It lives!
A friend of mine and I were joking about Will Wright's upcoming game Spore as being "SimEverything". In a sense, that's accurate, since the game supposedly goes from a single-cellular lifeform to an animal one to tribal and ultimately to the city and civilization level. That many levels in a game is about as ambitious as trying to compress the entirety of history into a game, but as the link there shows, that sort of thing can work.

When I saw the following on Evil Avatar, however, I immediately became curious. I haven't read Gamespy's article yet, but I certainly intend to.

Now, suddenly, his creature could walk. And he did so -- he walked right out of the sea and onto the land. This incredible moment in the history of evolution was made even more remarkable by the technology behind it: the game had figured out, procedurally, how a creature would walk if it had three legs (it was a kind of lopsided gait, if you're curious, with three steps: left, right, then middle.) No 3D modeler created the creature, and no 3D animator was required to make it move around -- it was all created out of a gamer's whim and a computer program smart enough to make it work.

It's exciting that there are games coming out that are just too awesome to ignore, and the knowledge that I may have to leave Azeroth for a while makes me a sad panda.

Update: Oh. My. God. No, scratch that. Holy shit. I said the Sim Everything remark up there was a joke. I now must say, having read the Gamespy article, it is anything but. This game really takes you from the single-cell level, out to INTERSTELLAR COLONIZATION. All of it done using player-made and procedural technology. Seriously, if you have any love of any game in which you control, make or otherwise have influence on something, go read the article. I am now fully stoked for Spore, and it will not come quickly enough. World of Warcraft can be booted aside with ease if need be, as Donald Trump punts aside an aging tropy wife for a new one.  ¶ 7:36 p.m.