Below, you can see the full background used in the original Creatures. With a size of 8352×1200 pixels, Albia was about 10 screens wide and 2 screens tall. And the remnants of an ancient civilization which is nowhere to be found. Norns live on Albia, a disk-shaped planet which features a variety of different environments. Which provides the perfect ground for emergent behaviours. The Game The World of AlbiaĬreature’s secret lies hidden in the complex and interactive ecosystem that it models, The title originally appeared on an article written by Steve Grand in 1993: Small Furry Creatures: The Mythography. The name was chosen in place of “ Little Computer Ewoks“, which felt too derivative. “ Small Furry Creatures” was one of the proposed titles for Creatures. To this date it was, and it still is, an experience unmatched by any other computer game.īut how could, a game that is almost 25 years old, succeed where even modern games are struggling? Please, join me on this journey to discover the AI of Creatures. Making it the closest experience possible to having a pet. Creatures was designed around the very concepts of empathy and nurturing.
From experience… from each other… and, most importantly, from us. Ok …perhaps they were neither of those two things. Norns might not have been alive, but they were definitely intelligent. Behind their furry look, the actions of each creature were controlled by a primitive, yet sophisticated neural network. Or at least, as close as you could get with an Intel Pentium in 1996. But, unlike a Tamagotchi, Norns were alive. A glorified Tamagotchi on steroids, if that makes sense. Hatching and raising them, until they are self-sufficient. In the game, you have to look after small furry creatures called Norns. I was 11, and little I knew that article was going to change my life.Ĭreatures is often described as an Artificial Life Simulator. It talked about a videogame which dared to do what no other game had done before. Leafing through the pages, one article in particular caught my attention. Back in 1997, my father brought home one issue of “Le Science”, the Italian edition of the popular magazine “Scientific American”.
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