Celebrities Play God -- and So Can You

Posted by: Burt Helm on June 23
I’m a fan of Sporevote.com. It’s a promotional site for an upcoming video game from The Sims-creator Will Wright called Spore. The game has an inherent marketing problem. The site cleverly solves it.
The problem is that to a casual gamer, Spore sounds like it’s going to be insanely difficult. Players are expected to do no less than guide a species’ evolution from the dawn of time until the space age. Yeesh.
But on Sporevote.com we see that Spore is so fun and easy, even a celebrity can do it.*
Red Sox Pitcher Curt Schilling’s “Munch”:
Everybody from Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson to Chef Emeril Lagasse took a crack at making a creature with the Spore Creature Creator, a stripped-down version of the game that’s available now, and put it up on the site. The game’s publisher, Electronic Arts, smartly extends the definition of “celebrity” to include a few plugged-in new media types like Michael Arrington to tap into their large techie followings. I found out about it from Digg founder Kevin Rose’s Twitter feed, for instance. You can watch videos of the celeb-spawned creatures on YouTube (the ostensible point of Sporevote.com is to pick your favorite one).
Check out a couple more of the creatures below. If I get my hands on the creature creator, I’ll post mine here as well.
Chef Emeril Lagasse’s “Craw Big Daddy”:
Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson’s “GreenGuy”:
*Or rather, most celebrities can do it. Mario Lopez, Mandy Moore, and others on SporeVote either couldn’t figure it out how to make a creature or haven’t gotten around to it yet.

http://bluespotmedia.ning.com/