Spore Preview

VideoGamer.com: There's been some recent hardcore games that might not have sold as well on the PC as hoped - Unreal Tournament 3 in particualr. There seems to be a feeling online that PC gaming is dying. What's your thoughts on that considering Spore is a PC game?

TV: PC games are the frontrunners. They innovate, they do the things that can't necessarily be done on the consoles. RTS are PC games. FPS are still PC games. Sure consoles have come a long way, with Halo and Call of Duty 4, the console versions are pretty good, but at the same time, if you really want to be at the forefront of making really interesting new games, PC is where it's at, in my opinion.

As for the market, it's still growing but it's tracked in a very different way. Take for instance WoW. NPD doesn't track the $15 a month that I pay for WoW, but it tracks the amount of copies that WoW sells off the shelves right. The verdict is still out. For us, if you make a good game people will come. As WoW did. Blizzard could have made a console MMO but they stuck with the PC and they have the biggest game both on console and PC in the world. And The Sims continues to sell, and Sim City continues to sell. And all the FPS do pretty well, RTS games do pretty well. Maybe one day the market will move in a different way. For now there's tonnes of PCs out there, there's lots of avid fans. And honestly, the things we're doing on Spore, would be very difficult to do on consoles if we started out on consoles. Like the pollination stuff, social networking sites, the procedural animation, that stuff is not as easy to do on console. The RTS aspect - with a console controller you can't get the fidelity you get from a PC. So the PC is perfect for what we're trying to do.

VideoGamer.com: I noticed the Creature phase has some elements of WoW.

TV: Yeah there's some elements of WoW in there. Each of the games has elements of other games. The original idea Will had was to see Pacman, Diablo, The Sims for Tribe, Civilisation for Civ and MMO for Space. So it's like the history of games if you think about it. It's evolved and changed a little but we still have a lot of those elements in there, like cells like Pacman. There's a lot of thought behind it. Nothing you see in the game is an accident. But with a game like this, the creativity phase is so large that we don't always know what's going to happen.

VideoGamer.com: But that's the most exciting thing right?

TV: It is exciting but it's nerve racking!

VideoGamer.com: Of the five phases, what's your favourite?

TV: I like them all! I like Tribe phase for its humour. I think Tribe phase is freaking hilarious! There's so many funny things in Tribe. I like Creature phase because I like WoW and Creature phase has a lot of that, like getting new abilities. I like Cell for its simplicity. I like Civ because it's so complex and huge and you're controlling tonnes of dudes, and I like Space because it's so open ended, it's just freedom.

Each of the phases feels like a cool game. For me just getting into the editors, making a UFO so easily, making a robot and a robot vehicle, it's so awesome. If I was only getting that from Spore I would be like, sold. That's already so powerful. Where else are you going to get a procedural animation tool, where else can you share content?

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time.

Spore is set for release on PC and DS on 7 September 2008, with a Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 version to follow.