Happy Holidays!

…to those who live in the USA, that is! In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m especially grateful to those of you (from any country) who keep sending me money to help make this project possible! It’s been a really rough year, so thank you for helping.

Should anyone else feel like you want to contribute more than the measly $5 I’ve been charging, I guess I should leave my Paypal begging hat here, on the off-chance. I’ll talk about the money situation later, though, when I’m not feeling so ill. I’ve had a bad bout of (allergic?) bronchitis and I think all that coughing has given me a bit of pneumonia.

Meanwhile, for those of you who can speak Spanish, a lovely guy called Sergio, who’s a Spanish games journalist, posted his first ever YT documentary recently, which was about Creatures. You can watch it here. But if you don’t speak Spanish, I asked him for his script and I’m posting it below, auto-translated into English. I thought he’d really captured the spirit of the game. The same spirit of empathy applies to this one.

I’m still working my ass off, getting a build together. I know it doesn’t look like I am, but there was far more to do than I expected, and I need to get the creatures’ life cycle fully working (even if buggy) or else the whole ‘wild population’ idea is just going to look too much like it sucks, so I decided to keep my head down and focus. It wouldn’t even make much sense if I told you exactly what I’m working on. I’ve no idea how soon it’ll be ready – hopefully it can be my Christmas present to you all.

Anyway, here is Sergio’s script:

Introduction

For as long as we can remember, human beings have tried to create life.  On our scale, with our hands and our machines.

From the myths of the Golem or Frankenstein to modern laboratories, the same question has always accompanied us:

 Can we give soul to something that does not have one?

In the twentieth century, that search embraced a new scenario: computers.  Machines capable of processing, calculating, repeating… but also, little by little, to learn.

The first basic neural networks were born in the 1940s and 1950s, in the shadow of that ambition: mathematical models that mimicked the structure of the brain, with connections that strengthened or weakened like memories.

 An attempt to teach a machine not only to respond, but to understand.

And yet, there was something that science could not program: empathy.  That almost instinctive impulse that makes us care, protect or feel sorry for something fragile.

 An invisible bond that, with just a few pixels, can make us feel affection for a character… or sadness over their loss.

Video games soon discovered that power.

 They learned that emotion wasn’t born just from challenge or victory, but from connection: from watching a character stumble, learning, or looking to us for help.

But for a long time, that connection was an illusion.

 Deep down, AI didn’t think.

 It didn’t learn.

 It didn’t remember.

 It only executed orders.

It was pure digital theater: behaviors carefully designed to appear human, without being human.

 And although that was enough to keep us glued to the screen, the illusion was shattered as soon as we understood the pattern.

 The monster that always turned in the same hallway.

 The rival of the strategy game that responded the same in each skirmish.  The allies who followed us along pre-established paths.

The “intelligence” was, in reality, a choreography.

And yet, the world was changing.

 Computers were stepping on the accelerator, the Internet at home was taking its first steps, and the idea of creating machines capable of learning – for real – was beginning to leave laboratories to settle in popular culture.

Because deep down, what we were looking for was not a more realistic game… but something alive.

 Not a programmed life, but an emergent one.

 A life that was born, grew, learned… and die.  A digital life for which we could feel empathy.

And it was exactly at this point that a British computer scientist and roboticist came into play, whose creation became one of the most amazing and forgotten essays in the history of video games.

 A simulation of digital biology, mind and soul.

 An experiment that blurred the border between play and life, with an intelligence that not only imitated ours, but forced us to look at ourselves in it.

This is the story of Steve Grand and Creatures, the game that taught us to care, to observe, to feel…  and that perhaps, without knowing it, made us a little more human.

Chapter 1 — The Dream of Creating Life

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, technological revolutions were noisy: more powerful computers, bright graphics, logos that screamed innovation.

 But silent revolutions, the truly transformative ones, are born in tiny offices, on scribbled sheets of paper and restless minds.

Steve Grand was one of those minds.

 Ever since he built his first computer in 1978 and developed his own graphics engine, Microcosm, he had the idea in his head that life could arise from the right combination of inert parts.

