Will Wright’s uber-anticipated Spore finally came out this past weekend (though much to EA’s chagrin, it was cracked by notorious warez release group Reloaded and widely torrented a few days earlier) and PC gamers of all persuasions are no doubt busily evolving their creations from adorably weird single-celled organisms into spacefaring imperialist nsfw penis monsters.

Wright will no doubt be swimming in Scrooge McDuck money—not that he needs more since last spring the dude sold his 100 millionth (!) copy of The Sims—at least in part because he’s getting gamers to do much of his work via user-generated content.

Yep, that ubiquitous web buzzword has evolved into “gaming 2.0” and Spore is the first triple-A title to give it a go (though Sony’s LittleBigPlanet will be next off the block this fall).

The game arrives pre-populated with critters birthed this summer when Wright “magnanimously” released a free trial version of his Creature Creator and people went ape-shit playing God. Wright says they were hoping for a hundred thousand species by September, but got a quarter-million on day one and a million within a week. By mid-July, users had generated more unique Spore species than currently exist on the planet. (At last check the Sporepedia claimed over 4 million.)

"It took them 18 days to reach the number of creatures on Earth and, by some accounts, it took God six days," Wright joked to media at E3 back in July. Not joking was Spore producer Thomas Vu who admitted to the BBC that the games industry is all over Spore's user-gen business model.

"If you imagine making something like a really cool creature can take a developer two weeks to do from scratch, but this system means somebody can make something just as compelling in two hours," Vu boasted. "This will definitely cut costs."

(Plus, as Valve discovered when fans modded their Half-Life game into the still-popular Counter-Strike, sometimes the collective community produces cooler results than the company's comparatively small dev team.)

While Spore is a single-player game, it’s more importantly a social experience--once players upload their organisms, creatures, tribes, civilizations and galactic federations into the central server, they will be accessible to everyone, making Spore’s ever-evolving universe as potentially infinite as our own.