Vintage retro sporn

August 5, 2008 10:46 AM

You may be excited about the upcoming Maxis game Spore. But don't forget about two other primo games named Spore - a 1987 C-64 title and a 1991 DOS title, which looks like somebody put Zork and Breakout into Creature Creator and mashed them together.

There's also Spore Productions, which makes Flash-based minigames. None of the above have giant phallus monsters, as far as I can recall.

posted by jbickers (10 comments total)

Somewhat related: When Unreal first came out, it took me a while to realize it wasn't at all related to Unreal.
posted by Dr-Baa at 11:03 AM on August 5, 2008

Pepspore Blue
posted by DU at 11:05 AM on August 5, 2008

Ah... Breakout Creatures. There's some fond memories. We wandered the countryside, smashing bricks with a ball. What fun! Until that jerk Noah came along and collected them all on his boat. Something about a flood? Man, was I ever pissed. I think I can say I've never been so ark-annoyed.
posted by Eideteker at 1:46 PM on August 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

Weird. I took a look at the Spore (DOS) screenshot and thought I recognised the name. So his current website is here. Spore is not specifically listed, but he does talk about it on the page about his subsequent game Mystic Force:

Here is a game with almost no redeeming qualities. In 1993, it was my second attempt at Interactive Fiction on a PC (the first being the awful IF/BreakOut hybrid Spore, two years earlier). This followed quite a few equally obtuse text adventures written for the CoCo 2 and 3, in prior years.

You can download the game from that page, too, if you really want to. Or maybe one of his more recent interactive fiction games like The Travelling Swordsman, which placed 4th in the 2006 IFComp.
posted by xchmp at 2:18 PM on August 5, 2008

Yeah. Looking forward to Spore. A few days of playing Viva Piñata has left me kind of od'ed on cuteness though...

It's also interesting that Spore is getting attention from media outlets which don't usually pay attention to video games. I heard about it on Morning Edition a week or two ago...
posted by wfrgms at 4:41 PM on August 5, 2008

I was excited about Spore, until the creature creator came out. I played with that for about an hour or so and realized all these characters that supposedly represent things that could really evolve and exist in space somewhere? Totally unbelievable. It's a toon generator. I wouldn't mind that if this were Looney Toons the RPG.

Feels to me the game is geared towards five year olds. Granted, I admit to having the maturity of a five year old... So far I'm just not impressed with Spore.
posted by ZachsMind at 6:23 PM on August 5, 2008

Ah, but you see, ZachsMind, that's where the user-driven narrative of Spore comes into play. If you don't like cutesy cartoon creatures, simply declare a pan-galactic jihad on them all, incinerating their homeworlds with spaceborne death rays and packing off whatever happens to survive into a cramped cargo ship programmed to dive directly into the nearest black hole.

Me, I like me some Spore. I saw a demo reel of it last week that showed the camera rotating around a planet, its onyx moon temporarily eclipsing the sun which turned the fragile atmosphere a burning sunset orange and sparkled off the placid seas, seas whose waves went tumbling out of the bays and against the clockwork docks of the toy towns far below.

The game is gorgeous.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:42 PM on August 5, 2008

I was excited about Spore a few years ago. Now I'm way to old for that stuff.
posted by srboisvert at 9:07 AM on August 6, 2008

When does "upcoming" become "vaporware"? I'd really like to know when to give up on things.
posted by Waitwhat at 5:41 PM on August 6, 2008

Waitwhat: "When does "upcoming" become "vaporware"? I'd really like to know when to give up on things."

If game producer Thomas Vu is to be believed, Spore has already gone gold.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:24 PM on August 7, 2008