Creatures (1996 video game)


Creatures is a video game developed by British studio Creature Labs and published by Mindscape for Windows, and was ported to Macintosh, PlayStation, and Game Boy Advance. It is the first game in the Creatures series.

Gameplay

Creatures is a game which allows the player to hatch and then raise anthropomorphic beings.
Creatures is an artificial life simulation where the user "hatches" small furry animals and teaches them how to behave. These "Norns" can talk, feed themselves, and protect themselves against vicious creatures. It was the first popular application of machine learning in an interactive simulation. Neural networks are used by the creatures to learn what to do. The game is regarded as a breakthrough in artificial life research, which aims to model the behavior of creatures interacting with their environment.
According to Millenium, every copy of Creatures contains a unique starting set of eggs, whose genomes are not replicated on any other copy of the game. An expansion pack, called "Life Kit #1" was released for purchase later.

Reception

Next Generation reviewed the PC version of the game, rating it five stars out of five, and stated that "Some will doubtless find the appeal elusive, but Creatures still offers one of the most obsessive and entertaining experiences anyone can have in front of the computer."
Creatures sold 100,000 copies by November 1997. At the time, John Moore of Mindscape explained that the company "expect to sell more than 200,000 Creatures by the end of the year." Global sales of the game neared 400,000 units by February 1998.