Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, who penned Disney's upcoming "The Princess and the Frog" and Ben Stiller pic "The Return of King Doug" at Paramount, will write the script for the "Spore" movie. It will be produced as a CG-animated toon by EA and Blue Sky Studios, which is behind the studio's "Ice Age" pics, "Robots" and its next effort, "Rio."

In the game, which was released in September 2008, players create their own creatures and the worlds they live in and share them with other gamers to create an overall universe.

"I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation," Wedge said. "From every perspective -- visually, thematically and comedically -- the world of 'Spore' provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen."

As we walked into Maxis' offices in Emeryville, there were giant posters up all over the walls that iterated the designers' mission statement. They might have been placed there for the benefit of visiting journalists, but I got the feeling they were a semi-permanent installation, meant to remind team members every time they walked by that they want players to be able to get all the way to the "space" portion of the game without feeling frustrated.

This was reflected in other design choices. Rather than force the player to start at the "cell" level, you can instead select between any of the five different parts of the game right from the start. While this is certainly sure to be a controversial decision -- it takes a lot away from the sense of growth and expansion that I believed the game would have if it forced you to start from the beginning -- it'll let anybody jump in wherever they feel most comfortable.

As we walked into Maxis' offices in Emeryville, there were giant posters up all over the walls that iterated the designers' mission statement. They might have been placed there for the benefit of visiting journalists, but I got the feeling they were a semi-permanent installation, meant to remind team members every time they walked by that they want players to be able to get all the way to the "space" portion of the game without feeling frustrated.

This was reflected in other design choices. Rather than force the player to start at the "cell" level, you can instead select between any of the five different parts of the game right from the start. While this is certainly sure to be a controversial decision -- it takes a lot away from the sense of growth and expansion that I believed the game would have if it forced you to start from the beginning -- it'll let anybody jump in wherever they feel most comfortable.

His new game "Spore," still under development at Electronic Arts, is built wholly around this phenomenon. Players will control a species at it evolves from single-cell organism all the way to interstellar space-traveling "Galactic God," creating the look and personality of the species and, later on, the tools, cities, and even planets they used and inhabited.

The game is created so that simple choices on the part of the consumer--mouth shape, leg placement and so on--will be amplified by the computer's physics and behavior models to create creatures worthy of a Pixar movie, he said.

But the real secret weapon for the game is that each player's creations will be uploaded to the company and then downloaded to other player's computers. Once a species reaches space, for example, it will visit other worlds inhabited entirely by cities full of beings created inside another player's game.

"Instead of putting players in the role of Luke Skywalker, or Frodo Baggins, I'd rather put them in the role of George Lucas," Wright said.