Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online game published by Electronic Arts, which allows a player to evolve their life form through 5 game phases – cell, creature, tribal, civilisation, and space. The decisions players make in each stage have an impact on the gameplay in future stages.
The aim of the website was primarily to promote game sales, but was also intended to be a crucial part of the Spore experience. User-created content is central to the game, and the brief specified that this content should be available to view, download, and interact with in various ways across the site. These ‘Community’ aspects were intended to maintain the site’s popularity long after the game’s initial launch. The site also needed to be available in multiple languages.
To meet these objectives, Lightmaker created a site powered by EA’s Phosworks CMS, which allows territories to update content such as their homepage, graphics, news, screenshots and movies, as well as being able to extend the site with additional dynamic pages. A free download of the Creature Creator is available, giving users a small taste of the Spore experience, and allowing them to experience the interactive areas of the website. These interactive areas pull data from the Spore game servers, allowing website users to browse the ‘Sporepedia’, keep track of ‘My Spore’, and interact with other users through comments, ratings, buddies, and more. Further areas including ‘Sporecasts’ and ‘Achievements’ are due for launch soon. In addition, the site is fully tagged using Omniture tracking technology, providing EA with detailed information on site visits.
To date, over 27,265,000 creations are available on the website – all are available to download, load into the user’s game, and modify. The site was also featured as a “hottest Google search” in September. Spore has currently sold over one million copies worldwide since 7th September