Enforcing my “no one dies” rule was especially important to me in this case, because like Pirates!, management had declared that this weird little railroad game would need my name on the box to help it sell. It would turn out to be the tipping point for all future name-branding, but the ramifications hadn’t yet become apparent to me. I had released several games in the interim without my name, and frankly, the executives seemed to be using it as a mark of low confidence rather than any kind of personal exaltation. But I couldn’t allow my name to go on something I wasn’t completely proud of, so there had to be no ambiguity. The conductor lived.
A few weeks after Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon was released, Bruce and I sat together on an Amtrak train headed up to New York. (If only I could have given their schedulers a copy of the game.) We were on our way to some kind of promotional event, but our minds were not focused on the interviews awaiting us. As always, we dreamed about what came next.
“This game was pretty fun to make,” Bruce said.
“It was,” I agreed. “We should do another one.”
I had never committed to collaborating with a particular team member without at least a working prototype before, but I had liked working with Bruce very much, and didn’t want to lose him to another project. Aside from our similar demeanor and work ethic, Bruce had proven during Railroad Tycoon that he could fill in the gaps.
The best working relationships are between people with complementary skills. Bill Stealey filled in my gaps on the business side, so he and I worked well in that regard, and obviously the sound and art guys were better at doing their jobs than I was. But when it came to design, I had been predominantly alone, or else collaborating with people who were skilled in all the same ways I was. I’m very good, for example, at ruthless self-evaluation. Even talented people have mostly bad ideas, and it’s critical in creative fields to let go of your ego and immediately bag anything that isn’t pulling its weight. But sometimes the wheat gets in with the chaff, and Bruce often saw a glimmer of value in an idea that I was ready to scrap. At the same time, he never got distracted by the parts of the game that weren’t finished yet. I could hand him a broken prototype with terrible graphics, overpowered enemies, and a crash bug three turns in, and he could look right past these immaterial complaints into the heart of what the game was really about. Where there was potential, he saw potential, and he could isolate areas for subtle improvement without getting distracted by what we both knew was easily fixable.
Fortunately, he was on board.
“Something bigger.”
“What’s bigger than the history of railroads?”
“The entire history of human civilization!”
We laughed at the absurd truth of the statement, but as soon as it was said out loud, I don’t think either of us could have settled for anything less. We were not the type to turn down an interesting challenge. At the age of twenty-eight, I had declared in my very first instruction manual that I would one day “write the ultimate strategy game.” Now, at thirty-six, I figured I was ready. Age and experience may bring wisdom, but sometimes it’s useful to be a young person who hasn’t learned how to doubt himself yet.
11
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, PART I
Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991)
A WEEK OR TWO LATER I SAT in the hospital, proud husband and new father. People try to tell you what to expect when your first child is born, but it never does justice to the real thing, so I won’t attempt to here. In a nutshell, it was amazing—and despite being objectively very similar to every other wrinkly little kid in the world, this particular kid in front of me was actually the best one.
But once the action is over, hospitals are pretty boring. Someday it would be socially acceptable to bring digital entertainment with me, but I had known better than to try it this time. Gigi and our son Ryan were both resting, so I decided to take a walk and maybe find something to eat.
The Indianapolis 500 was playing on a television out in the hallway, and I studiously assigned some of my attention to it so that the time might pass quicker. It was an interesting race, as far as those things went. There had been a big upset after the front-runner, Emerson Fittipaldi, had to make an early pit stop for failing tires, and now it looked like Arie Luyendyk, “the Flying Dutchman,” would take the crown. It’s possible I felt a bit of patriotic pride for Holland as I watched him zooming around the track.
Car racing requires deft maneuvering, of course, but strategy is at its core, as Fittipaldi had been so recently reminded. A professional driver must take a holistic approach to winning, with particular focus on the resource management of tires, fuel, and mechanical parts. A few racing games had begun to pay lip service to the player’s overall career, as we first had in Gunship, and some even offered a system of vehicle upgrades between races, but none had yet captured the mental side of the experience. What if you could find a way for those equipment decisions to be weighed mid-race, just like the drivers did? It wouldn’t be easy to keep track of so many elements while swerving around the track, but maybe you could let go of some of the speed in favor of the strategy. Taken to its logical conclusion, you could even have a turn-based racing game.
This was the eternal divide in the strategy genre: real-time versus turn-based. When the clock keeps running and everyone can play at once, there is an immediate increase in excitement. Quick thinking is rewarded over precision, and those with short attention spans finally get their day in the sun. But while the payoff is instant and ongoing, the ratcheting intensity can easily overflow into confusion and frustration. Turn-based gaming, on the other hand, is slow and methodical, and any excitement felt in the beginning is anticipatory at best. The comparative lack of intensity can risk sinking into boredom, but by the end, the payoff is usually bigger, because you’ve invested more time and personal choice into the outcome.
