Popular Science Interviews Will Wright

On my morning riffling through various internet blogs, I came across a fairly interesting (and fairly long winded) interview with a very excited game developer named Will Wright. Most of us know him as the father of Spore.

It's an incredibly detailed and well thought out interview with lots of questions that I really wanted to know about Spore and what to expect. What he says is fairly interesting. For example, the size of the game itself is astronomical. Oddly enough, I mean that literally. Once you get to the final "phase" of the game, the space travel part, the galaxy in which you fly around in is actually based on the galaxy we currently live in. Not only in structure, but in size and distance between stars and planets and such. It's crazy! A quote:

How much is the game based on established scientific theory, Darwinian evolution or what have you, and how much of it is more seat-of-your-pants?
I think the rough arc of life in the game is a pretty accurate though caricatured representation of reality, in the way life evolved from single cell to multicell to intelligence. Specifically on every level that kind of depends on what you're looking at. The evolution part of the game, the player is actually designing the creature, so in fact it's almost like intelligent design rather than pure evolution for your creature. The creatures around you are in fact kind of evolving more naturally, but in fact behind them of course are intelligent designers making the specific versions. Once we get up to the civilization level it's kind of an abstraction of human history. What are the different ways in which humans have built larger and larger groupings of people? We've done it militarily, economically, culturally, those are represented in fairly abstract terms. Once we get to space the scope of the size of the galaxy is an interesting little model of the real galaxy in terms of the distance between stars, the type of other objects you have up there, planetary nebula, black holes, stuff like that are fairly accurately represented in terms of their distribution in the galaxy, the number of stars we're dealing with is actually a very small fraction. Even though we have millions of stars in our galaxy, it's a very small fraction of what a real galaxy has. But still from the player's point of view they're both still huge numbers – almost inconceivable. Unless there's a compelling reason to break reality we've tried to follow reality, but again, in a caricatured format.

The whole interview is busting at the seams with interesting conversation about the game and the development of it. As for the due date, they're still shooting for Fall 2007 and it's still for the PC. It apparently could easily be ported to the Wii but there's no confirmation that it will be just yet. But one can surely speculate.

Check out the interview here:Popular Science