October 7, 2008 6:00 AMIGN has posted a new interview with Caryl Shaw, producer for Will Wright's latest god-sim, Spore. The game allows players to follow an organism from single cell to spacefaring creature. In the Q&A Shaw discusses the popularity of the game's editors and tools as well as the infrastructure supporting it.IGN PC: Spore's been out a while now and there's already an unbelievable amount of content available. Can you give us a brief overview of the galaxy and its varied populations? What's the perception within Maxis and EA of the way the game has been received?Caryl Shaw: The Spore Universe is off to an amazing start as we've just reached a huge milestone of more than 30 million creations made! When we launched Spore, the community had made 3 million creatures alone with the Spore Creature Creator, so it's pretty impressive to see that number jump so high in just three weeks. Our players' creations are not only a testament to how people have embraced the game, but how they've embraced their own creativity as well. From a 1950's robot creature and a human skull spaceship to a swimming pool building -- there's some very cool stuff on in the Sporepedia at spore.com. IGN PC: Did you anticipate this much user participation? At what levels are you seeing players get involved in the creation of content?Caryl Shaw: The results have been pretty mind-boggling. Will thought we'd reach 100,000 creatures made with the Spore Creature Creator (released in June) by the time we launched. Instead we hit that number 22 hours after the Creature Creator was released. Then when we hit the 1 million creatures milestone within one week, we had a pretty good idea that people loved this concept, and that the tools were easy, fun and engaging enough to unleash their imagination.But those were just creatures -- and that was really just the beginning. The Spore team couldn't wait to see what players would do once the building, vehicle and space editors were released. Now we're seeing people use their creativity in all sorts of ways. From the convincingly accurate and realistic to the fanciful and unimaginable, it's really amazing to see how talented our players are. The team sends around cool stuff that they see all the time. It's very satisfying to see what people have done with the editors for us. Very rewarding. Head over to the link below to read the rest of the interview.IGN: Spore State Of The GalaxyElectronic ArtsSpore
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