After years of silence, the legendary life sim Spore has crawled back to life like a 3-eyed amphibian emerging from a primordial alien sea
Spore was a pretty big deal back in the day, a life-sim RTS from famed Sims studio Maxis that gave players the opportunity to guide the evolution of a species from primordial soup to interstellar exploration. It was huge, ambitious, and unique, and alas, it was not great: The ideas behind it were bold, but the actual gameplay was pretty flat. We said in a 2018 retrospective that "in many ways, Spore was No Man’s Sky before No Man’s Sky"—minus the redemption arc.
All these years later, could that redemption arc still happen? Extremely unlikely, yes, but not entirely impossible, because Spore is back, baby. The first update posted on the Spore website in more than five years says the game has a new team within EA and an official Discord server "where you can keep up with the latest news from the development team, participate in contests, and get to know other players of Spore."
To be clear, this does not mean big new things are happening. A "setting expectations" message on the new Spore Discord says there are currently no plans for major updates to the game or a sequel.
"Our primary focus is on community engagement and being a central hub for all of the various communities out there to share a common space, and for us to be able to communicate efficiently to all," the message states.
Be that as it may, there's some real excitement for Spore's comeback in whatever form it takes. Confusion too, to be sure, because there hasn't exactly been a widespread demand for a follow-up, but there's hope for everything from proper online support on Steam (online features apparently still work, but account registration is broken) to—despite the warnings—new features and content.
You can't blame people for dreaming, I suppose, but at this point the new team is still just getting the lights switched back on: RogueLyeshal said there are currently only two people moderating the new Discord "and this blew up way faster than we anticipated."
That might give hope to Spore die-hards hoping EA will decide to jump back into it with both feet. The current ambitions are modest, but some fans are crossing their fingers that a sufficient expression of interest will lead to at least the consideration of more wholehearted support in the future. Less likely things have happened under the EA umbrella: We're getting a new Skate game next year, after all.
For now, though, the team is focused on far more basic things, like getting account creation working again and, according to an unofficial FAQ on the Spore subreddit, gaining control of the Spore account on X, which hasn't posted since December 15, 2010. Yeah, it really has been a while.