Upon returning from Boston I discovered that an old e-Bay purchase had arrived. Creatures was an advanced A-life game series in the late ninteies – in ’98 I got Creatures 2 as a Christmas gift and played with it quite often.
The game was customizable using scripting languages and Norns, the titular Creatures, were both breedable and engineerable. Unlike other artificial pets Norns were controlled by hundreds, sometimes close to a thousand, genes that controlled appearance, movement, brain function, body chemistry, and more.
The upshot to all this was that it was possible to make Norn breeds that fit into certain behavior/appearance/environmental niches. There were desert Norns, underwater Norns, anti-social Norns and poisonous Norns. There were other creatures as wel – the lizard-like Grendels and the monkey-like Ettins.
Around the summer of ’99 I got it into my head to create carnivorous creatures. Spider Grendels would be carnivorous hunters, eating other creatures for survival. This project involved creating new body sprites, writing a whole new genome (or adapting an old one), figuring out how to make it walk on four legs, and writing scripts so that it could eat the other creatures.
The project got off to a great start. I enlisted help from the alt.games.creatures community, at the time a large and vibrant collection of enthusiasts and tinkerers, for some help with the genome and the scripting. We were doing well, and then it all stopped.
The guy who was working on the genome kind of fell out of contact and didn’t deliver. And then my computer died for a period of six months. By the time I got it working again I was in the middle of three different productions at school, and then I worked summer stock that summer. Then London, then grad school, and then a new Windows XP machine that was incapable of running the game. I tried looking a couple of times to see if there was a Windows XP version, but at the time nothing had been finished.