The ''Spore Creature Creator'' is a software that allows players to create their own creatures with a standalone version of the Creature Editor from ''

Spore In biology, a spore is a unit of sexual reproduction, sexual (in fungi) or asexual reproduction that may be adapted for biological dispersal, dispersal and for survival, often for extended periods of time, in unfavourable conditions. Spores fo ...

''; the software was one of the first aspects of the game to receive focused development, and underwent ten rewrites since the start of development. It was rated E by the

ESRB The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is a self-regulatory organization that assigns age and content ratings to consumer video games in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The ESRB was established in 1994 by the Entertainment Softw ...

in early March 2008, indicating that the editor would be released separately well before the game's release as a utility program. Electronic Arts told

MTV Asia MTV was a pan-Asian music pay television channel that was launched on 5 May 1995 as a standalone pay television service. The channel was owned by Paramount Networks EMEAA. History Pre-launch The first incarnation of MTV Asia was launched on ...

that "EA Screen will provide visitors a chance to interact with EA's game producers hailing from the studios, and unveil the hugely anticipated ''SPORE Creature Creator'' demo version to gamers for the first time in Asia." Electronic Arts VP Patrick Buechner stated on the ''Spore''

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

page that the editor would be released in June or July 2008, saying, "We are looking at releasing it two to three months before the launch of the full game." ''The SimCity Box'' artwork showed a blurb stating that the creature editor would be included with it.

IGN ''IGN'' is an American video gaming and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa district and is headed by its former e ...

revealed that the ''Spore'' Creature Creator utility would be available in two different versions on June 17, 2008. There was a paid version (for $9.95) and a free demo that was downloadable from Spore.com and included for free, bundled with ''The SimCity Box''. The free version of the editor only contained 25% of the available creature parts that were found within the full version. In

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

, on August 30, 2008, three state newspapers owned by

News Limited News Corp Australia is an Australian media conglomerate and wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp. The group's interests span newspaper and magazine publishing, Internet, market research, DVD and film distribution, and film and television pr ...

offered the full version either free or for $2. The utility includes a test environment for players to see their creatures go through animations and allowed the player to import other user-created creatures through the ''Sporepedia'' at Spore.com. The utility included screen capture and video tools as well, including

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

functionality. The editor also gave the user the ability to create animated avatars, and output in

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

and embeddable

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

code to facilitate easy incorporation into such sites as

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

and

. The software is automatically superseded by ''Spore'' when it is installed, since the Creature editor is already present on the game. Shortly after its introduction, the ''Creature Creator'' was used to create creatures with oversized

genitalia A sex organ, also known as a reproductive organ, is a part of an organism that is involved in sexual reproduction. Sex organs constitute the primary sex characteristics of an organism. Sex organs are responsible for producing and transporting ...

, either stand-alone or engaged in

coitus Sexual intercourse (also coitus or copulation) is a sexual activity typically involving the insertion of the Erection, erect male Human penis, penis inside the female vagina and followed by Pelvic thrust, thrusting motions for sexual pleasure ...

(a phenomenon quickly dubbed "sporn"). EA responded with e-mails sent to those who made pornographic

machinima Machinima () is the use of Real-time computing, real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. The word "Machinima" is a portmanteau of the words ''machine'' and ''Film, cinema''. According to Guinness World Records, ma ...

from its demo, and has flagged certain on-line accounts for " TOS violations". Furthermore, YouTube pulled several such videos for violations of its own TOS. By June 24, 2008, users had already uploaded over one million creatures to the site. During Electronic Arts' E3 2008 presentation on July 14, 2008, Wright humorously noted that fans had done God's work at 38% efficiency by creating the same number of currently known species on Earth, 1,589,000, in about 18 days, compared to God's 6 days. When ''Spore'' debuted on September 1, 2008, over 3 million creatures had been added to the Sporepedia via the ''Spore Creature Creator''. When installing

, ''Spore Creature Creator'' would be uninstalled.

Reception

At the time of its release, the game received "favorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

References

External links

* {{Sim series, spore=yes 2008 video games Biological simulation video games Electronic Arts games MacOS games Spore (2008 video game) Maxis Sim games Science fiction video games Video game development software Windows games Single-player video games Video games using Havok Video games developed in the United States