While preparing this documentary, I had the opportunity to exchange some emails with Steve Grand himself to better understand his motivations and concerns.

 At 67 years old, he maintains the same mixture of curiosity and warmth that is perceived in his writings: more interested in how humans think than in the systems he created.

His father, an electronics engineer, had indirectly taught him the essentials of control systems: feedback.

 Those lessons stayed with him forever, not as a read theory, but as a way of seeing the world.

In the early nineties, Grand had already created two graphic adventures with an isometric view: The Adventures of Robin Hood and Rome AD92, the latter published by Maxis in the United States.

It was in this context that the spark for Creatures emerged, although not in a planned way.

 In his own words:

“It was an act of desperation, blindness and panic, rather than planning. Maxis had asked us for a new project to present that same weekend!”

Beyond that urgency, his real obsession was another: to understand how small inert systems could, when interacting, produce behaviors that no one had programmed.

 Readings such as The Planiverse and artificial life experiments gave him the intuition that life could emerge, even on a computer.

The idea that emerged was simple and huge: to create digital beings capable of learning, experimenting, and feeling pleasure and pain – even if virtually.

Thus the Norns were born.

 Each had an artificial brain based on neural networks, where small virtual “neurochemicals” modulated their behavior.

 Eating, exploring, playing, touching the fire: every action had consequences.  They learned to survive on their own.

For the first time, a video game offered more than just mechanics: it offered an emotional bond.

 The players did not control the Norns; they took care of them, observed them and felt them.

 And empathy appeared, like a silent spectator, in the middle of the pixels.

The world Grand created was called Albia: an enclosed but vibrant environment.  It was inhabited by different species—Norns, Grendels, Ettins—each with its own role, its needs, its way of interacting.

 The system didn’t stop when the player walked away: creatures ate, slept, reproduced, and died.

It was a digital ecosystem where life was not written, but discovered.  Every death, every learning, every game of chance within Albia could generate amazement or tenderness.

 The Norns were, in a way, mirrors of our curiosity and our empathy.

The experiment did not go unnoticed.

 Biologists, computer scientists, and philosophers studied the behavior of Norns as if they were real organisms.

 Academic articles, conferences, collaborations… even scientific publications emerged from that “game”.

At the same time, a community of passionate gamers emerged who shared genomes, theories, strategies to breed smarter Norns.

 The Internet, incipient, became a collective laboratory.

 Creatures wasn’t just software; it was culture and science at the same time.

But it was not all applause.

 Many criticized the idea of allowing the Norns to feel virtual pain. Was it ethical?

 Grand was clear about his point of view:

“If we want to understand life, we must dare to create it.

 Not to replace it, but to understand ourselves.”

Thus, Creatures was not limited to being a game: it was an environment that forced us to question what it means to live, care and learn.

Decades later, his influence is still alive.

 Emergent behavioral systems, adaptive AI, evolutionary environments… everything that is explored today in video games and simulations has roots in that small laboratory in Albia.

What Steve Grand did in 1996 wasn’t just designing a game: it was igniting a spark.

 To show that life, even digital, can teach us something about ourselves.

 That curiosity, care and empathy can be born from a few bits… and still feel completely real.

Chapter 2 — From Players to Caregivers

Sometimes, the real game is not played with quick reflexes, but with repeated gestures.

 With attention drawn, day after day, to a being who depends on you.

That’s what Creatures was  for a lot of people: not so much episodic entertainment, but an everyday practice.

 A routine that mixed scientific curiosity and emotional care.

Entering Albia meant choosing a mode of relationship.

There were those who approached it as an amateur researcher: he wrote down, crossed genes, created experiments with the calm of a home laboratory.

 There were those who took on the task of the caregiver: they taught words, administered medicines, supervised the incubator.

 And there were those who, out of simple restlessness, defied the order – they broke things to see what emerged from the chaos – and ended up, sometimes against their will, learning to respect.

The interesting thing is that all these roles produced the same effect: a paradox of care.

 The more you manipulated the system to understand it, the more you emotionally exposed yourself to its results.

