High brow US cultural magazine TIME has named EA’s Spore as the 20th ‘Best Invention of 2008’.

‘The retail DNA test’ took top spot in the list, followed by ‘The Tesla Roadster’ and ‘The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’.

Of Spore, the magazine said:

‘It's blasphemy, brilliance or both to take the entire evolution of a species — from a single-celled animalcule in a drop of water to a space-faring, galaxy-exploring sentient being — and turn it into a video game.

‘But that's exactly what Will Wright has done. Wright is the man who created The Sims, a game about everyday life in suburbia, but apparently he found the vast panorama of human experience too confining, because he then spent seven years creating Spore, in which players design their own life-form and then manage every aspect of its progress through the centuries, from savagery to civilization.’