The official release date has finally been set September 7th, 2008. Hurray!! It was first announced in their very orange newsletter on February 12th 2008, so sign up now to get some good stuff from them! I'm looking forward to seeing what they are giving out with their fan site kit. Below is the teaser video with the office release date announced.
According to this article published on August 1st by Next Generation by Kris Graft, entitled EA: Spore Will Ship When It's Done, Spore is going to be released in the early fiscal 2009 timeframe. It was also noted that the game wouldn't be released before its finished. EA's 2009 fiscal year starts in April 2008 and ends in March 2009, so April 2008 is the new release date.
It had been pushed just recently before that in May, for the end of this fiscal year.. or by April 2008. It would seem that release dates being pushed is about the only news we're getting! Right now, according to an interview with IGN's Dan Adams on July 10th, it shouldn't be too far beyond April 2008 since they are in the alpha stage. With the current trends though, I don't think it'll be released til December 2008.. Make that 2009. And thats because they want to get it right. This is both good news and bad news.... Good news because we are all looking forward to an awesome experience and want the job done right, and bad news because we've been hearing about Spore for years already! It is very frustrating, to say the least. After all this excitement and let downs, there is still something left to be excited about...
Ricitiello said, "We will make the choice of shipping a better game than an on-time game given the high potential for this franchise."
In other words, once Spore is released we are going to hear so much about it that it will make us sick! :D We know for sure that there will be a Nintendo DS version, but it will not be compatible with the PC version.
Wow, Will Wright on National TV! This was a great interview of Will Wright, interviewed by Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central on December 4th 2006. There really isn't any new information on Spore from this interview, no game demo either. What Mr. Wright did say was that Spore is going to be released in the 2nd half of 2007 which we already knew. He didn't get any more specific. A couple interesting things I noted was that I have rarely seen Stephen go so easy on someone he interviewed. Sure he mocked a little, but he didn't argue. Oh yeah, Will Wright must've taken a speech class because I don't recall him saying any "umms"! :D My favorite lines follow:
Mr. Colbert: Spore sounds strangely like a reproduction system. Is it a sex game? Audience laughs.
Mr. Wright: Well in its basic, yes! Audience laughs.
For those interested, there is also an article by Newsweek on-line entitled Exclusively: Behind the Scenes of Will Wright's Visit to the Colbert Report, published on December 5th 2006.
Here is a video of the the interview for you:
I just read a great Will Wright interview from GameSpot, entitled EA not Spore-ing until late '07. The article was written by Tor Thorsen, and the interview entitled Will Wright talks Spore, Leipzig, next-gen was written by Andrew Park. Both were published on August 9th. I pulled three important facts out of this interview.
Firstly, the release date has furthur been pushed to at least July 2007. They are in the home-stretch because all levels are playable, but they still have a lot of fine tuning to do.
Secondly, my estimate of perhaps 6GB of hard drive space might not be so far off. My hard drive space guestimate was countered by some because they say that creatures will be taking up as little as 3kb of space. In this article, Will Wright says that that is the compressed file size, and that every creature will be at least 3mb. 3mb upon 3mb adds up quickly!
Last but not least, there will be a playable version of Spore at the Lepzig Game Conference in Germany! We can look forward to great new videos then. :)
I got wind of this from two different sources. One was in the article published on July 21st 2006 by BusinessWeek, Spore Lives Up to the Hype. I quote here:
"Even so, it is clearly going to take Maxis at least a year to stitch all the elements into a coherent whole."
The second source that says it will push the date to June is actually some company info that was leaked. Here's a page from an equity research report that says that Spore will be released on June 1st 2007, and will be selling for $49.99.
It had been announced that Spore would be released in the 4th quarter of 2006, but the date has officially been pushed furthur. This is so disappointing but at the same time we all want Spore to be the best game out there, and time is thus required for perfection! The Internet article, entitled EA Slips To Quarterly Loss, Talks Next-Gen, Spore was found on GamaSutra.com and was published May 5th 2006. Here is the quote about Spore:
"Electronic Arts also confirmed in the earnings call that Will Wright's Spore will not ship in this fiscal year, meaning that the much-awaited title will not debut until at least April 2007. It also mentioned that it was "making investments" in its EA Digital Downloader for PC games, a possible competitor for Valve's Steam service."
As of today, there is still no official release date for Spore. It was announced by WiIll Wright for Fall 2006, and some sources online have said 2007. I think EA will push Spore to be released for 2006 Q4, in time for Christmas. They released The Sims Online in December 2002, and The Sims 2 on September 14th 2004. When The Sims Online came out, it wasn't all that ready. Major updates continued to come in, so much that the current version is now "New & Improved!" If they release Spore this fall, I think they will release updates as they are ready.
We also have not gotten much material to play around with. In Caryl Shaw's GDC 2006 speech, she talks about how they released a Sim editor before the Sims 2 was released as part of an open beta test. This allowed them to populate their database with different sims before it went public. We can expect the same for Spore, seeing that they need creatures in their database to populate worlds of online players. I will keep this site posted on beta tests and release dates. A lot of new information is expected to be released at this years E3.
