Posted March 01, 2011
And he needs our help!
(in the form of money)
If you don't remember, "Creatures" was a series of artificial life programs(sold as games) made in the mid-90s. It was populated by the "Norns"(good guys you were supposed to raise), "Grendels"(nasty fellas you were supposed to dislike for some reason), and(later) Ettins(....they did stuff, probably).
The game was frustrating. The creatures were stupid. They killed themselves constantly. If you tried to spread them to areas outside the healthy starting one.....good luck. They beat each other. They treated each other badly. They found the distillery in the basement and that caused a whole slew of new problems. Things happened that made little sense. The interface was complicated and unintuitive. The end result was just a bunch of inbreeding, infighting, culture-free stupidity with absolutely no end goal, narrative, challenging gameplay, or any of the things that are used to judge a game as "good" whatsoever.
And it was amazing.
The game was designed entirely without mass-market appeal at the forefront of the mind. Its broken, uneven design was the result of a raw idea, exposed and thrust onto the world. If you could mess with it, make it work, play with the things that did work, you had something special on your hands. Something obnoxious, annoying, and wholly pointless....but special. It wasn't designed as a "game", but it also wasn't designed as something else that could be made without computer technology(like, say, a movie). The whole idea was to have a fully realized life form, with a real biology, living in your computer. A realistic, interactive simulation of an evolutionary line with genetic randomness, inherited traits, learned behavior, and real disease that has to be dealt with in a realistic way. It was unique.
Raw ideas don't always have the best polish. They also don't always qualify as "good". But they can make something really amazing. With today's technology, I'd like to see what this man can accomplish, especially now that he's already done this a few times already. I'd love to see a biologist's take on a video game. Basically, I really want to see this project get off the ground.
Are you looking forward to this? Do you remember the Creatures games? Would you give a new one a try? Would you even invest in one up-front?
(in the form of money)
If you don't remember, "Creatures" was a series of artificial life programs(sold as games) made in the mid-90s. It was populated by the "Norns"(good guys you were supposed to raise), "Grendels"(nasty fellas you were supposed to dislike for some reason), and(later) Ettins(....they did stuff, probably).
The game was frustrating. The creatures were stupid. They killed themselves constantly. If you tried to spread them to areas outside the healthy starting one.....good luck. They beat each other. They treated each other badly. They found the distillery in the basement and that caused a whole slew of new problems. Things happened that made little sense. The interface was complicated and unintuitive. The end result was just a bunch of inbreeding, infighting, culture-free stupidity with absolutely no end goal, narrative, challenging gameplay, or any of the things that are used to judge a game as "good" whatsoever.
And it was amazing.
The game was designed entirely without mass-market appeal at the forefront of the mind. Its broken, uneven design was the result of a raw idea, exposed and thrust onto the world. If you could mess with it, make it work, play with the things that did work, you had something special on your hands. Something obnoxious, annoying, and wholly pointless....but special. It wasn't designed as a "game", but it also wasn't designed as something else that could be made without computer technology(like, say, a movie). The whole idea was to have a fully realized life form, with a real biology, living in your computer. A realistic, interactive simulation of an evolutionary line with genetic randomness, inherited traits, learned behavior, and real disease that has to be dealt with in a realistic way. It was unique.
Raw ideas don't always have the best polish. They also don't always qualify as "good". But they can make something really amazing. With today's technology, I'd like to see what this man can accomplish, especially now that he's already done this a few times already. I'd love to see a biologist's take on a video game. Basically, I really want to see this project get off the ground.
Are you looking forward to this? Do you remember the Creatures games? Would you give a new one a try? Would you even invest in one up-front?
