I needed a vacation.
9
HANG ON A SECOND
F-15 Strike Eagle II (1989)
THAT WASN’T ENTIRELY TRUE, what I said a little while ago. Technically, a flight simulator with my name on it—not in an on-the-box sense, just in the normal place on the credits page—was released in 1989, called F-15 Strike Eagle II. But I don’t think I really worked on it. And if I did, I don’t remember anything about it.
The game was basically just a repurposing of the F-19 Stealth Fighter code, nothing new to see. Maybe what happened was I was supposed to be working on it, but I chose to stay in my office making the Covert Action prototype instead. Or maybe I really did tweak the programming a little bit, and flight simulators were so uninspiring to me at that point that I blocked the entire experience. I don’t know. But I’m not comfortable taking credit for a game that I truly don’t recall contributing to in any way. Six flight simulators on my résumé is plenty; I don’t need to claim a seventh.*
* Achievement Unlocked: Life Is Short—Finish a chapter in less than one page.
10
ALL ABOARD
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon (1990)
TWO WEEKS AT THE BEACH TURNED out to be just the thing I needed. I returned to the office that August with a tan on my face, a disk in my hand, and all of my worries about Covert Action a distant memory.
“What’s this?” Bruce asked, a little surprised—or maybe not—to see that I’d been working while I was out. He turned the unlabeled disk over in his hands. “Another spy prototype?”
“Nah,” I said. “This is new.”
I hadn’t intended to come back with something dramatically different, but over the next several years it would become a fairly reliable pattern. Apparently, I do a lot of my most inspired work while on vacation. I’m not incapable of taking a break—my computer and I have a strong, but healthy, relationship. I never saturate myself in it, and I don’t neglect the outdoors or family members. Most days, I have about two or three hours’ worth of ideas to play around with, and after that I have to go recharge elsewhere. But to me, my computer is the very definition of a leisure activity, and it wouldn’t make sense to go without it. These days everyone travels with their laptops; I just happened to live in a time when computers were slightly more cumbersome. Bringing a computer to the beach admittedly turned some heads back in 1990, but loading a big metal box and a monitor into the back of the car wasn’t nearly as hard as people made it out to be.
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon box art.
© 1990 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM.
The important distinction was that I could do what I wanted on vacation, without any expectation of progress or success. It was the perfect time to experiment with something wild, or just mess around with whatever struck my fancy. Often it was game-related, but sometimes I’d doodle in an art program, or compose digital music. On this particular trip, I’d been willing to consider any diversion that wasn’t spies.
“Model railroads?” Bruce asked. As usual, his tone wasn’t overly excited or skeptical, just thoughtful. “Interesting.”
My father and I had once built a model railroad together when I was a kid—or at least, we started building one. It never really got finished, although I think that might be an intended feature of model railroading in general. It did, however, manage to take over the whole dining room. First we had to construct a large wooden frame for our future track to sit on, and then my father brought in rolls of chicken wire to sculpt a papier-mâché landscape over it. It was clear he enjoyed the painting and crafting more than the trains themselves, but they had recently become an obsession of mine, so he was willing to compromise for the sake of father-son bonding.
Unfortunately, it was not 1:87 scale trains that had caught my eye. I had gone to Switzerland a few summers earlier to visit my paternal grandparents, and discovered to my delight that their large family property was flanked on one side by railroad tracks, with the station itself only half a mile away. The train platform served double duty as the town’s central plaza, and included a smattering of shops where one relative or another would occasionally buy me a treat. But even without the promise of ice cream, I soon found myself hiking there alone each day to watch the trains. I could have basked in their thrilling size and complexity from the comfort of my grandparents’ porch, but what I really wanted to see was the large clock on the station wall. The trains always came in exactly on time, one after the other. I waited for one to be a minute early, or two minutes late, but they never were. Somehow, the trains just knew.
My grandfather got me a copy of the train schedule, a thick book that held the times for every train in every station across Switzerland. I began to learn which engines made which routes, and mentally follow a particular train’s path in the book for days until it returned once again to our little township of Bülach. The efficiency of the whole thing was both awe-inspiring and deeply satisfying, and I tried to imagine the person who ran the system, planning and coordinating and never being off by even a single minute.
I had been unhappy when I first arrived in Switzerland, and for several days I wrote entries in my diary begging the universe to let me go home. When the universe did not comply, I registered a formal letter of complaint with my parents back in Detroit, but they remained unmoved. If anything, my protests were seen as further evidence, to my father at least, that I needed this grounding in European family tradition. On the one hand, he had been the black sheep of his family, first marrying a foreign woman and then striking out for America with dreams of owning land, which was extremely uncommon in Switzerland. But on the other, I think part of him wanted to prove that his son was just as Swiss as any of my homesteaded cousins.
