A friendly chap named Matt P. led a packed main hall through pieces of Maxis’ vast, highly anticipated PC title SPORE. And before you ask: Yes, there were allusions to Sporn, and no, the peer pressure did not force Matt to crumble and create a mobile penis on the wall-sized demo monitors for us.

Despite that minor, minor disappointment, the demo made me realize how much pure, unadulterated fun you can have with this game. As Matt pointed out in awe, over 3 million creatures have been made with the SPORE creature creation trial already. Just imagine what content will be unleashed with the vehicle and building editors on top of everything else.

Matt showed us the cell stage to begin with, and explained how your dietary decisions would set the stage for your later evolutionary development. He also showed us the menu screen that allows you to track your course between carnivore, herbivore, or scavenger, which was a nicely designed graphical display that will undoubtedly take the guesswork out of directing your biological destiny. The cell phase was brief, and Matt explained that it was designed for an hour or so of play, as Maxis wanted to get the player through the ‘mini-game’-like phase and right into the thick of things as quickly as possible.

Food levels are important in the creature phase, and more biological modifications (aesthetic or advantageous) are gained each time you mate and reproduce.

As you progress through the game, you choose your creature’s evolutionary path through taking aggressive or social paths, such as choosing to destroy a village, laying poisoned food traps for rival tribes, or attempting to negotiate. (True to form, the PAX crowd was bloodthirsty and steered a cheerfully compliant Matt through the most destructive courses.) Although we didn’t get to see it, Matt mentioned that in the tribe phase one can domesticate animals and use them to produce eggs - simple agriculture.

The structural support this game offers the player’s imagination is immense. It appears to have the versatility of an entirely random, open-ended development should the player wish to be surprised, but it also offers players with a specific goal in mind the input they’ll need to steer their DNA and their civilization in that direction. The way that one’s decisions in each phase impacts the next is fairly simple and intuitive, yet still seems to leave enough room for exploration. (I’m curious to see, for example, if a bloodthirsty and carnivorous creature race can become a force of benevolent religion in the civilization phase. Just how pathway-locking are these player decisions, on the whole?)

Having been an avid lover of the Creatures games by Millennium Interactive, and of course all the Sim-games produced by Maxis, I was excited for SPORE long before sitting down to the demo. The demonstration merely scratched the surface of what is a deep, deep pool, but boy, the water is warm.

SPORE arrives in North America on September 7th.