Teaching a word to a Norn wasn’t just a technical exercise: it was a clumsy, hopeful conversation.

 The bond was fabricated with small and repeated actions:

 a meal on time, a virtual caress, a patient correction when they made a mistake.

Rituals which, when accumulated, ended up transforming the code into company.

During the research for this documentary, several players told me that the experience changed their day: they planned their time to return to Albia and controlled their routines like someone taking care of a plant or an animal.

Again, it wasn’t just entertainment: it was voluntary emotional labor, done with love.

When a creature died, the reaction was surprisingly human.  It was not an unimportant “bug”: for many it was a real loss, a hole.

The community wrote letters, mailed Steve, organized digital rituals to remind the Norns that they were gone.

 That collective response showed something essential: empathy does not need a body; it needs context and care.

“I remember a family from Australia who sent me a sick Norn and asked if I could fix it.

 I was touched that they cared about the health of a software.

 I manipulated its genetics a little and gave it back to them.

 Later that year, they sent me a Christmas card!”

That event sums up the ambivalence of the project: a technology that created affection, and a human response that objectified it as something worthy of our empathy.

A constant surprise was the human profile that the project attracted.

 People who did not fit the archetype of the player – young and not so young, many on the autism spectrum or with different forms of sensitivity – found in Albia a space to practice, to make mistakes and to belong.

“It was gratifying to see how they felt recognized and how the project connected them with others.”

That social dimension is part of the legacy: Creatures was also a therapeutic and formative community, an environment where difference was not penalized, but valued.

But history did not stop at feeling.  It became doing.

Chapter 3 — Albia’s Second Birth

Players began to manipulate, edit and share gene banks, homemade tools, mods that added new behaviors.

 Albia stopped being just the world that Steve designed and became a collective workshop.

The sharing of genomes on forums, the detailed guides, the home experiments: all of this made the game a platform for distributed creation.

This transformation is decisive: the fandom was not only a consumer, it was a citizen laboratory.

 And in that practice, early forms of community science applied to software were tested.

The boundary between hobby and science became permeable.

 Researchers observed patterns, compared reproduction rates, and used Norns as models to study learning and evolution in closed systems.

Some players started scientific careers motivated by what they experienced in front of the screen.

 It’s not an exaggeration: curiosity about a digital toy led people to study biology, computer science, or neuroscience.

“Many people wrote to me to say that, thanks to the Norns, they had ended up studying biology, medicine or programming.

 If I’ve taught anyone to love science, then something good came out of all this.”

That’s one of Creatures’ most unexpected legacies: a bridge between playful imagination and real learning.

With involvement came responsibility.

 The same forums that held experiments were now discussing limits:

 Is it permissible to induce virtual suffering out of scientific curiosity?  Should there be an ethic of experimentation in games?

A practical lesson emerges here: technological communities not only invent uses, they also develop norms.

In Albia, the rules were not imposed by the developers: they were born from the players themselves.

 The community self-regulated through advice, agreements and discussions that, in many cases, were more mature than official policies.

When the industry turned its back on the project, the community did not let Albia be wiped off the map.

 Archives, emulators, mirrors, guides and patches emerged to prolong the life of the ecosystem.

That preservation work is, in itself, an act of care.

 Not only out of nostalgia, but also out of the recognition that what was created had scientific, cultural and emotional value.

If there is one lesson that remains from all this, it is not technical; it is social.  A software could provoke a chain of human actions: patience, learning, community, ethics and memory.

Thus, Creatures taught us something simple and profound: technology does not invent empathy; it awakens it.

 And when it wakes up, it gives us back an image of ourselves.

In all the maelstrom that Creatures meant, in that gesture of care, Albia ceased to be just a map: it became a lesson about what it means to be attentive to each other.

Artificial intelligence was born as an attempt to understand ourselves, to build, with logic and equations, a reflection of the human mind.

But along the way we discovered something unexpected:

 that life is not defined only by intelligence, but by the ability to feel.

And maybe that’s why we keep trying to create it.

 Not to play god, but to find company.  So as not to be alone in a universe made of code.