How fitting to consider the next possible evolutionary event in gaming than a computer game that's about evolution?

Spore is a PC/Mac game in which players progress a character of their own design from a lowly single-cell organism to a space-faring colonist.

It's massive.

It's epic.

It's addictive.

And it might just mark a milestone, said Andy Reiner, an editor with Game Informer magazine.

'It's up there,' Reiner said. 'Spore is one of the top games everyone's been looking forward to. For the average consumer, it might go over their head, but I hope word of mouth from hard core to casual gamer will make it a big deal.

'It's going to be a monster ... it [just] might take a little word of mouth from gamers.'

Already a month in release, Spore has sold one million copies.

Is the game perfect? No.

Metacritic.com awards Spore an overall rating of 85 out of 100, based on 46 reviews, with the yea-ers praising the game's scope, the nay-ers criticizing the game's familiar stages.

Still, nearly all critics laud the sum of Spore's parts as a remarkable achievement in gaming.

But to truly appreciate what Spore is, you have to look back at what it was and how it got here.

And for that, a brief history lesson on video games is necessary.

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A square bouncing between two small rectangles.

Decades after Pong bounced into arcades and homes, it seems so ... rudimentary.

And it was.

It was also fun, novel, and revolutionary the kind of cultural event that happens once a generation.

Certainly Nolan Bushnell thought highly of the simplistic TV tennis game in 1972 when he saw a demonstration of a home video game by Magnavox called Ping Pong.

Bushnell charged his first employee at his fledging start-up, Atari, to come up with the company's competing version of the game for arcades.

The game, of course, was Pong a shortened version of the name Ping Pong to help avoid messy lawsuits and in an instant video games had a great-great-great grandfather.

The story goes that Bushnell decided to field test the first two Pongs in California bars. After a few days he received a call that one of the machines wasn't working.

When Bushnell's employee went to repair the machine, it was discovered that the only problem with Pong was it was choking on quarters overflowing from a milk carton inside the game.

Pong was not the first video game. Not even close. Those roots can be traced

into the 1950s, perhaps even '40s, when scientists in research labs first toyed with the idea of creating technology that was somehow 'playable.'

But Pong was the first video game that mattered.

It's credited with birthing a worldwide industry that, in three decades, now grosses annually more than music and movies combined.

In the 1970s and '80s crowds would line up to see the latest blockbuster film or perhaps to buy a much-anticipated album. Not anymore.

If you want to see lines, try being the first to buy a next-gen console the day of its release, or attending a midnight sale of an anticipated game such as

Madden NFL '09 or Grand Theft Auto IV.

Video games matter.

And like any cultural phenomenon, there's a natural progression. Just as films had the silent era, followed by talkies, color, and now digital cinema, there's an evolution at work in video games.

What began as a simplistic variation on tennis morphed into columns of insidious space aliens relentlessly descending to Earth with mankind's only hope being a lone base station armed with single-fire missiles. The frenzy over Space Invaders in 1978 reportedly caused a quarter shortage in Japan, while a determined group of Mesquite, Texas, residents tried unsuccessfully to ban minors from playing the game to prevent truancy the case even reached the Supreme Court.

After Space Invaders came Asteroids, followed by Defender, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, and Dragon's Lair, video games that drew crowds of adolescents armed with quarters, and pushed the burgeoning business with graphics and game play.

Since the heyday of the early '80s, though, video games have followed a fairly straight evolutionary line, with the occasional 'fish with legs' to leapfrog the industry to a new breed of entertainment.

Perhaps the industry's slow growth is due to lack of imagination, or a conservative corporate mentality that values return over risk.

Whatever the reason, for a few years at least, it seems most of the advances have been on the system side of things, with bigger and badder graphics (Xbox 360, PS3) or revolutionary controllers (Wii). Meanwhile, software makers have been fairly content to harness the power of these consoles, but offering nothing ground-breaking in the process. Sure, Grand Theft Auto IV is an incredibly immersive experience, but it is still the fourth title in a series.

And last year's critical and consumer hit Bioshock may bend the rules of the first-person shooter, but it's still, at heart, a first-person shooter.

Just when you think there really is nowhere else for software makers to evolve, that between first-person shooters, role-playing games, simulations, and platformers there's nothing new or interesting in gaming, along comes a title so different, so intriguing, so ... addictive, you have to call it revolutionary. You have to think that it may mark the next big advance in gaming, where a decade from now gamers will discuss it in the same reverential tone afforded Pong, Pac-Man, Ultima, Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and The Sims.

That game is Spore.

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Spore is a single-player game in which players share online creations, but really Spore is a part simulation, part user-created experience with play divided into five evolutionary stages: cell, creature, tribe, civilization, and space.

In cell, your existence begins as a single-cell organism, with the choice of being a carnivore or herbivore. Your goal is simply to eat, reproduce, survive, and evolve to the creature stage, where you have similar goals. At both stages, completing enough tasks consuming enough material, or wiping out a competing species rewards you with the ability to evolve your character, determining its appearance and its general behavior.

By stage three you're onto the tribal stage, where your now-sentient creature begins to create a community and makes peace or conquers other surrounding communities. The civilization stage is similar, only you have considerably more massive weapons at your disposal, having traded in spears for nuclear missiles.

Once you can lay claim to conquering your planet, you're ready to leave your world and visit others in the space stage as colonizer, conqueror, or peace maker.

Complete enough tasks and your species evolves into higher intellects, eventually

reaching god-level status.

