In case you've never seen the show, Robot Chicken is an animated series that runs on Cartoon Network (and other channels across the world). It's a sketch comedy show, which uses stop-motion animation to portray parodies of characters and settings from recent popular culture.

To find out how strongly gaming runs through the heart of the show - and the show's creators - we spoke with Tom Root, producer and occasional voice actor on the hit Cartoon Network series.

"I think most of the Robot Chicken writers have multiple consoles, and we're just as likely to be playing some sunshine-spewing Wii game as we are some grim, apocalyptic first-person shooter" he says. "Personally, I like to mix it up. I finished Fallout 3 and then moved on to Lego Batman, then the latest Tomb Raider, then Tiger Woods golf. I'm pretty scattered."

While everyone involved in making the show may be a big gamer, do they ever worry that not everyone watching the show might be? "I think we rarely worry about whether viewers recognize the references we're making, as long as WE recognize the references we're making", he explains. "Our philosophy has always been, 'If we find it funny, other people will find it funny', so that's all we worry about. Making it funny. To US. Heh heh heh."

Which leads us to wonder; as games grow increasingly popular, does he think in the future, they could take pride of place in the next generation's version of a show like Robot Chicken? "Our popular culture is getting so fragmented and niche-y, I really wonder what "pop culture" is even going to mean in 20 years", he says. "There are so many entertainment options that our shared experience as a culture is getting pretty tenuous."

"For example, can you imagine Johnny Carson's ''Tonight Show' audience understanding a Pac-Man joke?" Root continues. "Sure. Can you imagine Jay Leno's 'Tonight Show' audience understanding a Niko Bellic joke back when GTA IV was the biggest thing in video games? I can't. So it's hard to say whether video games will dominate entertainment culture in 20 years. I think nothing will dominate because there will be too many entertainment options to have a clear winner."

It's no surprise that alongside skits based on movies, comics, TV shows and action figures, video games have featured repeatedly on Robot Chicken. The highlight? In our opinion, the Final Fantasy burger joint sketch. Root agrees.

"Our Final Fantasy VII sketch from season two is one of my favorites", he enthuses. "We were all such big fans of that game when it came out. I think when I pitched that sketch, I was playing clips from the soundtrack CD to help sell the moments I was making fun of, and the other writers were like, 'YES!' And then the animation and the graphics were so spot-on. I'm really proud of that one".

And his second-favourite? "Another one of my favorite concepts — which got cut prior to animation, sadly — involved the Needler weapon from Halo. Because everyone knows the Needler sucks. I'd rather fight the enemy with a pair of nail clippers than a Needler". This scene, while cut from the show, will be included in a rough form on the release of season four on DVD.

Aware of the writing team's openness towards video games, and of the similarities between the premise of Robot Chicken and what they were working on with Spore, Maxis and Electronic Arts recently teamed up with Root and some of the show's other creators and writers to create a series of missions for the upcoming Spore expansion pack, Galactic Adventures.

"The folks at Maxis are fans of our show and asked us to help them demonstrate the game", Root explains. "It was a good fit. Our show is nothing but short-form madness, and Galactic Adventures lets players create their own short-form missions that can get as bizarre and as crazy as you want to make them."

While none of the Robot Chicken writers helped with the design of the expansion itself, they did play a role in the development of its missions. "After a day at EA learning the game, each of the writers came up with 10 one-paragraph pitches for possible adventures," Root says.

"Each list of pitches got winnowed down to one or two missions to be fully scripted. One writer, Hugh Sterbakov, had the poor foresight to write an entire trilogy, so he ended up writing twice as much as the rest of us. I think we ended up with about 10 total missions, but they might still be slogging away on Hugh's trilogy."

The experience wasn't as easy as the video here would have you believe. While good comedy is good comedy, regardless of the medium, the Robot Chicken writers ran into some unexpected obstacles (unless you're in the games business) when trying to write for a video game.

"I think I bent my brain in half trying to figure out ways to keep the player on track and experiencing the story the way I envisioned it", he says. "Plus, I also wanted my missions to be fun and have some repeat playability. In my mind that meant loading the levels with characters to murder. The problem was, the more murder-able characters I added, the more dialogue I had to write."

"When I look back at some of the games I've played in the last few years, like Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3, I have a newfound appreciation for how impossibly freaking hard it must be to write games that epic and make them not only actually work but also make them kick ass."

So having tried their hand at games writing, could there be a future in the business for Tom or any of the other Robot Chicken writers? "I personally think helping out with in-game dialogue or gags in a game or two could be fun, but I don't have the attention span to spend years and years developing a single game from the ground up", Root says.

"I have no doubt that our other writers could do it, though. Some of the sketches Mike Fasolo writes have the kind of epic scope that could only be captured in video game form. He's always writing things like the Earth splitting in half, then an asteroid splitting in half and the asteroid halves blowing up the Earth halves. Come to think of it, that sounds like a pretty good game."

