s the creator of all things Sim, Will Wright is perhaps the most respected game designer in all of video games. His upcoming Spore, the follow-up to his record-breaking Sims franchise, looks to be one of the most innovative games in years.

Game Informer: Your entire career has been about letting players experiment with manipulating simulations of the real world. Do you see Spore as the culmination of your previous games?

Will Wright: I don’t know if I’d call it a culmination. I think it takes into account a lot of the previous work. Look at things like SimEarth, a lot of aspects of that came into [Spore]…[also] SimLife, SimCity, and The Sims. I think you learn from every project and try to incorporate that knowledge into what you’re working on in the future.

GI: Is there any one part of the game that proved to be more of a challenge than you thought it was going to be?

Wright: We understood the technical challenges we were facing – aspects of how to make the content really compressible, how to procedurally generate all this stuff, especially the animations. I think the design challenge was larger than expected. One, getting these editors to be easy to use, and number two, incorporating all these genres into what felt like a singular experience. We wanted something that had a single interface. Doing that across genres turned out to be quite a challenge.

GI: How do you handle player progression through so many different stages of the game?

Wright: Each level has a particular goal that you are pursuing and there’s a progress bar at the bottom for every level showing how far you have progressed against that goal. Within each level we have mission structures, which are incremental goals on the path towards the major goal. We have it on two levels. On the lowest level, things have motivations and health and things like that, but we also have very specific goals for each state to proceed to the next level.

GI: Obviously, this game emulates the evolution of life on Earth. The theory of evolution has been under fire in recent years. Do you see this game as a commentary on that debate?

Wright: I actually just bought a book on [intelligent design]. It’s interesting to read what the arguments for intelligent design are. They totally leave out any numbers in terms of time, for example, the time between the Cambrian explosion and when other forms of life diverge. If you have a timeline of how long it took, you get a totally different sense of it. There are so many millions of generations that life has had to evolve to where it is. So, I think giving someone an overview of life on Earth up to where we are now frames the whole subject in a different way. For most people, a million years is about the same as a billion years, but they are vastly different. Most people can’t begin to comprehend those time scales. So, you look at something as complex as a human being and you wonder, “How could this have possibly evolved?” But when you take into account how many generations it’s been happening, it’s pretty remarkable.

GI: So do you see the game as promoting evolution?

Wright: I think people can take away different things. If you look at the game, you’re actually in the role of an intelligent designer – or not-so-intelligent, depending on the player. [Laughs] I’ve seen people on the Internet debating whether Spore was promoting intelligent design or evolution. Just getting people to have that discussion is worthwhile, but I personally fall very much on the evolution side of things.

GI: Spore has an interesting approach to the audience, allowing them to help create the world and populate your servers with creatures that can be shared but without allowing actual multiplayer.

Wright: I was working on The Sims Online around the same time that I started Spore, and I saw a lot of issues in designing an online game. There are a lot of design limitations you have to work with. You have to give up a lot of the cool things you can do in a single-player game. So, I was trying to figure out how you get the benefits of an online game – all these people working collectively to build this huge, shared world – without the liabilities of an online game… That’s not to say that we won’t do one later. We’re definitely kicking around ideas about what a multiplayer version of Spore would look like.

GI: How much of a design challenge is it to deal with all the custom content and the sheer amount of randomness that is introduced into the world?

Wright: Well, you have to make firm distinctions when players are making stuff between how much of that is going to be aesthetic versus functional. To keep the game balanced, you need to control the rough range of functional behavior in what they’re making. Then, as we’re populating, we want to be in control of what assets we’re bringing into your world. We don’t want creatures of tremendously higher powers to come in and kick your butt every time. But, on the other hand, with the creature creator, we wanted to give players a wide aesthetic range. We didn’t want to have a situation of “This is the ultimate creature design, so don’t bother creating anything else because this is always going to win.”

GI: How do you deal with the almost impossibly high expectations that people have for Spore? Do you feel that pressure?

Wright: I think it’s too much hype. About a year ago, we were realizing how much hype we were getting and we decided we should start to say that it’s going to suck just to de-hype it. That is a certain amount of pressure. When people don’t know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way you want them to be filled in. That’s true of almost anything. Then, when the actual thing comes out some people will be disappointed that it’s not “hardcore enough” or it’s not “easy enough” or that we didn’t do this or that. We’ve gotten to that point any additional hype isn’t serving us well. It’s a concern.

GI: Do you envision Spore being supported with a lot of expansion packs like The Sims has been?

Wright: I think it will be similar in extent but hopefully not the same strategy we took with The Sims. With The Sims, we were basically selling expansion packs to the same customers over and over. I think Spore lends itself more to horizontal expansion, where we take components of the game like levels or editors into totally different formats and hit people that maybe never even played the hardcore PC game, but would enjoy a lighter experience using one of the editors. Or, using the content in new ways outside of Spore the game. I think we’re going to see Spore expanding in a much wider variety of ways than The Sims did, but to the same extent. Different systems, different game styles, things like that. Once you have this much content there’s a lot of things you can do with it, gaming and otherwise.