Spore Wasn't Delayed! 'Fiscal' Years Giving Editors a Hard Time

Some while ago, rumors broke out that Spore was going to be delayed to 2009 (after it had already been delayed to early 2008). People starting wondering whether EA would be affected by this or not, but no one even thought of digging a little more to see is the delay was in fact a certainty. As it turns out, there was no delay, but more of a misunderstanding regarding EA's "fiscal" year that runs from April 2008 through March 2009.

Spore is a "teleological evolution" game, "god game" genre to be more exact, where the player's task is to mold and guide a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex being. Eventually, the species becomes sapient at which point the player sets the rules of that species' society. The goal is to progress the living being (intelligent at this point) towards space-exploration. Spore's main innovation is the use of procedural generation for many of the components of the game, providing vast scope and open-endedness.

So, as some clarification was in order, the developer had a nice chat with NextGeneration, that confirmed, once and for all, that Spore was not being delayed, and is still on track for a 2008 release: early fiscal (that's "fiscal") 2009:

"There seems to be some misinformation flying around," explained a rep in a phone interview, as NextGen posts. "Nothing's changed since our call on May 8, where [CEO] John Riccitello specifically said that we were moving Spore from fiscal '08 to early fiscal '09."

And to further shed light on the matter, the site also points out a statement of Riccitello's during that May earnings call: "�Spore is a title we have enormous confidence in. I've had the chance to review the title three times in the my short return to EA and it looks fantastic. I will also tell you that it's right up [to] the bubble in Q4 [of fiscal '08], if not sometime in early fiscal '09, so we don't feel comfortable in forecasting it."

So it was clear all along, that it was "fiscal" 2009 the company was talking about. Quite frankly, as EA's fiscal 2009 runs from April 2008 through March 2009, it's easy to get confused so, let's not blame anyone for the mistake, shall we? Currently, Spore is still on track for a 2008 release. Real-time 2008 that is...