Spore

Spore is a god game by Maxis and designed by Will Wright that allows the player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a multicellular organism, through development as a sapient and social land-walking creature, to levels of interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. The game has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

Spore was released on September 4, 2008 in Australia, September 5 in Europe, and September 7 in North America. To promote the game, the Creature Creator portion was released separately as Spore Creature Creator. Two spin-offs were released around the same time as the main game: Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS, and Spore Origins for the iPod, iPhone, and mobile phones. An unnamed Wii spin-off is planned, but no details or release date have been announced.

Procedural generation
Spore extensively uses procedural generation, rather than individual objects. Wright mentioned in an interview given at E3 2006 that the information necessary to generate an entire creature would be only a couple of kilobytes, according to Wright, who presented the following analogy: "think of it as sharing the DNA template of a creature while the game, like a womb, builds the 'phenotypes' of the animal, which represent a few megabytes of texturing, animation, etc."