make these levels work well with a fairly consistent control scheme across all of them? And it's not just the control scheme itself. It's also things like the feedback; how we present goal structures; how do you know something good has happened or bad; or what do you do to get to the next level?

It was a process of occasionally--all the levels would kind of go their independent ways, and then about once a month we would pull them all back towards some central portion; we'd figure out what the underlying spine is. Then they'd go off in own directions again, and then we'd pull them back. Eventually the shape of what that central spine is--it was being pulled back and forth and in all these other directions by each level--and in some sense I would say these levels were voting on you know what they wanted for camera control, for showing goal states, feedback, stuff like that. In a design sense, it was a kind of a Darwinian process; almost democratic that these levels kind of voting what the overall metaphor would be. But it was very much a process of iteration. It wasn't sit down, figure it all out at the beginning and then go do it. It was turn that crank painfully once a month, about twenty of thirty times.

This gets back to what we were saying about the length of development. From the beginning it sounded like an incredible game. It's sounding even better now, but you have EA on the corporate side, which is trying to make its projections and figure out when the game is going to ship? What kind of pressure were you under you know--whether it was self-imposed or externally--to provide visibility to the executives, when given the process you've described, the only way to unlock the great game that hopefully is inside your vision is through this process of iteration, which simply takes time?

Interestingly enough, on this project probably more than any other, the executive management at EA has always been on the side of "Get it right." Whenever we were basically saying, "Okay, we're not going to ship it this Christmas the way we thought," it was always, "Okay, but just get right. Get it right."

If anything, I think the team itself has felt more internal pressure to ship it sooner, but at the same time, as we get closer and closer, it's like "Oh, there's these last few things that'll just make it perfect," and "Oh, we've got to get this in." Things become visible to you toward the end of the process. Design opportunities that weren't obvious before, and so they weren't part of your schedule, but then you uncover these possibilities, and it's like, "Oh God, I don't want to leave that on the table. It would be so painful to do that." So that's probably the overall reason why the game is taking so long.

As we started digging into the pollination and how to communicate that to the player, I don't think originally we were expecting it to be such an ambitious undertaking. But as we started going down the path, and realizing all the things the players would want to do, and then we wanted to make those things easy and obvious, it expanded our design aspirations in that area, and as a result, it's going to come out in the state that feels like we you know thoroughly explored the design possibility space, and found the local maxima in there as opposed to just dropping in there and got the first thing we could build that was stable.

Right.

If you do it right this is--we've seen this with SimCity and The Sims these kinds of games: if you go in there and just thoroughly explore the design space, I mean almost to an obsessive degree, you don't have to worry about anybody else competing with you. [Laughs.] It's such a painstaking process. I'm still to this day surprised that we don't have a really reasonable competitor for the Sims. But I think it's for the same reason.

Wow, that's an interesting way of looking at it. So at what point would you say that things were truly starting to come together to the point like where you could say, "All right, I've had this vision in my head--me and the team we've had a vision in our heads--and it's starting to feel right, like the end is in sight." When did you guys hit that point?

Certain features and certain levels, they were starting to have a certain amount of finish. I'd say we put a big effort on the space level around the end of the last year, in terms of getting some of the rough metagames playable and tuning and all the features in. I think the Creature and Space stages were the first two levels where I really started feeling that, to a point where I'd say, "I can't wait until Civ feels this good or Tribes feels this good. They kind of set the bar for some of the other levels and they kept making progress too. So I'd say it was on a level by level basis. A lot of it was pacing too. We started to do a lot of focus group testing around the end of last year with a wide range of players: a lot of them very casual players that hardly play games at all, to get a sense of how accessible it was. And we discovered some interesting things. It caused us to kind of go back, and rework the design a bit.

For instance, one of the things that we changed late last year was....We noticed universally when people were able to just drop into any editor that they wanted to and play around with it--that was a much more entertaining experience for them to start understanding what the gameplay was. The gameplay made a lot more sense to them after spending time in the editor designing something. Originally we were going to force the players to start at Cell and play their way up through every level, but we decided that we wanted to make it feel more like a toy box of the universe. So we let players drop into any level they want to, right off the bat. We have an entry path for every level, straight off the bat, where you grab somebody else's pollinated content as your starting point if you didn't play Creature for instance. We found the players enjoyed browsing the levels lightly at the beginning, and trying a little bit at each level, then they would generally go back, start a full game from the Cell level, and play the whole thing straight through.

It's interesting that you mention that, because the most recent Vs. Mode I did on Level Up with Stephen Totilo from MTV was on Burnout Paradise. Obviously, you're starting with a completely new IP, whereas Burnout is established so there's already something there for people to either push back against or love. With Burnout, there was a mixed early response first with the demo, and initially to the finished game as well because of its open world, go anywhere, do anything structure as opposed to the previous games, which had a fairly rigid progression of race upon race upon race. In your case, while Spore is not out yet, you have shown the game several times, and the assumption that people had was that there would be a certain set progression. Now that you've done this redesign based on the feedback from a focus group of casual gamers, is there any concern that the core gamer who has played some or all of your previous games, where there is something of a linear progression, is going to feel weirded out or thrown off by Spore because they're feeling like "This isn't game-y enough."

Well, I think this in some instances far more game-y than a lot of the other games I've done. We have very clear goal structures at each level, because we use levels. They're also in some sense difference genres. We naturally are seeing people have their you know favorite level; they really enjoy Civ, but Creatures is a little too laid back for them, or they love Space because it's so elaborate. People are paying for the game. right? I mean, it's their game. They bought it. I don't feel right as a designer locking them out and forcing them to watch my cutscenes, and play this level before they get to that level.

There's a lot of narrative reward in playing through the entire game from start to finish in different ways. There are mechanisms in the game that acknowledge that. But again, I think a lot of players are going to approach this as something between a game and a toy, and I wanted them to be able to just open the box, the toy box, look in at all the toys, say "Ooh," and grab the toy they want. So for a lot of people, that's going in and designing a really cool space ship right off the bat, and then going off, and playing the Space game. For other people, it's going to be grabbing a creature, and making a lot of friends in Creature game. I think I want more of that kind of joy of discovery as opposed to, "Here's an obstacle course. Let's see if you can get through it," because I think that's going to be, at the end of the day, a more accessible experience that serves our franchise the way we're kind of envisioning it. This is really a game about creativity and exploration, more than it is about beating the final boss.