My brother’s interaction with the game would end up illustrating one of the most important features of Civ, that “simple plus simple equals complex.” Agriculture generated food at a predictable pace. Military units fought for just one turn, and instantly one side or the other was declared the victor. Most of the game didn’t even use numbers, it was all barter and equivalence—fill up your “shield” bucket, and you got another spearman; spend enough turns learning the skill of pottery, and you could exchange it with a neighbor for bronze working. Like chess, each piece’s function was easily understood, and only after you began looking at moves in combination did the really interesting paths emerge.
This sense of aggregated simplicity had clear roots in the expansion and economic systems in Railroad Tycoon. Meanwhile, Pirates! had informed the need for balance. Which was the stronger chess piece, the rook or the bishop? Well, it depended on the layout of the board. Maybe in this round diplomacy was best, but under other circumstances the only way out was war. As always, I refused to declare one choice superior, because it was the player’s story, not mine. Considered in this light, Civilization seemed less like a stroke of genius and more like a logical progression that I’d been building up to for years. Without its older siblings to lay the groundwork, I’d venture to say the game never could have been made at all.
Original Civilization floppy disk.
PHOTO CREDIT: BRUCE SHELLEY. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.
Bruce Shelley, on the other hand, did not feel the same loving equivocation that I did about our various projects. He says he always knew Civ was unique, from the moment he played the first prototype. He even saved the original disc, partly because he regretted having no mementos from Railroad Tycoon, but also because he was sure it was destined to be “another Sid masterpiece,” as he puts it. I guess that’s one more reason Bruce’s input was so valuable: he was always better at predicting a game’s popularity than I was. To me, public reaction is something I have limited control over, so it would be foolish to bend over backwards for it, let alone stake my self-worth on it. Consequently, I’m not as impressed with myself as others sometimes insist I should be—but I also don’t feel too badly if a game doesn’t sell well. As long as I’m proud of my work, then it’s a success.
In any case, my intrepid codesigner turned out to be right. Once I finally allowed the game to spread beyond people named Bruce, the excitement among the other developers was fierce. Many would stay after-hours playing the prototype for fun, and random coworkers began coming into my office with feedback. What if you could establish caravans to improve your trade routes? What if pollution was a factor you had to deal with as your cities grew? What if certain settlers could be assigned jobs like taxman, scientist, or entertainer? What if building one of the Seven Wonders of the World gave you special abilities? What if there were more than seven of them? What if aqueducts prevented fires, granaries prevented famine, city walls prevented floods? What if lighthouses increased your navy’s speed, but suddenly became obsolete after the development of magnetism? It seemed almost compulsive, for both them and me. The more they played Civilization, the more ideas they all had, and every idea brought with it dozens of potential interactions that I couldn’t help but include. Every element of the game was connected, and every cool new suggestion spiderwebbed out into days (and nights, and weekends) of code changes. Eventually, I had to close my door and enlist Bruce as my gatekeeper, just so I could get any work done at all.
Even then, however, I wasn’t convinced the world at large would share our enthusiasm. My projects had been straying farther off the beaten path each time, and I was occasionally referred to in the press as a “designer’s designer,” implying that my games possessed a deeper brilliance that could only be appreciated by the connoisseur. I wasn’t sure it was an accurate characterization, but it did hold up in the sense that (1) I was a designer, and (2) I made games that I personally wanted to play. It didn’t bother me that strategy remained a dirty word in the industry—casual, nonthreatening things like “adventures” and “action” were okay, but everyone knew only nerds were into strategy. Conventional wisdom said you could make a specialized product for the hardcore audience, and it might turn a profit if you kept development costs down, but a strategy title would never make the big money. I loved Civilization, and my coworkers loved Civilization, but if the game had been a massive flop with everyone else, I wouldn’t have been shocked in the slightest.
Of course, it wasn’t.
MicroProse hadn’t put a big marketing push behind it, so like most of my recent games, it started as a slow burn. Ironically, the game still seemed to appeal mostly to game designers, it was just that Civilization brought out the inner game designer in everyone. When the first fan letters trickled in a few weeks after the game’s release, they had a decidedly different tone than we were used to.
“Dear Sid,” an old letter used to begin. “I played your game Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and I thought it was really good. The land battles were dumb, though. Sincerely, Your #1 Fan.”
No hard feelings; everyone has an opinion. We rarely got a letter that didn’t include some kind of criticism buried in the praise, and usually they ripped the Band-Aid off pretty quickly. But not with Civ.
“Dear Sid,” the fans would write. “I played your game Sid Meier’s Civilization, and I thought it was really good. I’m curious why you chose to start the Aztec civilization with bronze working when they’re obviously more well known for their pottery. Also, it would make sense for the trade caravans to move a little faster as your cities grew, and if you could set them up to run automatically, that would be even better. By the way, I’ve figured out a strategy that’s guaranteed to beat the game every time, using only chariots. Here’s how it works . . .”
In short, we had stamped our game with the tagline “It’s good to be King,” and they had agreed.
