Spore Cubes Classic

This is the 2008 update to the original version of Spore Cubes that launched in the year 2000 and became a viral hit!

Made with Macromedia Flash and ActionScript 1.0 initially, Spore Cubes was among the first wave of proper fun web games distributed through websites and starting to gain viral attention. Around that time most Flash games were too simple, consisting mostly of “click the button” or “click this target” type of interactions, since the frame rate of Flash at the time was low (averaging 12 to 20 frames per second) and the limitations of ActionScript 1.0 made it difficult to program anything more sophisticated.

In 2003, Macromedia released Flash MX 2004 with ActionScript 2, and around 2008 or 2009 Adobe had purchased Macromedia and renamed the app to Flash Professional, along with ActionScript 3 and support faster graphics rendering. This is when you start to see some really fantastic creations come out made with this technology.)

Despite these earlier limitations, Spore Cubes delivered gameplay that felt challenging and addictive. Initially uploaded to FlashKit.com, it was popular enough that the developer built the website LilGames.com to host it along with games from other developers but the thousands of players “hitting” the web page crashed the website! The site was down for a week and lost many visitors who discovered that the game could be played elsewhere since the game file from FlashKit was being copied onto dozens (hundreds?) of other websites.

After Lil’ Games changed web hosting companies and was back up and running, many loyal visitors asked about buying the Spore Cubes game on CD-ROMs. Internet access was slow at the time and the idea of logging onto the internet and waiting for the game to download every time they wanted to play was not appealing. So Spore Productions answered that call by self-publishing the game on cute little tiny discs. You can read more about this and see some images of the disc by visiting the Lil’ Games About page.

Not bad for a 1-person operation, eh?