If Steve Jobs wants to turn the iPhone into an industry, what better way than with Will Wright's already legendary Spore? I say "already" because the hype around Spore feels a little like the hype surrounding George Lucas's Star Wars prequels years before they came out. The difference, of course, is that unlike Lucas, Wright has a reputation for delivering.
Spore on the iPhone -- It'll ship around the same time the full game does for PC and Mac this September.
Spore, if you hadn't heard, is Will Wright's ostensible magnum opus, a multi-platform "god" game that's been in development forever, and which claims to marry open-ended gameplay with cutting edge "procedural generation," i.e. content created on the fly (as opposed to pre-made).
You can start as a multicellular organism and evolve all the way up to an interstellar spacefaring culture. Wright calls it a "massively single-player online game, with fingers into pretty much every aspect of entertainment media. The iPhone version, like the Nintendo DS, reportedly focuses on just one phase of gameplay: the tide pool phase, where gamers can sort of float around as protean microbes ala flOw devouring cells until they form an egg. Will you be able to transfer your egg from the iPhone to your PC or Mac running the full version? Who knows, but I'm guessing it's at least a maybe.
When it hits in September this year, Spore will be the very first third-party game on the iPhone. It'll apparently take advantage of the iPhone's touchscreen (well duh!) as well as the phone's tilt sensitivity (okay, that actually sounds cool).
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