Spore Coming to Mac Later this Year

One of the most anticipated simulation games in years will have a place on the Mac when Electronic Arts releases Spore later this year.

EA announced the Mac release at MacWorld last week along with a demo on display at the expo, and it somehow slipped under the radar.

Spore is a simulation game on steroids. Will Wright, the game’s chief designer, is a pioneer in the genre, having developed the city planner’s dream game, SimCity, and the bestselling life simulator, The Sims. Spore lets you craft a universe. From creating life, watching it evolve and building civilizations to customizing entire planets, players have full control.

“We couldn’t be happier to bring Spore to the Mac at the same time as the PC version. Spore is a highly creative game, and I look forward to seeing what the players come up with to fill the universe they design,” Wright said in a press release.

The game begins with a comet crashing into the player’s chosen planet. This spurs the earliest form of the evolutionary process, where players guide cellular organisms through a tide pool in an eat-or-be-eaten Pac-Man-like scenario. Once the microbes evolve, creatures take to the land, and you have the option of customizing nearly every aspect of the wildlife.

Species eventually form tribes and entire cities until they advance far enough to explore space and to colonize other planets. EA will be porting the game to the Mac using the Cider Portability Engine by TransGaming, which the publisher has used to bring much of its PC library to the Intel Mac platform.

Spore is expected to hit stores in the spring and will be joined by modified versions of the game for the Nintendo DS and mobile platforms.