I’ll be honest; I haven’t been following news on Spore, Will Wright’s ambitious take on evolving from a single-celled organism to a space-traversing race of creatures, because I just assumed my PC wouldn’t be able to run the game. Well, today Maxis released the minimum system requirements necessary to run the game, and they are actually quite attainable for the modern gamer. Here’s the full breakdown for both PC and Mac:

Windows XP
2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
512 MB RAM
A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
At least 6 GB of hard drive space

Windows Vista
2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
768 MB RAM
A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
At least 6 GB of hard drive space

Mac OS X
Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
Intel Core Duo Processor
1024 MB RAM
ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for creations.

So you can see it looks like the specs needed to run the game are actually quite reasonable, and most gamers should have no problems giving this one a go. I still won’t be playing it though, as my computer takes a solid 3 minutes to open up Microsoft Word whenever I need to work on a story. I fear that if I tried to play Spore, the whole process would be so slow that I would just be leaving the primordial soup as everyone else was setting a course for Spore 2 with their spacefaring races. Oh well, you kids have fun, I’m going to go back to my console gaming now.