An amazing keynote from the genius creator of The Sims was a fitting way to end SXSWi 2007.

What struck us instantly was what an amazing speaker Will Wright is. Speaking what seemed to be 1000 words a minute, he still had an amazing ability to articulate pretty complex ideas in a simple way.

The keynote was split into two main parts - a presentation around story telling and then an incredible demo of Spore (his latest game currently in development).

Wonderland Blog has an excellent article covering the keynote in some detail, so I’d recommend giving that a read.

However, I will quickly skip to the end of the keynote mention spore…

Spore demo
Spore is quite simply geek heaven… or hell depending on how you want to play it.

The best way to describe it is the Sim’s on a galactic level, but that doesn’t do it justice. Basically the players start of with a single cell organism and then evolves his creature. Over time the creature can evolve to not only be the dominant species on a planet, but an entire galaxy - where the Sims had a house to play with, Spore has a universe.

In this game galaxy really does mean galaxy too… there are literally 1000s of planetary systems to explore, all automatically populated with creatures by the game or by other players around the real world.

The visuals were amazing too… there were no “loading” messages when zooming out from creature, to planet, to solar system, to galactic level. If this stays like this in the final version it will be an amazing feat.

A couple of other things he showed off in the game was the Monolith (ala 2001: a space odyssey, where you can place a monolith on a planet and get its creatures to worship you as their god) and the spaceship that can “customise” entire planets (Will demonstrated how you candestroy all life on a planet - fun!)

As Will Wright said in the presentation, he’s trying to create a philosophical tool that will pose “meaning of life” type questions and he looks like he might achieve it.

Expect this game to take the world by storm!