Brian Eno is working with Will Wright on Spore’s procedural soundtrack.
Back in the 1970s Will Wright and Brian Eno got hooked by cellular automata such as Conway’s “Game of Life,” where just a few simple rules could unleash profoundly unpredictable and infinitely varied dynamic patterns. Cellular automata were the secret ingredient of Wright’s genre-busting computer game “SimCity” in 1989. Eno was additionally inspired by Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” in which two identical 1.8 second tape loops beat against each other out of phase for a riveting 20 minutes. That idea led to Eno’s “Music for Airports” (1978), and the genre he named “ambient music” was born.
Spore takes place in a universe which ranges from the very large to the very small and from the distant past to the distant future. Depending on where you are in the game, you experience it as a cell, an organism, a tribe, a city, or a civilization.
“I’m interested in the idea of games creating original music,” Eno said in an interview with rolling stones magazine. “It allows you to write interactive music in ways that are very difficult to do when you’re licensing music. With licensing, you have a band who has already written a piece of music without having thought at all about the idea of games or interactivity in any way, and so unless you happen to have some particular thing going in your game — like a radio you can turn on — it’s very difficult to make it blend into the action of the game and be responsive.”