A lot better than this one: "I wish we could take the Left 4 Dead framework and replace the heroes with Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Doug Goldstein and Hugh Sterbakov [Robot Chicken producers/writers]. How hard could that be? The engine already exists! Doug and Breckin would end up ignoring the zombies, arguing about which one of them wrote our 'Emperor's Phone Call' sketch and shooting each other. Hugh would keep threatening to use his shotgun on himself. The possibilities, people..."

So Robot Chicken features video games. The writing team love video games. They now have video game design experience. So I ask, what are the chances of us ever seeing a Robot Chicken game? Surely the show's sketch comedy format is ideally suited for, say, a collection of mini-games spoofing popular gaming series or characters?

"Funny you mention that!", he says. "One company came close to pulling the trigger on just such a game, but as of yet, no luck. We're definitely open to the idea, though. And by 'open to the idea' I mean 'dying for it to happen'."

I can't help but think Ratchet and Clank as I watch this trailer for Mothership Down, one of the Maxis-created adventures included with Spore Galactic Adventures, which will be available on June 23rd in the states. The weapons can't possibly be as cool and inventive, and there is no way the humor will even come close, but there's just something about the look of what I've seen so far that has me thinking of Insomniac's dynamic duo.

So, show of hands - who is picking this up?

Hot on the heels of this morning's announcement that the Robot Chicken team was providing downloadable adventures for Spore's Galactic Adventure's expansion comes this video, proving the fact. It features one hell of a Spore rendition of the titular chicken, along with a bonus appearance by Breckin "Garfield's Jon Arbuckle" Meyer. It doesn't get much better than this.

Robot Chicken co-creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich conceptualized a special campaign for Spore Galactic Adventures, which was then handed off to their writing team to add in what in the television business is commonly referred to as "the funny". The special campaign will be available for free on June 23rd when the expansion launches.

"We're big fans of Spore, so teaming up on Spore Galactic Adventures was a natural fit and so much fun for all the guys at Robot Chicken," said Seth Green, co-creator of Robot Chicken. Co-creator Matt Senreich continued: "We're all gaming geeks, so when the Spore guys said they had an alluring proposition for us, how could we say no? Instead of creating absurd worlds with toys, this gave us the opportunity to create literally anything we wanted as gamers. Geek moment. We think that RC fans will love the pretty random and absurd adventures we created and we can't wait to goof around with the ones the fans create."

While the official announcement is a bit vague on what to expect from the new adventures, they do mention planetary rest stops, man cannons, and banana monkey wars, which are of course the three core elements of any successful science fiction project.

More information should be available soon at http://www.spore.com/wtf.

Librande plans to guide students through Spore Galactic Adventures' Adventure Creator and tech them how to make game concepts come to life.

"Maxis and EA are huge proponents of college game design programs and nurturing rising talent," said Lucy Bradshaw, VP and General Manager at Maxis. "The robust creative capabilities of the Adventure Creator in Spore Galactic Adventures, empowers future game developers with a different way to experiment with game design. I can't wait to see what the students create."

The tour kicked off late last week at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It will head to the University of Southern California later this week and then Carnegie Mellon University on May 1.

"The games industry continues to grow with the rise of online gaming, casual gaming and the exciting challenges of new markets," said Cindy Nicola, VP, Global Talent Acquisition. "EA is passionate about attracting and hiring the brightest graduates as they are our next generation of leaders. Our university partnerships and the talent they produce are key components of our overall talent strategy and we are deeply committed to continuing to hire interns and new graduates across EA."

The effects tool lets you customize your adventure by adding things like strings of Christmas lights or glowing floor panels. These things aren't like items in that they're part of the environment instead of interactive objects. You'll find them in the planet editor, along with more natural effects like rainbows and meteor showers.

Sadly, most of these new screens show off the Captain editor instead of the effects menu. The one thing they do show is a boring old sunrise. To really get an idea of what you can do with the effects tool, imagine Laser Floyd and multiply the trippy factor by ten.

Once space exploration is unlocked, players can choose the Galactic Adventure tab from the main menu and get down to some real exploring – like where you get out of your ship and walk around. This gives players more of a connection to their Captain characters, especially when you start going on quests and leveling up with experience points.

What's really going to be the draw of the Galactic Adventures, though, is the adventure editor. This is a shame because there's so much to that particular facet of the expansion that I don't feel like I got to see enough of it to really write a fair preview.

Oh well. Here goes…

What is it?
Spore Galactic adventures is an expansion pack for Spore that lets you extend the space exploration segment to actual adventure gaming – kind of like the creature phase, only now you have guns and armor and stuff.

What We Saw
I got about twenty minutes with the title toward the end of an EA press junket held in possibly the noisiest club I've ever been to.

How Far Along Is It?
The build looked pretty final to me, but the game ships June 23. It's likely Maxis is doing a very careful polish with the extra time.

What Needs Improvement?
Spare Me Spore: Whatever else this expansion accomplishes, it's not going to change anyone's mind about the game. It doesn't address all the issues critics attacked the game for; it doesn't do anything particularly new or different to the established method of playing the game. That doesn't mean it's a bad expansion – it just means it's almost exclusively "for the fans."