Spore is as grand and epic as any title, past or present. It's also more than just a game.

By giving us options in our creature's character development, Spore offers an existential self-analysis: am I an aggressive person, or would I rather make friends? Is it better to wage war, or to seek peace?

No, Spore is not the first game to make players think inwardly: Ultima IV did that more than two decades ago by sending a crusader on the path of enlightenment and challenging him to be of noble mind and character. In other words, don't gleefully wipe out a small town just because you can.

Other games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Fable have

followed with similar themes of in-game choices plotting character destiny. And in simulation games such as The Sims and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) like World of Warcraft, a player's choice of how to interact with those around him is probably a window into the soul, whether he wants to admit it or not.

But none of those option-A-leads-to-consequence-C game psychologies compares to the man-in-the-mirror-honesty that Spore provides, where your every choice what you eat, how you behave, what you wear, how you interact with artificially controlled inhabitants as well as those controlled by living people determines who and what you are.

If you are what you eat, then you are what you Spore.

Of course, none of this dime-store analysis of the game would matter if Spore wasn't so much fun to play.

Be warned that Spore is as close to a chocolate-covered crack bar as video games will ever get; be prepared to fall into the game for hours, perhaps days, at a time, and never think twice about missing out on things in the real world.

Significant other? Children? Work? Chores? All will fade into the background as you dedicate your life to advancing your creature creation past blob status and into a productive citizen of whatever system of the Spore universe you inhabit.

The game also allows you to be Picasso, and design, color, and even dress your character, as well as the places it lives and the vehicles it drives, in what seems like endless possibilities.

It's your world; do with it as you will.

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None of this fun would be possible without Will Wright, the gaming giant who has made a career of designing open-ended games where players act as lower-case gods over sprawling metropolises (1989's SimCity) or simulated humans (2000's The Sims the best-selling computer game of all time).

In 1990 Wright even made an attempt at a game about evolution called SimEarth, in which players develop and evolve a planet and its species through billions of years until the planet dies.

The game wasn't a big seller and its game play was severely limited to the technology of the day; nevertheless, SimEarth clearly stuck with Wright, who conceived of Spore in 2002.

But the video game designer knew what he wanted to create wasn't going to be easy, so he assembled a small team of five to 10 people to develop prototypes of the game technologies that Spore requires. Nearly three years ago, the process was fast-tracked, and the development team expanded to eight times its size.

'There were many new obstacles that we overcame trying to integrate new technology and on making the game accessible to new players, introducing them to many different game concepts that they may not be familiar with,' said Thomas Vu, a game producer at Maxis, which developed Spore.

Among the challenges was developing multiple design tools to give players a wide range of artistic freedom

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These masterworks are also shared online with other players via the Sporepedia.

'The ability to pollinate creatures created by other players is a new concept that will likely see more developers use,' Mr. Vu said.

The developers knew they were onto something special when Spore was

introduced in summer 2005 at E3, the video games industry's biggest event where new software and hardware are debuted for the press and public.

Spore took Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, and Best Simulation Game. A year later, it repeated as E3's Best PC Game, Best Original Game, and Best Simulation.

The buzz was building.

Nearly two years later, just a week before its Sept. 7 release, Stephen Lim, development director with Maxis, wondered if the game could live up to the hyped-up expectations of gamers.

'It's hard for any project to fully realize the breadth of expectations that build up while the game is being hyped,' Lim said.

In a recent interview with Game Informer magazine, even Wright wondered if the pre-release chatter about Spore overshadowed his creation.

'I think it's too much hype. About a year ago, we were realizing how much hype we were getting and we decided we should start to say that it's going to suck just to de-hype it,' he said. 'That is a certain amount of pressure. ... We've gotten to that point any additional hype isn't serving us well. It's a concern.'

Perhaps.

But usually, when there's this much talk, it's for a good reason.

And much of the talk about Spore concerned the uniqueness of the game.

There's never been anything like it certainly not to the level of character control and destiny.

With The Sims, Wright gave players the ability to control the day-to-day lives of computer people.

In Spore, Wright gives players the building blocks of life, and worlds in which to play.

It's like playing god on a PC. And just like that Far Side cartoon with God sitting at a computer, his finger hovering just above the 'smite' key, Spore gives you a geeky sense of power.

In the creature stage, for instance, decisions affect what creatures evolve with you.

Do you make peace with neighboring creatures by singing or playing music to them, and developing friendships and even allies? Or, do you hunt them for food, or battle them to extinction?

Spore is overtly Darwinian in its 'only the strong survive' theme.

If this sounds a bit heady for a video game, that's the point.

Games up to this point generally rewarded players for aggressive tactics. It was always kill or be killed.

Spore introduces the moral conundrum.

By having big-picture consequences to simple survival tactics you often can't help but wonder if you made the correct decisions. Perhaps I would have been better served to make friends with a six-legged, three-horned species of blue-skinned herbivores rather than eliminating them from contention in the computer cosmos.

And just wait until you nuke a rival city to advance your continental empire to global power. Spore is proof positive most of us are not fit to be president.

It's also proof of just how far video games have come in a relatively short span.

Only 36 years ago, players were happy to bounce a square back and forth for hours.

Now players are gods of a galaxy, much of it their own making.

Spore isn't just a game; it's evolution at work.

Now, if you'll excuse me, evolution is calling me to play.

Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.

First Published September 27, 2008, 7:58 p.m.