Creatures

This is an entry about an artifical life computer program series. For information on creatures as a synonym for animals, see creature.

Creatures is an artificial life computer program series, created in the early 1990s by English computer scientist Steve Grand whilst working for the Cambridge computer games developer Millennium Interactive. The program represented an important breakthrough in the advancement of artificial life (ALife) research.

In Creatures, the user 'hatched' small furry creatures called Norns into a world called Albia, and had to teach them how to talk, feed themselves, and protect themselves against vicious creatures called Grendels. Later games in the series introduced a third species, the Ettins.

The program was significant as it was one of the first commercial titles to code artificial life organisms from the genetic level upwards using a sophisticated biochemistry and neural network brains. This meant that the Norns and their DNA could develop and "evolve" in increasingly diverse ways, unpredicted by the makers. By breeding certain Norns with others, some traits could be passed on to following generations. Most interestingly, the Norns turned out to behave similarly to living creatures. This was seen as an important insight into how real world organisms may function and evolve. Earlier ALife programs had worked by giving their organisms a limited set of commands and parameters, and seeing whether the way the subjects behaved was realistic.

It's worth pointing out that the genetics in Creatures are somewhate different to human genetics in that they are haploid and therefore any "evolution" is a result of random cross-over mutations and so there is no concepts of dominant and recessive genes. Nevertheless, the complexity of the simulated biochemistry meant that Norn behaviour was highly unpredictable.

Creatures was developed as a consumer product by Millennium, and was released by Mindscape in 1996. The program was instantly successful, and an an online community of players soon formed, swapping Norns, creating new objects for Albia, sharing tips on how to play the game and anecdotes about unexpected evolutionary changes that they had seen, and even creating new breeds of Norn. At one point, the Creatures online community was the largest of its type.

Among the fans of Creatures were the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins and author Douglas Adams.

In 1998, the computer games division of Millennium was sold to Sony Entertainment while those working on A-Life and Creatures formed a new company called Cyberlife Technology. Along with continued work on the Creatures titles, the company did work for industry and the British MoD (Ministry of Defense), famously attempting to teach A-Life organisms to fly fighter jets (virtually, of course!).

In the late 1990s, Grand left Cyberlife to form Cyberlife Research and focus on the production of new ALife technologies, including current work on a robotic life form he calls Lucy as well as writing books about his research. The remainder of the company was renamed Creature Labs, and focused on computer game development.

Sequels to Creatures, including Creatures 2, Creatures 3 and the small-children's games Creatures Adventures and Creatures Playground, were released by Creature Labs in subsequent years. One sequel, an internet-based game called Docking Station, was released free of charge, and allowed the user to place their Norns in an online world inhabited by the Norns of other users. Norns could travel at will between computers via a central server and players could track them and their offspring via the Docking Station website.

Development was suspended on future Creatures games on March 20 2003 when Creature Labs ceased operations, but development and trademark rights have since been purchased by a company named Gameware Development Ltd. Gameware has revived the Creatures Developer Network, the shop, the forums, and have released many before-purchaseable tools for free. The newest addition after Gameware bought Creature Labs is the Docking Station Central/Hub.

Gameware staff that previously worked on Creatures have now developed a convergent media game for the BBC called Bamzooki.

The Creatures games has recently been re-released under the names The Albian Years (C1, C2), Creatures Exodus (C3, DS) and Creatures Village (CA, CP).

Story

The original Creatures game took place on the fictional disc-shaped world Albia. While the "faces" of the disc were uninhabitable, the "rim" of Albia was home to a complicated environment much like Earth's. Here lay an abandoned system of laboratories left over by the Shee, an advanced race that had suddenly left the planet many years earlier in order to find a more stable (possibly spherical?) world. In these laboratories and environments, the player was able to hatch new Norns from leftover eggs and reinhabit the world of Albia.

Creatures 2 took place many years after the first game, after a devastating natural disaster had changed the landscape of Albia dramatically and opened up new areas of the world. New technology and species were made available to the player. Despite the great change in environment, the focus of the game remained the same.

Creatures 3 took a detour from the first two games. It took place on the actual spaceship that the Shee had used to flee Albia. The ship was divided into many carefully controlled environments. Creatures 3 was much more technologically focused. Still, the goal was to experiment with the three principal species and create a living world out of an empty ship.

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