SPORE, that is what jumped up on the screen in beautiful white lettering on a black background. I have seen a few demo clips here and there, most from the last E3. Here we were with the master at the helm. Will started us off from, well the beginning. Literally, you were this tiny blip on the radar of existence crawling around in a fluid state. You really did get this slide on a microscope feeling as you moved around searching for food. The more you ate, the bigger you got; that simple. And, just milliseconds before the larger "thing" ate him, he jumped to the editor showing us the next stage of life.
The creature creation screen looked very simple and intuitive to use. Of course, with the guy who built it driving, it should. You have millions of possible permutations to look at. The program renders behavior real time as it analyzes your creation for movement and where the jointing is. So off we go into the new world as if we have just crawled on to the land and there we hunt for food, only to become dinner ourselves. This was surprising to Will as he admitted, "I wasn't supposed to do that."
He then guided us into outer space. From space you can explore your universe. His ship, though not infringing on IP, looked very much like something Gene Roddenberry would be proud of. He explained that once you had gotten to this point, it was pretty much anything goes. You were free to explore new worlds. He took us to one planet and interacted with an alien race. By dropping a Monolith, he actually raised their intelligence, thus impacting their evolution. Influence worlds and become their deity, or just hang out with the locals - it is all up to you. The power of the entire universe is in your hands. He made one statement on how far he wanted to see the creativity of his players go, and that was that at some point, it should be so diverse that you will see "Care Bears vs. Klingons" in a battle for planets.
If you have played a "God" game or some of his other games like The Sims, then hold on to your seat. This is the current God game of God games. Rising up from a Protozoic beginning to rampaging through the universe, terraforming planets and creating a universe... I am salivating here! Well you are just going to have to wait until October with me.
