It is the equivalent of a new Beatles album for computer gamers: a $20 million (£10 million) sequel to the world-beating Sims franchise that lets players control life, their Universe and everything.

After seven years of testing by a team of seventy-two designers, Will Wright, the visionary behind The Sims, unveiled Spore, the most anticipated computer game for years, to an audience of adoring fans.

The Sims, which allowed players to manipulate the residents of a suburban household, became the biggest-selling game franchise, selling 70 million copies and generating $1.6 billion (£827 million). Spore extends the principle from controlling a city to playing God with your own personal Universe.

Electronic Arts, the world’s biggest game company, is gearing up to flood stores with the game when it is finally released in the autumn.

“Spore is about the entire history of life and where life goes in the future,” Mr Wright told delegates at the South by South West interactive festival in Austin, Texas, before making a spectacular demonstration.

The game begins with a drop of water emerging as a single-cell organism. Players then develop this cell to create their own species, build a civilisation, colonise their planet and ultimately send missions into outer space. It is a Darwinian battle for survival.

Mr Wright, 47, admitted that it would take players “76 years without sleep” to explore all of Spore’s different planets. The $20 million development costs have produced a world in which the species you create interacts with planets and tribes developed by other players. The organism initially grows by consuming other cells and then absorbing the traits of other, larger prey.

Gamers choose whether their species grows up to be a peace-loving herbivore or claw-wielding carnivore.

As the game develops through stages, your species fashions tools, builds shelters and creates thriving cities. The acquisition of advanced technology and architectural principles allows the creation of spacecraft. Missions to other planets can be launched either for warmongering or for more diplomatic purposes.

Mr Wright has made a major breakthrough with the game’s graphics, which incorporate the techniques used by the latest Hollywood animated films. He said: “You can create creature scenes in three minutes that it used to take a Pixar film artist three weeks to generate.”

Mr Wright has no shortage of ambition for Spore, which was inspired by the Seti (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) space programme. “It is a philosophy tool to play with,” he told his audience. “I want people to think about the infinite possibilities of life. Games can change the world a little for the better.”

For example, a climate change tool allows players to flood their Spore world with greenhouse gases, demonstrating the disastrous consequences that result.

If Mr Wright’s instincts are correct, millions of gamers will be umbilically connected to new worlds and civilisations created by people that they have never met. He said: “There will be several millions of different worlds and species built by other players in parallel to yours. I want to see some interstellar wars.”

Described as the “Bono of the games industry”, Mr Wright, from Athens, Georgia, believes that games will prove to be a more durable form of entertainment than cinema.

He said: “Film directors take you to an end point they dictate. Games ask, ‘Can you extract an entire world from your own imagination?’.

“Websites like YouTube show that people want to produce content they mould themselves.”

As players find themselves in charge of the Spore galaxies, he allowed himself a Star Wars comparison. “I want you to be George Lucas rather than Luke Skywalker,” he said.

Mr Wright, who collects left-overs from the Soviet space programme and designs robots in his spare time, is believed to be the world’s wealthiest games designer after selling his Maxis company to Electronic Arts in 1995. Spore will be released for PCs initially, but handheld Nintendo Wii versions are also planned.

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