Sims creator on to evolutionary idea

In his Hawaiian shirt and oversized glasses, Will Wright could have been any other geeky gaming enthusiast wandering the halls of the E3 gaming expo in Los Angeles.

The difference is that Wright, who heads the game development company Maxis, has dreamed up some of the best-loved computer games released so far.

The creator of the hugely successful Sim City and The Sims game franchises, Wright is now in the enviable position of being able to develop pretty much any game he wants.

His Sims titles and their various spin-off expansion packs are a major earner for games publisher Electronic Arts, which publishes much of Maxis' output and will also release Wright's new creation - Spore.

"I'm gonna add a spike to my guy," said Wright as he designed the physical attributes of the star of his new game.

Spore has shades of Sim City and The Sims in it, but takes the sweeping backdrop of the history of evolution as its setting.

In Spore, your creation starts out as a single molecule and progresses as the first creatures did hundreds of millions of years ago.

Along the way, you as the gamer play God, tweaking the characteristics of your species.

"There's a whole ecosystem going on here. I can make them social or individual, herbivorous or carnivorous. When I make one change, I'm affecting the entire species. It's like a simple version of Sim City," said Wright, who came up with Sim City in the late 80s because he "just wanted to make a game about city planning".

A virtual editor is key to the game. Players create the physical attributes of their creatures and this affects how they develop - from how they eat and hunt, to procreation and walking the land.

"The features of this creature in the environment are totally based on what I do in the editor," Wright said.

As with the Sims Online, players in the world of Spore interact in one another's games.

"We're sucking these things up to our servers and using them to populate other players' games."

The sheer amount of content that will be available in Spore's collaborative online environment will give a vast number of directions for the game to take.

"I want the players to have tremendous powers, but not ruin the experience of other players," said Wright.

"We're going to end up with an entire galaxy of content, which is automatically built as you play."