HOW WILL YOU CREATE THE UNIVERSE?

SPORE is a simulation/RTS/god game first released in 2008, developed by will wright and maxis and released by EA. you get to raise a lifeform all the way from a single-celled organism to a spacefaring superpower!
the game features five distinct stages: cell stage (single-celled life), creature stage (terrestrial life), tribal stage (sentient life + forming societies), civilization stage (one dominant species, nations fighting for power), and space stage (the final frontier!)
spore is known for a lot of things: a modding community that remains active 15 years after the games release, a lot of game-ruining bugs, that really weird DRM controversy on release, and for being extremely innovative and remarkable for its time. unfortunately EA hates everything you love, so they killed maxis in cold blood!

i was five years old when spore first released! it's been on my computer (or a family member's computer) since i can remember. five years old and in preschool, i really didn't know how to read that much, like most preschoolers. but i did know i LOVED watching my parents play this game - my mom and my dad both got a kick out of it! i'd watch them play and i wanted to play too. i started picking up on the words on the screen, and even though i mispronounced half of them - i couldn't say "religious" and always misread "cell" as "call" for some reason - i started learning to read. it was spore and toontown online that inspired me to learn to read at a young age - i was the top reader in my kindergarten class. if you put me in a class of 5 year olds i could still kick their asses.
i made... a lot of abominations. a lot of them. my early creations were just not good. as is the case for most children who make things in this game, i loved making horrible little animals. if you go back and look through my sporepedia page (technically my mom's as well but i make most of the stuff on there), you can really see how awful some of them were. most of my new creations don't appear cuz i use part mods now!

as a kid i loved the warrior archetype but now i have CLASS and play zealots or traders. sometimes ecologists or scientists but usually the first two. their superpowers are all pretty good!