In Spore, players guide the evolution of life-forms from their beginnings as protozoan organisms to sentient members of galaxy-conquering civilizations. But although the game appears to be ripe fodder for criticism from creationists, it isn't the pulpit-pounding religious zealots who are taking up arms against the game, according to game creator Will Wright.

　　"I think our bigger fear was that we didn't want to offend any religious people," said Wright in a recent interview with Eurogamer. "But looking at the discussion that unfolded from this thing, what we had was a good, sizable group of players that we might call militant atheists, and the rest of the players seemed very tolerant, including all of the religious players."

　　"I didn't expect to hit hot buttons on the atheist side as much; I expected it on the religious side," noted Wright. "But so far I've had no critical feedback at all from anybody who is religious feeling that we were misrepresenting religion or it was bad to represent religion in the game. It was really the atheists."

　　In the interview, Wright emphasized that his team at EA-owned Maxis contains a number of "pretty religious" members, and that questions of faith were left as open as possible to avoid a dogmatic quagmire. "Obviously as the player you're coming in and playing something like a god, directing the evolution of a species, but we never really state who you the player are."

　　Already available for mobile phones, Spore is expected to ship for the PC, Mac, and DS on September 7 in North America. A Wii version is also in development and will launch at an as-yet-undetermined date. GameSpot's extensive coverage has more on Spore.