Spore, the hugely ambitious follow up to The Sims game series, won’t be publicly available until September – but you can start creating characters for the pan-evolutionary epic today using the just launched SporeCreator. Windows and Mac users can join a celebrity roster including Carlos Santana, Ze Frank and Jay Adelson of Digg in making Spore creatures for the SporeVote contest.
Spore will be a game that tracks a world of creatures along each step of their evolution, from primordial slime fights to hyper civilized urban environments. If the read/write web is of interest to you, you’ll want to give Spore a look.
The game is heavily influenced by leading Web 2.0 trends, including integration with the new YouTube API, a collection of widgets, at least some RSS feeds and some wiki inspiration. Does it seem a bit arrogant to ask users to start creating creatures months before the game is released, though? Some people think so.
The creature creator will even be a revenue generator for Electronic Arts – the free version only includes an estimated 25% of the available body parts. We don’t feel like squabling over details right now – we’re just anxious to get our hands on the game.
Below is a screenshot of the creature created by Ze Frank, from whom we learned about the availability of the creator on Twitter this morning. We think the likeness is pretty good.
We’re excited to get our hands on Spore this September and this Creature Creator campaign will likely make good progress towards getting even more people excited.