The Sunday Times had a teleconference interview with Lizbar the Horrible:

Now attending . . .” says the bland, female computer voice welcoming me to my San Francisco conference call. “. . . Lizbar the Horrible,” groans what sounds like a drooling space monster, probably with a horned helmet and a quantum destructo-gun.

It turns out Lizbar the Horrible is actually Will Wright, who admits he currently spends “several hours a day” playing Spore. Bryan Appleyard, the Sunday Times journalist who interviewed him was lucky enough to be given the possibility to play the game at EA’s UK headquarters in Chertsey. Mr. Appleyard starts out with a short overview of Wright’s life and work on The Sims. He makes a sharp analysis of its appeal:

As with hundreds of soaps, the primary setting of The Sims is American suburbia. This made it, perversely, universal, in that everybody knew what it looked like from television shows.

Wright says they learned a lot of the way people interacted with The Sims, and how they let their Sims interact over the internet. All those lessons went into Spore. A new tid-bit on the start of a new Spore game:

Spore begins with a comet impact on earth. It thus borrows the theory of pan-spermia – the idea that life on earth was seeded from outer space.

It looks like the journalist had fun trying the game out:

It is, to say the least, engrossing.

I created my own animal, a vaguely dinosaurish beast called Bryan, with a rather pathetic squeak and an extra pair of eyes on its haunches to look out for predators, or, indeed, editors.

Sadly the interview does not come with pictures, but it’s a good summary of the ideas of Will Wright behind the structure of Spore.