Some of the letters were several pages long, and included phone numbers in the hopes that we could discuss things in greater depth. Many asked for a job at MicroProse so they could personally implement their improvements. Rather than being discouraged, I saw the critiques as a net positive, because it meant we had gotten players thinking on a deeper level. They were interacting with the game as a tool, rather than an experience. Other games offered entertainment, but somehow—and I wasn’t quite sure what all the magic ingredients were yet—Civilization offered empowerment. Fans had enough control over the outcome that they no longer saw a boundary between the fantasy and the game itself. All of it belonged to them.
The next several months were both surreal and anticlimactic. The game went viral, or “became really, really popular,” as we would have said in those days. Bill called me in jubilation on the night we won our first major award for the game, but soon we had so many that he was letting news of the latest accolades wait until the following Monday, or maybe Tuesday if there were too many meetings. Meanwhile, I started to get a kind of publicity I’d never had to deal with before. Interviewers asked the same questions over and over, most of which I had no concise answers for. I couldn’t explain in a single sentence where I’d gotten the idea for the game, or what made the mechanics so addicting. I was grateful, I was honored, and I would never complain about being so fortunate—but I wasn’t very used to it yet. Just four years earlier, Tom Clancy had warned me of the pitfalls that can come with fame, and I tried very hard to keep his advice in mind as I blindly navigated the terrain myself.
I think I did okay. As time went on, I got better at knowing what to say, but also further removed from the experiences I was supposed to be talking about. New fans were discovering the game every day, but for me it was slipping into the past, becoming that game I made six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. I had poured everything I had into Civilization, and I was honestly ready to think about something else for a while.
I lent a helping hand on a few projects around the office, talking other programmers through the kinks in their code or giving a
dvice on the latest flight simulator when asked. I put my stamp of approval on the re-releases of Pirates! Gold and Railroad Tycoon Deluxe. I fiddled around with my ongoing collection of half-working prototypes. I took some time off.
But mostly, I just struggled to find a path forward, and quietly worried about how long a state of burnout could persist before it became permanent.*
* Achievement Unlocked: Midlife Crisis—Whoa, we’re halfway there.
13
IF IT AIN’T BAROQUE
Sid Meier’s C.P.U. Bach (1994)
“WHAT’S SID GOING TO DO NEXT?” For the first time, this question wasn’t just being asked by my bosses and occasional coworkers. Fans and journalists—even those who didn’t generally cover games, and had never heard of me before that year—were clamoring for news, and speculating wildly in the absence of any. There were rumors of a sequel set in outer space, and a Civil War prototype, and a phone book’s worth of industries with the word “tycoon” tacked onto the end. Some of the letters about Civ took time to offer tips for these fictional titles as well, while others simply begged to be let in on the secret.
None of them wanted to know as much as I did.
How do you top the thing that critics were calling “more addictive than crack,” and “as perfectly executed as any simulation we’ve seen?” How many Game of the Year awards can you receive before you start to worry that you’ll never be this good again?
It wasn’t hard to see that madness lay in that direction. I couldn’t let myself get caught in a cycle of always trying to outdo my last game, or I would lose whatever sliver of sanity I still retained after such an exhausting, complicated endeavor. It wouldn’t even be enough for me to step outside the strategy genre, I realized. I had to do something that no one could possibly compare to Civ, including myself.
Normally I would have looked to my own interests for inspiration, but Railroad Tycoon had taught me that even a casual diversion might turn into a serious title when I wasn’t looking. When all you have is a joystick, the whole world looks like a game. Every potential project had this dangerous mental tug-of-war looming over it, and in the end, I could only come up with one topic that I was sure I could never turn into a strategy game.
I’d been interested in music since I was very young, which is probably no surprise given my love for mathematics. The neurological connection is well-documented, and many math geniuses throughout history have also been virtuosos on at least one instrument. I don’t claim to be either of those things, but perhaps it’s fair to say that “math genius” is to “virtuoso” as “math enthusiast” is to “basement band keyboardist.” The piano entered my life relatively late, though. My first instrument was the violin.
Along with his artistic outlets in woodworking and painting, my father was very musically inclined. I can recall him playing guitar, violin, ukulele, harmonica, and recorder around the house, and it’s possible he knew how to play other instruments that we didn’t happen to have on the premises. Music lessons seemed like a logical choice for his children, but our family didn’t own a car at that time, so extracurricular activities had to be on a bus line or within walking distance. We had a supermarket, a drug store, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a camera specialty shop all within a few blocks of our urban Detroit duplex, but unfortunately, no music school.
Then, a few years after moving to the neighborhood, my mother happened to meet a Bulgarian immigrant named Luben Haladjoff, who taught orchestra at a local high school and lived just down the street from us. He didn’t take many private students, but she convinced him to see Dorothy and me at his house once a week for violin lessons. It was mostly a coincidence that this was also one of my father’s instruments—had Mr. Haladjoff been trained as a trumpeter, no doubt that’s what we would have learned instead. At just five and six years old, we were a rarity among his students, and at one point Mr. Haladjoff even arranged for us to be guest performers during the high school’s formal concert. Unfortunately, something happened in the middle of the piece that caused us to get out of sync with the older kids, and the rest of the song was a disaster. We were not invited back.
