Like many other people here, I found Thrive because of my love of Spore. I started playing Spore when I was quite young and I’ve loved it ever since. Spore is my favourite game of all time, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a lot of my fascination with evolution, the Universe and biology was caused by Spore.
I have always wanted there to be a sequel to Spore (and part of me still does), and I used to search the web for games trying to tackle the same concept as Spore. In 2019, I watched a video called “Spore 2 - A Simple, Plausible Approach” about if a hypothetical Spore sequel was made, how would it be done? In this video, a interesting game was mentioned called Thrive, which I thought looked like an interesting microbe simulator and I made a mental note to check it out later.
Quite a while later, me and a friend were both playing Species: ALRE (an interesting ecosystem and evolution simulator) when I remembered Thrive. I mentioned it to him and I searched for Thrive on the internet. I (somehow before I found the main website) stumbled upon this image made by QuantumCrab.
It’s silly to say, but this really was a childhood dream come true for me. I was so happy that there were other people than myself that actually cared about Spore, and even decided to try and make their own spiritual successor.
After the initial excitement wore off, I only checked in on Thrive very occassionally. Development was quite slow at the time, and I lost a lot of hope for the project. After a while, I stopped checking in on it completely, until about December of 2020. I think I rediscovered the launcher on my PC, and decided to play the game once again to see if anything had changed. I immediately noticed the vast amount of improvements, and my hope for Thrive had returned.
I’ve been following Thrive to an extent from then to now. In March of this year, I finally decided to sign up to the forums, and the rest is history, I guess.
Anyway, sorry for this novel of a post, I just wanted to share my story with Thrive. I’m really glad I watched that YouTube video and discovered Thrive, because otherwise the past two years of my life would be quite different. I think the vast majority of people can relate when I say that life can suck sometimes, and having Thrive can actually help. If you who is reading this has contributed to Thrive in any way, please know that you are not just making a video game, you’re providing help to many people who may be going through tough times. Thank you.
(There are a total of 485 words in this post. Wow, I spent way too long writing this.)