Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content) Remastered
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it for Wright's ideas on procedural design and as the source of the huge expectations around Spore.
What it is
A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content. He covers procedurally generated content and the ambitions of the game, with gameplay demo starting around 12:30.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ziggy_star · 2024-06 · on “Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine”
He then went on to do Spore. Here is a pre-release talk from 2005: [this video] The final game got nerfed by EA but this talk is great fun and a continuation of sorts.
Cites ChoGGi · 2023-06 · on “5.5M Spore users have uploaded some 191M creations and counting”
> as you may inadvertently set expectations higher than you can possibly achieve The expectations were mostly from the GDC video, I believe? Gameplay starts around 12:30: [this video]
Cites DonHopkins · 2023-07 · on “Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands”
Will Wright Discusses the Demoscene: [LINK] >You can take any piece of content in the game, and imagine an algorithmic solution to it. Or also, you know, a way that the player could customize that object of thing. >There's this group in Europe called the Demoscene that make these very elaborate demos for a computer that fit into very tiny little memory blocks, you know like 64K of memory, and you run the thing, and in fact it algorithmically generates about 100 megabytes worth of data, you know these rich 3D environment, generated music, generated wave files, generated animation. >And they're developing techniques to generate, you know, huge amounts of interesting data, with very very simple
Cites hajhatten · 2024-06 · on “Quake in 13kb (2021)”
The Farbrausch demo and a talk by Will Wright on the (originally planned) procedurally generated design of Spore lives rent free in my brain every time I see the list of 100's of gigabytes of queued game updates in Steam nowadays. [this video]
Cites DonHopkins · 2026-08 · on “Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development”
>"I definitely have mixed feelings about this," he wrote about his retirement. "I mean, there are three games in particular I’d still like to make. One is very big, one is very small, and one I don’t know how to make, which scares me." -Warren Spector I hope he figures out how to make it once it finally becomes possible, and comes back! Will Wright said this at the closing his 2005 Spore GDC talk: >A lot of the games I've worked on, I've always had obstacles -- usually trying to convince other people it's a good idea, or it'd be sellable, or whatever. When I look back on this idea, the biggest obstacle I truly had was making myself believe that we could build the game. My own imagination was