Jump to 2:08 in the above video and you'll see the one part of game designer Will Wright's 2005 Game Developers' Conference unveiling of "Spore" that didn't make it into the final game. What happened to the 3D underwater stage that appeared to follow Cell Stage and precede Creature Stage? It's not in the final game.

I asked Wright about the omission during our interview two Fridays ago.

He said: "We were originally going to have underwater civilizations. You could play Tribe and Civ underwater. But we did a lot of prototyping of that, and we never got a satisfactory interface. It was really way too hard to use. So we ended up cutting that and forcing the player onto land primarily for usability reasons."

So it wasn't going to be its own stage, but rather an optional way of playing two of them. Anyone miss it?

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