Shack: In the early conceptual phase, was the content creation aspect as central to the game as it is now?

Morgan Roarty: That was always part of the plan. My opinion is, I think we didn't realize the value of that. The moment when you're going through Creature game and you run into a species that you created is very cool. The moment you're out in Space and you run into a Space species that you created, or a friend of yours created--I don't think I understood the impact of that in the beginning. People mention that all the time. It's just a simple thing. To run into your own content is a very cool concept for our game.

Shack: Was the "massively single-player" cross-pollination of creatures always a part of the game, or was that added sometime later in development?

Morgan Roarty: Pollination was always part of the idea, the idea of sharing content. I think the thing that got added mid-cycle was the Sporepedia. That was something that wasn't in the original plan. But just the idea of a place where you can go and browse content, assign buddies, do Sporecasts, that was something we added. And we're really proud of the Sporepedia, it's a very cool feature.

I was on it today. Some people had made this species of creatures, and he invited people to make other variations of it. And there was just this really cool moment where about eight or nine people started pitching in making the Peekweek citizens, the Peekweek military guy, the Peekweek court jester. It was this really cool community moment where everybody was helping make a species, and if you select that Sporecast and go in the game, all those planets and all those worlds are going to be populated with those species. It's kind of a first for gaming.

Shack: How moddable is Spore, in the traditional sense?

Morgan Roarty: We definitely have people that took things in the Creature creator--there was a set of creatures done where somebody took off the skin of the creatures, and we're still trying to figure out how that was done.

Shack: Yeah, I saw that.

Morgan Roarty: Yeah, there's a whole bunch of these really cool skeleton guys. I never got all the details on it, but it looked like a mod. So there's a lot of possibilities there. Not something--there's no open tools that we're supplying yet, but there's definitely a possibility for people to start messing with stuff. We're hoping we built a really cool tool-set so that people don't have to immediately go there like they have with other products. But there are some possibilities there in the future for some more expanded tools.

Shack: Were the phases pretty solid all the way through development, or were there any that were axed or added late into the game?

Morgan Roarty: Uhh.. [Nervous glance toward EA representative.] Yeah, I mean, there was a city game at one point. You know, there's Cell, Creature, Tribe--there was a city design at one point, that sort of bridged Tribe and Civilization. That might be new information, but yeah. A game this big, the scope's so large, we had to start cutting and figuring out what we could get done.

Shack: Is there a chance we might see some of those ideas show up in future expansion content?

Morgan Roarty: Possibly. I think the exciting thing about Spore from a production standpoint are just the possibilities for the fiction. All the different areas we can go--more editors, more content, more worlds--just more fiction we can layer on the game. Even more parts for the editors. You've seen all the crazy stuff people have done just with those 218 parts. Adding more into that mix--

Shack: It'll be exponential.

Morgan Roarty: Yeah, it's really going to help the high-end creators. And I think it also helps--I was thinking about this today--I think it also helps those medium level creators. Just gives them more parts to play with, more things to kind of enrich their imagination.

Shack: There's been a lot of talk about how Spore is a platform that will be built upon.

Morgan Roarty: I mean, it was developed with that intent, to really add to it. You take The Sims' example, which a lot of people worked on that work on this game--yeah, there's a possibility there, and you might hear something upcoming about that.