How did you decide this is what you wanted to do next?

MP: That’s a good question. You know, when we built Spore, we built a lot of great things. It’s groundbreaking in many different ways, when we see what the community was doing with the technology. I mean, the Sporepedia [online user content repository] has hundreds of millions of variations out there. It’s insane.

Then, with what we were doing internally with the technology, we looked at that, and we looked at what players were saying out on the forums, and what they’re looking for in gameplay, and we thought, “Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could take this technology and use it to make creatures and characters that would fight together?” We wanted something we could make to play either co-op against enemies or fight against each other.

When we did a bunch of testing very early on, we took the tech in Spore and it allowed us to do a lot of very quick prototypes, and we very quickly realized that the action RPG genre is such a great fit for this tech.

Then we went from there. We saw the prototypes we played, we thought they were a lot of fun, and we thought this is a great way to make an action RPG game.

jump on over to Gamasutra to catch a full inteview with Mike Perry about DarkSpore!