Spore

I spend half an hour trying to make something that remotely resembles a living creature. Instead, I have a mess on screen that would instantly lose in an evolutionary competition. Spore from 1991 is what you get when a mathematician says "let's make an evolution simulator" and releases it with basically no graphical interface.

It's an honest attempt to simulate evolution on a computer. You start with a single-celled organism and gradually add parts to it — fins, mouths, sensory organs — and try to create something that survives in its environment and reproduces. Each generation gets slightly more complex. Theoretically it sounds great. In practice it means spending lots of time in endless menu navigation that isn't intuitive and where it's not even clear what each button does.

Playing is frustrating. The controls are sparse, visual feedback is practically non-existent, and the game hardly tells you why your creation died. You feel like you're simulating something important, except on screen it looks like a game printed in black and white ASCII. After a while you realize that here isn't about entertainment — it's about a computer experiment. More scientific software than a game.

Will Wright pushed the idea forward in the two-thousands with his unique phenomenon with its own creature editor, but this version from the early nineties is just the skeleton of an idea. In retrospect it's an interesting artifact — proof that creators believed in evolutionary gameplay long before it became mainstream. But for it to be fun, it's missing everything essential.

If you're interested in the history of digital experimentation and aren't deterred by archaic menus without any style, you can try it. Everyone else should reach for other strategy — like Star Control or something where programmers knew players wanted some fun too.