Spore, the wildly ambitious game from Maxis and EA was released to the clamouring hands of Europeans last week Friday. This much you know. To no-one’s disbelief, however, the game’s servers, meant to authenticate your copy of the game as well as dynamically spread your user-made content across the web, have been swamped and have buckled. Players aren’t able to play the game due to the server’s inability to authenticate their copy of the game. It is not known when the issues will be cleared up, but players are still experiencing problems.

An e-mail from EA to the Spore’s customers: “We deeply apologise for the inconvenience that you are currently experiencing with SPORE. It appears that there is an ongoing issue with the accounts server and the registration process for the game. We would like to inform you that we are already investigating this concern and in the process of resolving this issue. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding in the meantime.”

Meanwhile, Will Wright himself has responded to some of Spore’s reviews, saying; “We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players,” continuing on to say, “Spore has more depth than, let’s say, The Sims did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for Sims 2, which was around 90, and something like Half-Life, which was 97, and we decided - quite a while back - that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of Sims 2 than the Metacritic and sales of Half-Life.” Spore’s current Metacritic average is 87 based on 20 reviews and it’s likely to have already become a blockbuster, sales wise, over the weekend.

One last bit of Spore news is regarding the Spore prototypes that Maxis have released to the public, giving people insight into their creative process by showing players earlier work that contributed to the final designs. You can check out the Spore prototypes here.