Spore (2008)

For those who don't know, Spore is a game that was released in 2008. In it, you create a species that you control from a cell to a space-faring civilization. I used to play Spore a lot when I was a kid. I haven't in a while (at the time of writing), mainly because I haven't had a computer with it installed or anywhere to install it from. I liked the game, but I would rarely get past the Creature Stage. The primary reason being that I'm not that big on strategy games (which is what it becomes in the Tribal and Civilization stages).

While I was just a kid and just playing the game to have fun, I think I did think about it too much. What I mean by that is playing the game would always give me a weird feeling that I couldn't explain. Now I'm pretty sure I recognize that feeling as a mild existential dread. I've been having thoughts about the nature of existence and experiencing existential dread from a young age, and Spore (2008) definitely had some part in that. There was this timeline thing you could look at to see how your species had evolved over time, and something about seeing how long the canonical(?) amounts of time between evolutions was made me feel something. I would sometimes just run around during the creature stage and feel something. Having an idea of the scale of the world, and how long time is, and how nothing lasts forever made me feel something. I've never been good and explaining what my feelings are, and this may be more difficult, seeing as it has been years.

Another thing about Spore (2008) is that it was a rather broken game. This is to be expected, considering that not only is it a decently big game from the late 2000's, but also it was made by EA. There's one glitch that scared me when I was a kid, and still scares me now. It's to the point where I can't even watch a video of it without experiencing dread. It happens in the beginning of the Creature Stage. What it is, is that your nest spawns in the ocean instead of on land. It may not sound all that scary, and it isn't, but video game oceans fill me with an unnamed dread. Perhaps that, combined with the general aura of existential dread that this game has for me, and how young I was when I first played it, is why I'm so weird about this one glitch from a game that's just a few years younger than me.




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