Whether he was right was up for debate. By lineage I was also half Dutch, by birthplace I was technically Canadian, and culturally, I considered myself totally American. Like many first-generation children, I often served as my parents’ guide and ambassador, and one of my favorite arguments against my mother’s rules was, “That’s how they do it in America!” I successfully applied this social blackmail to missed bedtimes, scattered toys, uneaten vegetables, and pretty much anything else I wanted to get away with. I wasn’t being disobedient, I assured her. I was being American.
But between the trains and the many young cousins living on the property, I soon discovered that I loved it in Bülach. My parents had emigrated from Europe before I was born, and prior to this trip, I had been only nominally aware of our extended family overseas. There were at least ten relatives living in the homestead where my father grew up, plus another twenty or so within walking distance in town, and it wasn’t unusual for most or all of them to gather for a meal or weekend celebration. In Michigan, I was an only child with no aunts and uncles, but in Switzerland, I belonged to a classroom’s worth of children—and unlike school, where my shyness occasionally got in the way, I was accepted immediately because I was family. I could also appreciate the organization and routine that went into running a household of this size. With so many people coming and going on their own schedules, we were practically a miniature train station ourselves.
Toward the end of the summer I wrote a new letter to my parents, explaining that I had changed my mind and asking if I could stay for longer. There was a local school I could attend, and my Swiss was fluent enough to manage. (Most people in Switzerland write in German, but the spoken language has evolved into a unique dialect, in the same way that Chinese diverged into Mandarin and Cantonese.) I’m sure there was plenty of discussion between adults that I wasn’t privy to, but ultimately, my parents agreed to let me stay through the end of the first semester.
Four months later, I wrote them again, to ask if I could stay indefinitely.
“No,” was my mother’s emphatic answer. “We’re coming to get you.”
I had originally flown to Zurich by myself, but she didn’t trust me to willingly board the plane back home, so she and my father flew out in person to
guarantee it. In retrospect, I think she probably never wanted me to go in the first place, but my father had insisted that it would be good for me. And it was, overall—though I think back to when my own son, Ryan, was eight, and there’s no way I’d have let him live overseas for most of a year. So, I can certainly understand my mother’s position. Especially after she ran to embrace me, and we discovered that I’d forgotten how to speak English.
It only took about a week for the words to start to come back to me, and during that time I was still able to communicate with my father in Swiss. But I can imagine the dirty looks my mother must have been giving him behind my back, thinking that he had allowed her son to forget his home entirely. Eventually words like “train,” and “station,” and “totally cool 200-page schedule” emerged, and she began to get a glimpse into my new obsession. I don’t know how long it was before my father decided we should make a model train, but her tolerance for our sprawling project may have been bolstered by the hope that, on some level, it might help Detroit compete with Switzerland.
Like I said, though, it didn’t really work. The problem was that model trains are less about the running, and more about the building. One of my recurring tasks was to push in these tiny black railroad spikes, with the traditionally hyper-accurate kit demanding around ten spikes for every one inch of track. I don’t know what my father was working on, but the spikes were all mine, and I spent hours and hours pushing in each tiny connector. This was not the part of trains that I was interested in, and it clearly wasn’t his idea of fun, either, so it’s not surprising that we never managed to finish the thing. At some point, my mother’s patience waned, and the whole setup quietly disappeared. She got her dining room back, but I never lost that childhood fascination with schedules and routing, which is how I ended up with the model train simulator that Bruce was now holding in his hands.
It wasn’t a game, really, just a way to lay out tracks without making your fingertips sore. But Bruce was more of a typical train enthusiast, with a stockpile of knowledge about different engines and historical nuances that I’d never delved into, and he saw the potential. Back at Avalon Hill, he had even designed a railroad board game called 1830, though it focused on general land control instead of hands-on routing. Bruce immediately began suggesting details that could be added to the prototype, and I was happy to oblige, as long as it meant I didn’t have to think about Covert Action.
Then, something revolutionary happened. Fellow designer Will Wright released his magnum opus, SimCity, and the phrase “god game” entered the lexicon. The idea had come to him while working on a different title, Raid on Bungeling Bay, after he realized that he enjoyed designing the levels more than bombing them. Not entirely surprising for a game designer to feel that way, but he came to the radical conclusion that others might agree with him. Will had spent years trying to convince publishers that his city-building simulator was a game at all, until finally he and a partner formed their own company to release it themselves in February 1989. The first version was for the Macintosh, but with success came ports to other machines, and sometime later that year—just as Covert Action was floundering, and my model train prototype was emerging—I got the chance to play SimCity on the PC.
It was a game. It was about creating, rather than destroying . . . and it was a game. The objective was dominance over one’s own limitations, rather than a morally inferior antagonist . . . and it was a game.
My railroad simulator was a game, too.
