Spore has been gestating for several years, Will Wright the creator first talked publicly about at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. You can watch a 35min video of his talk on YouTube, below.

So what does all of this have to do with e-learning? Well nothing directly, but it was announced while I was working on Ecolibrium with Futurelab. Ecolibrium was always designed first and foremost as a tool to learn about evolution, the dynamics of predator–prey populations and systems thinking. When I first heard about Spore I thought that it would be great to leverage it’s undoubted popularity by making Ecolibrium a place where Spore creatures could be left to run wild.