My enthusiasm for the lessons was minimal at first, though I acquiesced politely enough—my mother was determined to inject some culture into our lives, and I knew that if it weren’t this it would be something else. But over time, I grew to love playing the violin. Our concert bookings temporarily stalled after the debacle at Mr. Haladjoff’s school, but my sister and I would perform duets for our parents and their friends, and after a few years I joined a small community orchestra. Eventually, Mr. Haladjoff suggested I should audition for the Youth Orchestra, a program run by the Detroit Symphony to groom future performers.
The piece I prepared was Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, and with it began one of the longest-lasting obsessions of my life. The “Double Concerto,” as it’s commonly known, was a step up from anything else I’d ever played, and I was entranced with its beauty. More than anything else, I was fascinated by the way in which Bach’s music seemed simultaneously surprising and inevitable. There was clearly a secret, and I wanted to understand it.
Around that same time, I found a music theory textbook in our house called Harmony. It was written by a Harvard professor (and celebrated composer, though I didn’t know it at the time) named Walter Piston, and had appeared on the bookshelf as part of a collection that a family friend had been disposing of. I’m not sure my father even read the titles before rescuing them; he believed in the inherent value of books no matter what the subject was.
Piston’s Harmony was a revelation. Suddenly my two worlds became one, as page after page explained how music could be understood mathematically. Of course I had understood early on that rhythms are fractional parts of a whole, but Harmony taught me that pleasing chord combinations were as easy to calculate as ratios. Concepts were illustrated with real examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers, including many from Bach, and I was happy to see that my instincts about him had been correct. Bach’s harmonies were some of the most effective in all of music.
The violin, however, is not a chord-based instrument. It’s possible to play two-note combinations across multiple strings, or to progress quickly from one pair to another up a chain of notes, but to play three notes precisely at once requires too much pressure to sound very pleasing, and many of Piston’s examples used four or more. So in order to try out the principles I was learning, I bought an electric Wurlitzer piano from a friend at school. The $200 price tag was hefty for a teenager, but as with my first Atari computer, I tended to save my money for the important things.
Between the Harmony textbook and my existing knowledge of violin music, I taught myself how to play the piano pretty well over the next few years. I even managed to fit the Wurlitzer into my dorm room at the University of Michigan, though the thin walls prevented me from playing as much as I’d have liked. Shortly after that, my studies became filled with circuit boards and punch cards, and my musical tastes skewed decidedly modern as well. In the same way that I took coding very seriously, but used it to create entertainment, my obsession with understanding Bach’s brilliance deepened, even as I directed that knowledge toward the wonderful new world of polyphonic synthesizers.
A few months before graduation, I traded in the Wurlitzer for a Polymoog. Used by everyone from ABBA to The Moody Blues, the Polymoog analog synthesizer came with a pitch controller ribbon, three-band equalizer, self-oscillation, and independent volume control for different sections of the keyboard. Most importantly, it featured a “variation” function that allowed the musician to hand-modify its eight preset voices into almost any sound imaginable. It wasn’t just a way to make beautiful music; it was a way to create entirely new forms of music that had never existed before. Learning this system would one day help me program audio on the Atari POKEY and Commodore 64 SID chips, but for now, I put it to the more traditional use of rocking out with my new coworkers, Andy Ho
llis and Grant Irani.
A few months after I started hanging out with the basement band, Andy approached me with an offer to join his other, professional, band. They called themselves Fragile, and played a variety of popular cover tunes for nightclubs, weddings, and the occasional bar mitzvah. They even had a recurring gig at the local Moose Lodge, one of those charitable fraternal organizations. Armed with a cheat sheet of chords for “Celebration” and about twenty other radio hits, I technically became a professional musician only a few months after becoming a professional programmer, though of course one paid considerably better than the other.
After the band split up, I had rechanneled my musical interest into composing game soundtracks for several years, until sound design was politely pried from my hands—rightly so, like I said before, but still, I missed it. Now, as I cast about helplessly looking for a game that wasn’t a game, music emerged once again to offer safe harbor.
The thing that makes Bach’s work so extraordinary is the degree to which it manages to be both predictable and stunning, like the pattern of a snowflake. He routinely used something called invertible counterpoint, in which the notes are designed to be reversible for an entirely new, but still enjoyable, sound. He also had a fondness for puzzle canons, in which he would write alternating lines of music and leave the others blank for his students—often his own children—to figure out what most logically belonged in between.
Bach even went so far as to hide codes in many of his works. Substituting place values for letters creates a numeric total of 14 for his last name, and this number is repeatedly embedded in the patterns of his pieces, as is its reverse, 41, which happens to be the value of his last name plus his first two initials. His magnum opus, The Art of the Fugue, plays the letters of his name in the notes themselves (in German notation, the letter B refers to the note we call B-flat, and H is used for B-natural). At the top of one famous piece, The Well-Tempered Clavier, he drew a strange, looping flourish that scholars now believe is a coded set of instructions for how to tune the piano to play in every possible key, opening up new possibilities for variation and modulation.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 14