In hindsight, it’s a little odd that I hadn’t yet drawn the parallel between planes and trains. Of course a simulator could be a game! My career had been built on blending game fiction with aeronautic fact, and it would have made sense to forge the same alloy with other vehicles. True, trains never shot each other down, but there had been no weapons in Solo Flight, either, just a friendly mail bag waiting to be delivered.
Possibly I’d missed the connection because train simulators were already uncharted territory. The flight simulator genre was established and even somewhat crowded, so it had been necessary to put my own twist on things—combining gameplay with technical realism—in order to stand out. But with trains we were alone, making it up as we went along with no challengers to urge us forward. It’s hard to think outside the box when there is no box. At any rate, SimCity was either the kick I needed to see what was right in front of me, or else maybe the reassurance that my intuition was feasible after all, and from then on, I knew this wasn’t a distracting little side project. We were making a railroad game.
I began prototyping in earnest, delivering copies to Bruce for feedback on an almost daily basis. Before long we had added an economic system to carry commodities from one city to another, and terrain challenges like mountains and rivers. There was even a postal delivery option, just like in Solo Flight.
1989 came to a close with no completed projects from me, but Bruce and I narrowly managed to convince the executive team that the railroad prototype was worth finishing. SimCity’s proven success in the marketplace probably helped a little, but I think they mostly agreed because I was only using a bare minimum of staff. Sure, I could have forced a confrontation, and they would have thrown up their hands and said, “Well, Sid’s going to work on what he’s going to work on,” but the assignment of paid employees was pretty clearly in their domain, and I wasn’t prepared to go back to doing everything by myself. So we made our case, and they agreed to let me keep Bruce, plus one artist and a handful of support staff toward the end of production. But most of the in-game graphics would have to be mine, and we were to wrap it up quickly.
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon screenshot.
© 1990 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM.
Soon after that, Bruce’s feedback took an unexpected turn. It was unfair, he noted, that his bridges kept washing out in floods. I countered that SimCity had included a robust variety of natural disasters, including tornadoes, earthquakes, and non-copyrighted Godzilla-ish monsters who stomped through buildings with abandon. Compared to all that destruction, the occasional bridge washout didn’t seem so ruthless. Besides, flooding was a legitimate concern for rail companies, certainly more so than sea monsters were for city planners.
But Bruce reminded me of one of my own axioms of game design: make sure the player is the one having the fun. “When my bridge is knocked down for no reason,” he said with a placid shrug, “I’m not having fun.”
He was right, of course. It seems like players ought to appreciate the hardships we throw at them—that the whole reason they play is to prove their worth. But it’s not. People play games to feel good about themselves, and random destruction only leads to paranoia and helplessness. Thwarting an enemy’s attack feels worthy, but recovering from an ambush is a relief at best. Unfortunately, the flip side of that imbalance is that the designer feels powerful and clever, which is what makes these unexpected setbacks so tempting to implement. As major plot points, they’re practically universal: your trusted partner steals the treasure; the damsel who begged for help is a double agent; the noble scientist has a secret weapon to wipe out mankind; the princess is in another castle. Or in other words, the player did everything the designer asked of them, and then the rules changed for no reason. A sudden reversal of fortune is only exciting or dramatic when it happens to someone else. When it happens to you, it’s just a bummer. The player may soldier on out of defiance, or irritation, or just a basic acceptance that this is how games are supposed to be, but their experience has been diminished nonetheless. I had recognized these pitfalls when they were part of a linear storyline, but Bruce’s comment helped me see that the same principle applied to even the tiniest plot points in open-world games. All random obstacles are, on some level, crafted with an “imagine the look on their faces when” mentality, which can also be loosely translated as, “Hey! Hey! I designed this! Look at the big brain on me!” The game isn’t supposed to be about us. The player must be the star, and the designer as close to invisible as possible.
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon screenshot.
© 1990 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM.
There was one other detail that was bugging me about the bridges. My aversion to violence was well-known around the office by then, and it had become a sort of joking mantra that “no one dies in a Sid Meier game.” I’d glossed over a few theoretical characters in the early military titles—we didn’t have the resources to animate pilots parachuting out of their planes, or submarine captains diving through an escape hatch—but you also couldn’t prove they didn’t survive the wreckage. In Pirates!, the enemy’s men never drowned; they were always captured and put to work. And up until I’d abandoned it, the Covert Action prototype had made it clear that your weapons were nonlethal. Yet now, in my least aggressive game ever, trains full of innocent crew members regularly plunged to their death over a washed-out bridge.
The loss of the train was necessary, otherwise there would be no incentive to pay for a sturdier bridge. But the wholesale slaughter of loyal employees made me uncomfortable. So I asked our artist, Max Remington, to draw the engineer and other crew members clearly jumping out to safety just before the train went over the edge. It was a tiny detail, but it kept the game’s universe consistent.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 11