Will Wright: the origins of 'Spore'

If any forthcoming videogame is more eagerly anticipated than Electronic Arts' Spore, it's hard to imagine what it could be.

And it's no wonder. Spore is the brainchild of Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, the best-selling PC game of all time.

Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com

And the new game's conceit -- to let players take a microscopic spore and grow it into a larger organism, which then spawns a colony of small creatures that evolve into the population of a city and a planet before emerging into space colonies that interact with other players' creations online -- is one of the freshest videogame concepts to come along in years.

At the Game Developers Conference in San Jose on Thursday, Wright gave a keynote address talking about the origins of Spore. And as he weaved and wound his way through a high-concept talk discussing the science, fantasy and inspirational books and movies that led to the game -- currently slated for a 2007 release -- at least 3,000 adoring game designers listened for the lessons he imparted about process.

Wright is well-known as one of the smartest designers in the game business and certainly one of the most erudite. And that reputation showed in his keynote. It moved adroitly from robots to astrobiology to rocketry and communications between planetary societies to the ways game-design teams are built.

He had the crowd laughing throughout as he mixed dry humour with a long series of slides (above) demonstrating his ideas.

In the end, it was hard to pinpoint exactly what lessons a game designer was supposed to take away from Wright's talk. But one thing was clear: if it was possible to bottle what a videogame industry superstar like Wright does, thousands of designers would line up to buy it.