Complete creature editor to serve as the demo for the game 

From PC Gamer comes this scoop :

 There's a story going round that EA are releasing Spore's creature editor as a separate and possibly commercial product. That's not quite how Will Wright tells it.

I asked my close personal friend Will about precisely this back in 2006, shortly after chatting to my close personal friend Robin Williams about Battlefield 2. The game's very much focused on spreading people's content around, so you're always encountering species that other people have made. The obvious awkward question is, what about when it first launches?

Well, that's why the demo, which is free, and released well ahead of the game, is the creature editor. And all the stuff you make with it gets 'cross-pollenated' into the Spore hivemind, ready to populate people's games when they start playing the real thing. It also shows off the best thing about Spore, gives you a great idea of how versatile and creative it is, and, of course, strongly motivates you to buy it so that you can play around with your new creation.

To recap, the salient points of this post are: a) the editor's not a retail product, b) PC Gamer gets all its info two years before everyone else, and c) Tom is friend to the stars.

Spore is set for release in September this year.