Wings are in the way: You play the adventure mode pretty much the same way you play the creature mode – from a behind the shoulders view. However, because it's an adventure and not a virgin planet, there is often a lot of stuff on screen at one time that narrows your field of vision (buildings, trees, cars, etc.). This kind of makes it hard to play the Captain like you would an adventure game – especially if they have wings that get in the way whenever they walk into a building-dense town to talk to an NPC.

Adventure ADD: Twenty minutes wasn't really enough time to get a handle on how intuitive the adventure editor was – but I get the distinct feeling that all of the stuff you can do (planet editing, object editing, NPC dialogue trees) will likely overwhelm more than a few seasoned Spore players. Even my demo master said he'd start to create an adventure then "get ADD" and never finish it. He'd get side-tracked by some neat gimmick he invented (like disguising mines as cakes – see below) and forget what he wanted his enemy NPCs to do when they encounter the Captain (follow, territorial, defend, etc.).

What Should Stay The Same?
The Cake is teleporter Lie: All adventures have an item component. You can make your own items or choose from an extensive selection of random stuff that Maxis has cooked up for you – and then drag and drop them into your adventure. Once you do this, you can choose to set that object's "behavior" for different parts of the adventure. Like in Act 1 of your adventure, you can put a bunch of cars down in a town, but set them to be invisible. Then, for Act 2, you can set them to visible – so that when your Captain completes Act 1, the cars magically appear before him. Or – you can disguise objects with other images; like setting down a teleporter, bur disguising it as a cake. It's a very clever game mechanic that empowers the user.

The Planet Editor: I've longed for this since the original game, so I'm glad Maxis included it. You can't really change the size of the planet, but you can customize the colors, the weather, the water-to-land ratio and drop some really weird geological formations almost wherever you want.

That pre-created "Bar Hoping" adventure: According to my demo master, the Bar Hoping adventure I chose wasn't done yet – but whatever it was, it looked cool. My Captain was put in an alley between two clubs playing loud rave music (another customizable feature) and I had to get him past the bouncers to go inside and start picking up beer bottles.

Big Bang for your Buck: There is so much stuff to do in this expansion. Sure, it's overwhelming, but never let it be said you weren't getting your money's worth.

Final Thoughts
Whatever its flaws, Spore: Galactic Adventures does exactly what an expansion is supposed to do. It expands on the original gameplay, adds a bunch of new stuff to make the purchase worthwhile and does little (if anything) to appease people who've already given the game up or never tried it in the first place. The only thing you can really fault Galactic Adventures for is possibly dabbling in the dark side of EA's expansion pack practices — but I'd wait for a Spore: IKEA expansion before getting upset about it.

Doesn't help that he has a new game coming out, while Spore launched last year. Still, the online community for the game has been active — weekly challenges plus and upcoming API contest are what's going on there — and the first expansion, Galactic Adventures, is due out in June.

The house didn't fill up, but it was a pretty decent talk. In the first five minutes, Producer Caryl D. Shaw changed the name of the panel to something about her life story and used the opportunity to talk about Spore online development and her cat.

The big challenge of developing Spore for online stuff was knowing when to get the servers. The online side of the project first went into development in 2005 and Shaw bought the servers early. This turned out to be problematic since by the time the game launched last year, the servers were slightly outdated.

But ultimately, Shaw thinks it's good they started early. It got the Sporepedia off the ground without the servers crashing and set up a system of community management that grew up along with the community.

That system seems to be working fairly well; Shaw showed off the following spiffy stats for Spore's online performance since launch:

89,505,660 total uploads since June
1.5-2m uploads per week (1m per day the first week)
2.6m registered users
3500 new users a day
500-600k uniques a month to Spore.com
4.45 minutes (average time per visit)
5 – number of Web Engineers at Maxis (plus Ernie, the part-time database guy)

Her number one piece of advice to those handling online development for single-player games? "Whether you're on the game side or on the online side… don't hide from your customers," Shaw said. "Don't hide behind your desk, don't hide behind your email – get out into the community."

Oh, and more load testing. That's how you keep the servers from crashing on opening weekend.

Its pretty much a whole new game added onto the already existing one, once the Spore: Galactic Adventures expansion is released this June. A whole new game starring a space captain you create yourself, capable of guiding your little sporelings as they explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and just boldly go about their business.

One of the issues I had with the game was that it felt a bit too skeletal. Sure you could go from single cell to space exploration, but you couldn't really dig into any of those.

It looks like Spore Galactic Adventure might fix that, at least for one phase.

While retailers like Amazon, GameStop and Play have had Spore Galactic Adventures listed for a March release for a week or two now, EA made the expansion official today. It's planning to reveal details on the Maxis-developed expansion later this month at an event in San Francisco.

And, going by the wording of the invite, it sounds like EA and Maxis have additional Spore products in the pipe for 2009. We're RSVPing now and we'll let you know exactly what the "Spore line-up for 2009" is looking like in a fortnight.