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You are the creator in ‘Spore’ universe

“Spore,” the latest game from “The Sims” creator Will Wright, evolved into a sensation — months before it hit stores.

The highly anticipated “god game” lets you be the creator of life forms. Enthusiasm is high among hard-core and casual players alike, says Kristen Salvatore of “PC Gamer” magazine. “I think that speaks to how popular Will Wright’s games are and how great he is at making them. They’re accessible and deep at the same time. Each piece of the game, and there are many, is easy to play with and understand, but all of the pieces fit together into a very elegant and complex whole.”

Justin McElroy of the video game news site Joystiq.com has designed creatures ranging from a “pretty convincing Grimace of McDonaldland fame to a “living guitar with antennae for tuning pegs and a mouth where the sound hole would be.”

“Spore” starts at the very beginning: Players begin as a simple, single-cell organism that must make its way out of the primordial mire and onto land. You help your creature evolve, from a slug into a creature with arms and legs, ultimately intelligent enough to venture into space.

McElroy’s experience with the “Creature Creator” “has taken me from being sort of conceptually interested in “Spore” to being really eager to see how all these creations will function in a game setting,” he says. “We in our industry have become predisposed to eye-rolling whenever someone says the only limit is your imagination. But that really doesn’t seem to be far from the truth.”

Releasing “Creature Creator” early gave players a taste of the game but also helped the developer, Wright says. Players got nearly three months with the drag-and-drop editing tools — similar features are used in other parts of the game — so they felt comfortable when the full game was released ($50 for PC and Mac; $80 for a Galactic Edition with DVD, book and poster).

When a creature is uploaded to the online Sporepedia, an encyclopedia of “Spore” species, it’s automatically added to the game. “We’ll have hundreds of thousands of creatures to start pollinating on Day 1,” Wright says. “In some sense, we are priming the pump on the creativity of the database.”

Five years in the making, “Spore” grew out of Wright’s interest in astrobiology, SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and “Powers of Ten,” a short 1977 documentary film and 1992 book of relative scale, both based on Kees Boeke’s 1957 “Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps” (vendian .org/mncharity/cosmicview). Players’ perspectives expand from microbial to massive. “By playing the game, they will have actually created an entire world at some point,” Wright says.

Along the way, the game covers the evolution of games as well. “We start with something that feels very much like ‘Pac-Man,’ and then we move to something that feels like a first-person shooter,” Wright says. “Then we move to something that feels more like an early (real-time strategy game) like ‘Populous,’ and then more like ‘Civilization.’”