Spore Galactic Edition Unboxing Porn

Posted by Gary Hodges at 3:25 AM Sep 08, 2008

Well it’s finally here after years of work (and nearly as many years of hype): Spore, Will Wright’s latest opus lets you guide a fully customized creature from microbe to intergalactic navigator every step of the way. Today I picked up the $80 “Galactic Edition”, which is a full $30 more than the normal edition – one of the bigger markups among the special editions I’ve stripped so far. It also hails from EA (insert grumbling here), so the package is starting out with strikes against it… but I changed my tune when I really saw what I got for the money.

Click through to ogle every inch!

For one, the actual physical packaging for this deluxe edition is probably more interesting and pleasant to look at than any other I’ve seen. Not just a shiny tin or oversized box, the sleeve for this set is thick white plastic decorated with a relief depicting hundreds of designs from the game. It’s intriguing to look at and compellingly tactile – you just can’t resist touching the weird surface of the thing - and a unique, sturdy and reasonably-sized enough package to make a nice visual addition to a movie or game rack.

The embossed sleeve contains three items, and as you’ll see below, the game’s logo is actually cut through the sleeve completely. Here’s what it looks like gutted:

Below are all the contents spread out; from left to right you’ve got the National Geographic infomercial/documentary “How to Build a Better Being”, the game case itself (which includes a few items), and then the hardcover “Art of Spore” book.

Starting with the National Geographic DVD: I was a little skeptical of the program when I first sat down to watch it, and some parts are a bit silly: seeing Wright go about his daily routine and have supposedly spontaneous conversations with people while pretending he isn’t being filmed never quite works, and the doc – like clockwork – regularly comes back to Spore, and How Fucking Amazing You Will Find It.

That being said, it’s never boring and actually spends a good deal of time talking about evolutionary principles in a satisfyingly not-to-complex-yet-not-to-shallow way, with enough content so you can actually learn something. Something other than How Spore Will Change My Life, I mean.

The game case actually has a few goodies in it, aside from, you know, the game. One is the expanded instruction manual, a 100-page deal with dense writing, color graphics and more information than you could possibly digest in a single sitting.

The next is a poster. Now generally I’m down on posters packaged like this with games, because having to fold them up like origami to fit into the package makes them too unsightly to actually hang up, and this is no exception. It’s a shame, because it’s a neat image. If you had a kid the right age, I bet he or she would go nuts over it.

Last in this part is a DVD, “The Making of Spore”, a short history of Spore's development. While it’s way too slick to really tell much in depth about the process or give any interesting glimpses of what Wright is actually like to work with, it is interesting to watch for the look at the freedom Wright is afforded by EA – something, I suspect, few others at the company enjoy. It appears Wright kicked around half-baked concepts for Spore for years without anything much to show for it or even a formal pitch to the suits upstairs, instead just plucking the best and brightest to experiment and design models for things that could be a game, someday, maybe.

The documentary also discusses a few problems they ran into during development that even to a layperson sound formidable, like how to make procedural animations work in a game where you have no idea what a player’s creature will look like, nor even how many limbs it will have.

Last part of the package is the Art of Spore hardcover, another piece that surprises. Not only is it thick, but it’s packed with visuals from every step of the way: pencil sketches to interface mockups to CG renders. A coffeetable-sized book with the same content - and the case's embossed cover - would be a real prize.

My feeling is if you’re going to kick in twenty or thirty extra bucks for a special edition, at bare minimum the materials should live up to the expense – that means a durable package you don't have to baby, color manuals, packaging that’s distinctly different from the standard edition and so on. After that, you want something added to the box that actually has some value (not just Tijuana trinkets and extras from the publisher’s table at E3), and a package that’s not only cool to look at, but practical to work into your entertainment center setup (for example, the GTA4 lockbox, while cool, is an item doomed for the closet).

The Spore Galactic Edition actually hits all those marks. Looking through the materials and watching the videos – hell, even holding the box in my hands – I couldn’t find a way to criticize it. And it’s from EA, so I really tried. Overwhelming or simply overhyped, there’s no doubt Spore is the product of some of the most talented people in the industry working very hard for many years – and the Galactic Edition shows it.

Simply put: the best special edition I’ve seen for a game since the Working Designs days. Pricey, yes, but not overpriced.

P.S.

Did you know Will Wright once leered at me through an entire talk he gave? I nearly had to call security. Read all about it and view the incriminating pics HERE.