The only fantastical promise about the game I ever remember reading was the animations were supposed to be kinesthetic based on how you made your creatures; kinda like how GTA’s Euphoria physics engine works.

And as far as I had read regarding that, they were struggling with it and had to abandon it at the behest of management not giving them more time to figure it out.

I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.

Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn’t surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they’d actually solve a well known industry challenge.

If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn’t be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.