[Dude, I'm gettin' a Dell]
Will Wright is my hero. He has a new game in the works called "Spore," where you start out as a single-celled organism and evetually evolve to a populated civilization in a solar system that you can traverse once you're smart enough to develop UFOs. Everything is customizable: as you evolve, you choose how you'd like to look (tentacles or fins? how 'bout some vertebrae?) and you can start building brainpower as you evolve. This, in turn, affects what type of society will evolve. And you make all the aesthetic decisions about how your creatures and their settlement looks. You can also terraform and populate entirely new worlds out in the solar system.

Of course, this probably won't come out for Mac until 2017, so I might have to ply Nick with Absinthe to get him to build me a PC.