Coming in along with the news of Spore’s September release is a two part interview Newsweek had with Will Wright. The interview is so massive it had to be cut into two parts (part 1 of the interview, part 2 of the interview).

It’s impossible to tell you about all the exciting news that’s in there, so go out there and read it! A few highlights will follow below though. EA Executives are often critisised by the gaming community for “pushing out games that are not ready”. According to Will the opposite is true for Spore:

on this project probably more than any other, the executive management at EA has always been on the side of “Get it right.” Whenever we were basically saying, “Okay, we’re not going to ship it this Christmas the way we thought,” it was always, “Okay, but just get right. Get it right.”

Another new piece of information is that it will be possible to jump into all levels of the game right from the start where first we thought one had to “unlock” the higher levels:

Originally we were going to force the players to start at Cell and play their way up through every level, but we decided that we wanted to make it feel more like a toy box of the universe. So we let players drop into any level they want to, right off the bat. We have an entry path for every level, straight off the bat, where you grab somebody else’s pollinated content as your starting point if you didn’t play Creature for instance. We found the players enjoyed browsing the levels lightly at the beginning, and trying a little bit at each level, then they would generally go back, start a full game from the Cell level, and play the whole thing straight through.

We can tell you to get ready to share your creature’s lives, as:

you can capture game footage at any time, photos and stuff

A note on the music for the game which was created by Brian Eno:

about half of our music is now procedurally generated within the game based upon things you make

It will be very interesting to see and hear what kind of effect that has on the overall game experience.
Finally a slip of the tongue, or maybe something the interviewer misheard over the phone (the interview was not done face to face). It’s not on Spore, but worth sharing anyway:

A lot of what the Sims 1 became, was based on what people were doing with the Sims City

In addition to the interview with Will Wright, Newsweek also spoke to Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer for Spore. She explains some of the challenges encountered getting the game playable not only on PC, but also on Mac, DS, and mobile phones.