It's the week of the Game Developer's Conference, which means there's news about Spore. In Mitch Laskey's (former CEO of Jamdat, which has recently been acquired by EA) speech at the conference, Spore was mentioned as one of the games that would be released on mobile phones. Although initially it was said to be out this year, after calling EA representatives GamingSteve found out that it won't be out until 2007. Meanwhile, an interview with Will Wright at RedHerring says that Spore on PC probably won't be out until 2007 either. The team currently consists of 70 developers, and the project will cost about $30 million to complete. The article further discusses innovation in the games industry, and how Wright is able to put his own creativity in the games he creates. An article published in Wired Magazine recently also suggested 2007 as the shipping year for Spore, instead of the earlier late 2006.

In another chat with Will Wright, AdvancedMN was able to find out that Spore is also coming to the PSP and Nintendo DS in 2007. No further details were given yet.

Thanks to SporeSite for some of the links above.

With the Game Developers Conference last week, some new information about Spore was revealed. Although not much - basically the confirmation about handheld and mobile versions was the biggest news - there are small details to be noted. For example, besides editors for creatures, vehicles and buildings, it also seems that there might be a flora editor, as suggested by IGN in their report. They also say that currently a creature takes op 10 Kilobytes of hard disk space, but Maxis will try to bring that down to 2-3 Kb per creature before shipping. The article from GameSpot is less informative when it comes to the gameplay, and talks solely about Wright's inspiration and research for the game. Gamasutra did pretty much the same in their article. GameSpy addresses another speech in their coverage, talking about how prototypes were used to present various elements of the gameplay in Spore. Another article, although not directly related to Spore or the GDC, but written by Will Wright, can be found in the online version of Wired magazine. The offline magazine recently published a different article, with four pictures which you can find below.

That's not all that's from the GDC though. Caryl Shaw and Eric Todd talked about involving the community and prototyping respectively, and their slides are available for download online. You'll need a Powerpoint viewer, with which you can view Caryl's presentation and Eric's presentation. Thanks to AnotherMike on the GamingSteve forums for finding them. A few pictures from these presentations, as well as a host of others from GameSpy, SnootySpore, Spore.es, kotaku, CNet and Wired can all be seen below. Just click the thumbnails to enlarge the screenshots, or go to our screenshots index. Finally, GamingSteve posted a 18 second clip of the creature editor on Google Video. You can watch the video straight from your browser.