The Escapist : News : The Man Who Made Spore Suckier
Nutshell version: "Spore" was originally a true evolution simulator, where decisions made early on in the unicellular stage had dramatic effects downstream when you walked on land for the first time or formed a culture. One douchebag at EA thought that was "too science-y" and turned it instead into a dull intelligent design game with no real choices or consequences involved.
An article from scientific magazine Seed dissecting the intelligent-design aspects of Spore highlighted Hecker's early concerns in development over the realism of Wright's vision.
"Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world," states Seed. "'I was the founding member of the 'cute' team," he says with pride. 'Ocean [Quigley, Spore's art director] and Will were really the founding members of the 'science' team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, 'That's the greatest thing I've ever seen!' and some of us were thinking, 'I'm not sure about that.'"
Hecker's camp began messing with the science team's concepts. "Quigley's microscopically accurate concept drawings were vandalized with stuck-on googly eyes; there were suggestions that it might be cool if the creatures wore sneakers," revealed Seed.
Quigley understood both sides, explaining that a true evolutionary project "is so absurdly vast, so radically outside of any scale that people can really empathize with, we knew we had to turn it into a toy."