EA has announced recently that the Creature Creator will be released 17 June, over 2 months before Spore itself is released. The creator will have all features of the full game, and creatures created with it can be used in the full game as well. There will be two versions. A free version, available as download or with the SimCity box that will soon be released, contains about 25% of the content. The other $10 version, available through various retailers, has all creature content that will ship with the full game. SpaceOddity also mentions a French announcement that buying the full creature creator means you can get a discount for the full game. Whether such offers are available everywhere remains unconfirmed now, though some retailers in any part of the world may offer such a discount.

Earlier this month The Spore Zone was invited to come over to the EA UK headquarters in Chertsey to take a look at Spore. We spent some time playing the PC game as well as the DS and Mobile versions of Spore, all of which are expected to be released 7 September of this year. Our sneak peak of the game is now ready for your consumption. Spread across 2 pages, here is our exclusive Spore preview.

Read the exclusive preview now!

EA has finally announced what will be the date when Spore will be released: 7 September 2008. It'll be out worldwide that weekend. Some countries may already receive the game in the days before the seventh. First and foremost there is a PC and Mac version, which are both equal. Besides that EA is also working on a version of Spore for the DS, and another for Mobile phones, both of which will probably be very different from the PC/Mac game. Other versions have not yet been announced, though GameSpot reported in October last year that at least a Wii version is also in the making.

We have also confirmed that this date, 7 September, will not change unless there are drastic reasons to do so. A release date announcement trailer has been posted at the official site. An American and Australian newsletter (both with the same text, different layout) has also been sent out, showing the new logo of the game and a message from Will Wright.

Over the past couple of days The Spore Zone has experienced some downtime. The site is now back and should remain online properly from now on again. The server this site runs on has been hacked due to a security hole in PHP 4. We have now switched to using the newer PHP 5. If you notice anything odd on the site, especially if you notice that something is broken, please do not hesitate to contact us and inform us about the problem. We expect everything will run just fine though. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by the downtime, and hope you'll continue to enjoy The Spore Zone as you always did.

It's been a long time since we've updated, but we're starting up again as Spore gets more attention as well. In a recent conference call about EA's quarterly fiscal results, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that Spore will be out before the holiday season this year . That means a summer release is not out of the question, but it might also happen just a bit later in the year. This news came after an earlier press release, stating that Spore will be out on Mac at the same time as the PC. EA will use TransGaming's Cider Portability Engine for the Mac game, which also means they will publish the Mac game themselves rather than through a third party. Both Will Wright and Lucy Bradshaw (executive producer) have stated to be very excited about the simultaneous Mac release, hoping the extra players will fill up the universe with their unique creations.

As some of you might have noticed the past two days, there has been some downtime of this website. That's because the site has been transferred to a new, more powerful server in Germany. The occasional database errors on the old server should now also be of the past. Meanwhile we are still having a few small technical issues with the new setup, which means the site might experience a little downtime. We're trying to keep this to a minimum, but nevertheless we apologise for any inconvenience caused by this. Come back after a couple of minutes if you can't access the site at any time.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.