Both styles can be a disaster in the wrong setting, but sometimes the most interesting games come from a deliberately nontraditional choice. Consider, for example, a real-time chess match: all the same rules as regular chess, but with no requirement to wait for your opponent to take their turn. If you were quick enough, you could slide a bishop diagonally across the board, capture a piece, and slide back out of range before your opponent could retaliate. Then again, they might have snuck in and captured your knight while you were busy with the bishop. You’d probably have to institute some new rules like “one hand at a time” and “no shoving” just to keep things sane, and I don’t know if it would work in the end—but it’s easy to see how changing that one factor creates a radically different game.
Now if only parenting could be modified into a turn-based campaign, instead of the white-knuckled real-time melee I knew I was in for. But like I said, when you play in real time the payoff is instant.
Paternity leave wasn’t really a thing back then, but I did take some vacation days after Ryan was born, which in theory meant I could work on whatever I wanted—at least when he was sleeping. But the timing was such that I was still enthralled with my latest project. Just two weeks earlier, I had handed Bruce the first playable prototype of Civilization.
It was not good. It wasn’t horrible, necessarily, but no fan of the series would recognize it today. The clock ran in real time, as it had in Railroad Tycoon, but really it was more like SimCity on a global scale: zone some areas for agriculture, zone some others for mining, then sit back and watch your empire grow.
Unfortunately, neither “sit back” or “watch” are features to be proud of in a game. That’s what movies are for. Making players stop to ponder their next move is fine, but taking over the story is not our job—nor are we very good at it, despite the perpetual instinct among designers to try. We simply can’t compete with the panorama of a movie, or the length of a novel, or the acoustics of an album, and prioritizing these features over gameplay will always lead to disappointment. As Chris Crawford once wrote, “The time has come for us to outgrow Hollywood envy. . . . Sid Meie
r makes a pathetic Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he makes a magnificent Sid Meier.” Other works of art are successful when the performer is interesting, but a game is successful only when the player is interesting. Our job is to impress you with yourself, and on that, we have a monopoly.
I had run into a similar issue a few years earlier, with my wargames that could play against themselves to a completely predictable outcome. This time around, at least, I sensed there was a problem right away. But before I could identify what it was or how to solve it, my lack of published titles finally became too much for executives to put up with.
“I need you to finish Covert Action,” Bill told me. “We have to sell some games.”
Though I didn’t like being derailed, Civilization was admittedly stalled for the moment, and Covert Action was close to being done, if you were willing to tolerate the repetitive story lines. So, Bruce and I set Civ aside, and dug in to finish our old spy prototype as quickly as we could. I wasn’t embarrassed by it, but I wasn’t especially passionate about it, either. Only after the game was on shelves did it strike me how I might have fixed it.
Just like in Pirates!, the primary gameplay feature of Covert Action was jumping back and forth between the overarching story and the various minigames—lock picking, code breaking, and so on. What had made Pirates! successful, however, was the fact that the main story line was relatively simple. With Covert Action, I had tried to increase the narrative complexity without sacrificing any details in the minigames. It was like two games in one, which sounds great in theory, but in practice was as distracting as switching back and forth between two different movies. After spending fifteen minutes breaking into a building, the players would emerge with only a vague memory of which clues had sent them inside to begin with. I should have simplified the minigames, or even better, cut way back on the procedurally generated stories that I was never happy with in the first place. Each half was strong on its own, but forcing them to compete dragged them both down. Combining two great games had somehow left me with zero good ones.
The notion that “one good game is better than two great games” was such a revelation that it became known in my mind as “The Covert Action Rule.” Many of the designers I mentor now weren’t even born when that game came out, so we’re more likely to talk about the issue in terms of where a game’s “center of gravity” is. But the lesson holds, and I’ve never stopped citing the truth of it to myself or others. If anything, it’s grown in relevance, since back then we at least had limited computing resources to restrain us. These days, the easiest thing in the world to do is more, and if we’re not careful we can end up with three or four games all jammed into one. Deciding what doesn’t go into the game is sometimes more important than deciding what does.
Despite being an involuntary assignment, the break to work on Covert Action was good in the long run, because it allowed me to spend some time mulling over just what was going wrong in Civilization. Finally, it occurred to me to try it as a turn-based game, and just like it would have in chess or racing, that one decision changed everything. Suddenly, the player was doing instead of watching, anticipating instead of scrambling to figure out what had just happened. Their whole brain was engaged, rather than just the tips of their fingers.
Other changes quickly followed. There was something magical, I realized, about starting from nothing. Even an empty map is still a map, full of mountains, rivers, and predetermined expectations of what the player can or can’t do. But a hidden map—a single settler dropped into the wilderness, able to see nothing but the nine squares surrounding them—was quietly grand. It allowed the player to imagine a seemingly infinite set of possibilities in the blackness beyond. There might be treasure just one square over, or an enemy lurking perilously nearby, and that uncertainty made the urge to start exploring both intense and immediate.
