Steve Grand draws on his experience creating the groundbreaking computer game Creatures to explore fundamental questions about life, mind, and what it would mean to truly create artificial beings. In Creatures, players could breed digital organisms with simulated brains, genes, and biochemistry that produced emergent behaviors—creatures that learned, had moods, and died. Grand uses this experience as a launching point for examining what 'life' actually means and whether silicon-based systems could ever possess it. He argues against both naive AI optimism and biological chauvinism, proposing that life is a process rather than a substance—a pattern of organization that could theoretically be instantiated in different substrates. The book weaves together insights from biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science, explaining complex concepts through accessible analogies and thought experiments. Grand describes his own journey from game developer to independent researcher attempting to build a robot with genuine intelligence, detailing the technical challenges and philosophical puzzles he encountered. His perspective combines the hacker's pragmatism with deeper questions about consciousness, emergence, and whether understanding can arise from systems we design. Readers interested in artificial life, the nature of mind, or the boundaries between simulation and reality will find Grand's hands-on approach illuminating—he writes not as a theorist but as someone who has grappled with making artificial creatures that, in some meaningful sense, live.