Well my worst fears are realized. CyberLife went out of business a few years back :L I got nostalgic today during a slow couple of hours at work and started looking up thing about Creatures 1, 2, and 3. Creatures was a revolutionary kind of game. It wasn't a game at all initially. With 2, 3, and Creature Adventures it got more kitschy and more fun-oriented, although C3 was the most complex artificial life system I've ever seen created, especially for home useage!

Creatures was created by CyberLife in the 90s and released 1997. I remember the first time I saw advertisements for it in a gaming magazine. Must have been around the time they were making Diablo cuz I was on the prowl for that game too. All I saw was a few eggs and a weird looking creature standing next to it with a big grin on it's face and saucer-plate eyes. It was the cutest thing ever, and the only words on the otherwise black page was "Their life is in your hands..." I had no idea what this was for as not even the game title was there. These truly were teaser ads at their best! I kept looking for new ones in the months to come. I finally found a more detailed ad a few months later detailing the first accurate artificial life system. These creatures had their own set of drives and needs and they had an AI unlike any I'd seen before. Yeah Tamagotchi's were the craze eh? I had one, and those were gay. Very gay. I wanted something that really was capable of AI. Creatures answer the call of my plea. The creatures would roam around their world, Albia, and the goal was to breed as many as you could and pass along genetic traits and genes. There was a villain of course the Grendel. These green baddy's could beat the heck out of your norn and even kill them! They spread disease, germs, and many a bad joke. And this was the first emergence I'd seen of a huge widespread internet fanbase. Remember this is a time when the internet was just gaining popularity for the common American. People created COBs, (objects you could import into Albia such as food machines, Grendel traps etc sky was the limit!), and traded Norns online to eachother by exporting and importing them.

Creatures 2 expanded on the series with a whole new world that had a thriving ecological system. Not only did the creatures biosystems become more complex but the ecosystem was just as, if not more! Plants would drop seeds which would germinate, some plants required pollination from animals flying around the world. There was introduced the genetic splicer which allowed you to combine any two creatures. There was a new one as well, the Ettin, a cute little white guy with dreadlocks who liked to steal things and run away with them. The Grendel was back but this time you could teach your Norns to defend themselves, or avoid him.

Creatures 3 finally came about the time I was a sophmore in HS. This game was so complex in terms of the biosystems it really blew my mind. I got into genetics at this point and read a ton on them, and wolfing runs. Kind of my own home Darwin experiments. I'd have a wolfing run in which I'd hatch about 10-20 eggs and leave them alone for a few days with no formal teaching. After that time I'd come back and see who was weeded out. Survival of the fittest indeed! The norns now had an immune system, could develop antibodies, and genetic flaws and adaptations were inherent. Quite the interesting game. I had found out that the C3 CD had broken somehow on my move into the Red House last fall. :L It had always run so slow on my old computers, I was going to retry it after like 6 years to see if it ran beautifully on my PC now.

Today I ordered C3, unopened, still in the cellophane from Ebay's Half.com. $1.75. I also ordered the same conditioned C2. Guess how much? $.99. Now I'm starting to see how things depreciate in value over time. A hi-fi stereo from the 70s is worth next to nothing today, and I never reallyl noticed this before. When C1 came out it had to be at least $30-$40. ::sigh:: It will be a pretty unique and cool screensaver kinda thing to leave running all the time :)

Thinking of buying Creatures Adventures (a kiddier version) for my niece and nephew. I think he'd really be into that seeing how he loved Animal Crossing. Yeah yeah, I played and own Animal Crossing. It's such an amusing little game lol. Something fun about visiting your nephew's town and having him send you letters and gifts in a little virtual world. It even has a cool password mail system where I can send him something without having to transfer it from a memory card. He just enters in a password, and I assume the game calculates and decodes what it means and what item it refers too.

That game definitely too up too much time...lol