What’s more, if this was (as I now understood) a game about personal decision-making rather than the uncontrollable march of time, then the first step shouldn’t be zoning a theoretical city. It should be establishing one: declaring your place in the world and your intent to rule it. Symbolically, it felt like the difference between signing a deed for a distant frontier versus driving a flag into the dirt with your own callused, sweaty hands. The player should plant their first city right where they stood, I decided, or close enough to it, and it should trigger a suitably commemorative, full-screen animation. Rome founded: 4000 BC. Never mind the covered wagons and simple yurts—this is Rome, capital city of a mighty civilization, and it will be glorious. To this day, when I play Civilization, I almost always choose the Romans.
The question of who else to include, however, was a tricky one. From a practical standpoint, I could store data for only about fourteen civilizations. (I really would have preferred sixteen, because the nature of binary code makes 24 much more satisfying than [23 + 6], but computers are notoriously indifferent to such feelings.) The geopolitical landscape in 1990 encompassed nearly two hundred countries, and that wasn’t even counting all the great historical civilizations that didn’t exist anymore. Obviously it made sense to skip the most obscure ones, but that still left a lot of midtier rivals: who was to say whether samurai or Vikings would be more compelling for the player?
Meanwhile, there was at least one major entity on the world stage that should have been a given, but I hesitated to commit due to historical baggage—namely, our sometime nemesis Germany, which had finally allowed the last of my banned games, F-15 Strike Eagle, back onto its shelves barely one year earlier. I knew I wanted each civilization to have its most iconic ruler at the helm, but German law prohibited any media that mentioned Hitler by name, regardless of context, and it felt wrong in any case to create a game where he could potentially come off as the good guy. On the other hand, leaving the Germans out felt like a blend of cowardice and censorship—and for all I knew, the BPjM would still ban Civilization even without the presence of their former Führer. But again, this was Hitler. I didn’t want anyone using my game to celebrate him. (It’s worth noting that Chairman Mao and Stalin both went into the game without any doubt on my part or comment from others. The rules about what was acceptable didn’t always make a lot of sense.)
I struggled over the inclusion of the Germans right up until the end of development, before finally putting them back in under the leadership of Frederick the Great. We’d probably all know a lot more about poor Frederick if Germany didn’t dominate the history books in other ways: he had one of the longest reigns of his era, and won several wars despite tactical disadvantages. He was a generous patron of the arts, instituted freedom of the press, and encouraged the lower classes to become judges and government officials. It’s not his fault someone else stole the spotlight through notoriety instead of the traditional qualities of leadership. At any rate, the Germans’ reinstatement came so late in the process that our first run of manuals still referred to their former placeholder, the Turks, and we had to include a note in each box explaining the discrepancy.
In the meantime, however, there were plenty of non-controversial game elements that needed my attention. Some strategy games focused on military battles and maneuvering, while others prioritized resource gathering and economic strength—but I wanted both. Players should be able to engage their troops over a piece of land precisely because it contained valuable resources, I thought, while simultaneously developing technologies to use those resources in increasingly advanced ways. This was supposed to be a game about the entire history of civilization, and I wanted the player to control everything a real world leader did.
Likewise, it was common for games to set rules for governing cities, but in reality there were a number of political systems to choose from—or even switch between. History revealed a reasonably clear progression through anarchy, despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, and finally democracy, but that path was rarely stable. War or mismanagement could easily knock a population back a few steps, and even forward progress often brought a period of tran
sitional chaos.
All of these factors went into the game. To advance from despotism to monarchy, for example, the player had to first develop the concept, or “technology” of monarchy (which itself could lead to feudalism, and then chivalry, which enabled the player’s military units to upgrade to knights). Then they had to stage a revolution, and suffer through a turn of anarchy before officially ascending the throne. As governments modernized, however, so did their constraints. Things like martial law—i.e., calming a discontent citizenry by stationing military units inside your own cities—shouldn’t be available, I decided, to rulers who had advanced beyond communism. Keep the people happy, or you’ll find yourself forced to regress your society in order to retain control at all.
It was an admittedly simplified understanding of political history, but that was intentional. Unlike our military games, which relied on technical manuals like the Jane’s Fighting Aircraft series, research for Civilization tended to come from more generalized history books, some even aimed at children. I wanted to simulate the overall experience of building an empire without getting bogged down in the specifics of how existing empires had done it. It didn’t matter, for example, that gunpowder was originally developed for medicinal purposes in China—what mattered is that you, as a civilization, could have discovered it any time after the perfection of iron smelting. You were rewriting history, not reliving it.
Besides, “simplified” was already proving to be complicated enough. The more elements I added, the more I had to acknowledge the overlapping nature of their prerequisites. Astronomy (for improved navigation) grew out of mysticism (increased contentment for your populace), but it also required mathematics, which could separately provide catapults to the military without any help from mysticism. I began laying out the various cultural advancements into a complicated flowchart I dubbed the “tech tree.” No branch of it could be neglected forever, but players should be able to decide whether mapmaking or ironworking was a higher priority for them, perhaps based on whether their first city was established closer to a coastline or a mineral deposit. More choices meant more personal investment in the outcome, and more reasons to try again for a successful one.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 12