17
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999)
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Sid Meier’s Civilization III (2001)
WHILE I WAS MAKING GETTYSBURG!, Brian was working on another title players had been begging for, called Alpha Centauri. One of the nonmilitary paths to victory in Civilization was to win the space race by landing a small ship of colonists in the nearest star system before anyone else. The parallels to the lone settler at the beginning of the game were deliberate, and it was the most satisfying way to end the story, in my personal opinion. To anyone familiar with the series, Alpha Centauri was a clear sequel—created by the same people, operating with the same game mechanics, and picking up precisely where the original had left off. It was the “Civilization in Outer Space!” title that our fan letters had always demanded.
In a legal sense, however, it was not part of the Civilization canon. MicroProse still owned the franchise, and Firaxis didn’t dare use the word anywhere in the title or promotional materials.
The history of the Civilization copyright was long and tortuous. It started in England in 1980, when a designer named Francis Tresham published his Civilization board game through a company called Hartland Trefoil. Tresham’s design was based primarily on trade and cooperation among the players, and like many foreign titles, it was soon licensed for US release by Avalon Hill. (Tresham’s first creation, a railroad board game called 1829, served as the foundation for Avalon Hill’s 1830, which Bruce Shelley had worked on before coming to MicroProse.)
When Bruce and I started developing our “entire history of human civilization” prototype several years later, we informally called it “Civilization,” but only in the same way that Gettysburg! had once been “the Civil War game”—it was a placeholder that we expected to change later on. Marketing would surely want to call it Government Tycoon, or perhaps Sid Meier’s Latest: The Revenge, and there was no point in trying to pin down an official name before they had their say. As a former employee at Avalon Hill, Bruce was of course aware of their Civilization board game, and we might have even had a copy of it somewhere in the MicroProse “Fun Zone” (also known as the break room)—but I had never personally played it before embarking on our project.
This is not to say that my version of Civilization had no outside influences—far from it. Aside from the general “creating not destroying” concept I had first encountered in SimCity, there were two games that I very much respected, and blatantly took ideas from to use for my own purposes. The first was The Seven Cities of Gold, written by Dan Bunten in 1984. It was a land-and-sea exploration game that had very clearly shaped Pirates!, all the way down to the menu-driven interface. But even now, six years after its release, Dan’s brilliance was still compelling me to build upon it. The Seven Cities of Gold would randomly generate a new continent for each round, and gave you the option to behave honorably or cruelly with the natives you encountered, something I had never seen in a game before. Civ would later be classified as “edu-tainment” for its loose embrace of history, but in fact, that term was first invented by Trip Hawkins to refer to The Seven Cities of Gold. The game was a cloud-parting, shackle-removing, mind-blowing masterpiece for me, and there were elements of it in nearly every game I made thereafter.
The other game that directly influenced Civilization was called Empire: Wargame of the Century, by Walter Bright and Mark Baldwin. It, too, had a randomly generated map that was slowly revealed as you marched your armies across it, but unlike Seven Cities and the board game called Civilization, Empire had a significant military component. It also extended the timeline from the ancient into the modern era, and differentiated the types of units available as the clock progressed. Ironically, Walter Bright had submitted an early version of Empire to MicroProse back in 1985, but Bill apparently gave the pitch a form-letter rejection, saying that we were only looking for “action oriented real time strategy simulations.” I suspect he didn’t even play the demo, and I know I didn’t, or I would have pushed for us to publish it. The game was captivating, and at one point I asked Bruce to make a list of ten things he would improve about Empire, so it obviously played a large role in my thinking. (Incidentally, this is a great strategy for revising your own game mid-development as well. It’s important to step back and view your work in terms of concrete opportunities for improvement.)
As our development progressed, however, Bruce and I grew more and more attached to the “Civilization” nickname, and eventually came to the conclusion that no other title could be as suitable. Even though Avalon Hill’s product wasn’t a direct precursor to ours, they had the name we wanted, so Bill approached them to work out a deal. We agreed to share the rights to the name in exchange for a small fee and a cross-promotional flier in every box.
A few years after Civilization exploded, Avalon Hill released an official computer version of their board game, which they called Advanced Civilization. Though we were now competing in the same format with nearly identical names, everyone took great care to distinguish the two products. Computer Gaming World opened their review with, “No, it isn’t that Civilization,” and Avalon Hill wrote in their own self-published circular, The General, “The MicroProse version had nothing in common with our boardgame other than the theme and the name. . . . To put down [Sid Meier’s Civilization] is to insult the Holy Grail.” When we released Civilization II shortly after, no one was confused about the lines of succession.
But a couple of years after Jeff, Brian, and I headed to Firaxis, things got kind of dicey. Avalon Hill licensed their rights out to Activision for a game they dubbed Civilization: Call to Power, and at the same time, the two companies jointly sued MicroProse for copyright infringement. Avalon Hill couldn’t have afforded the suit on their own, and Activision had no legal standing without Avalon Hill, but together they hoped to gain control of one of the most successful names in gaming history.
The executives at MicroProse responded with an equally winner-take-all attitude. Instead of countersuing, they went overseas to Hartland Trefoil, the original owner of the British board game, and bought the company out entirely. MicroProse now owned the ongoing licensing deal that had been granted to Avalon Hill in the first place, and judiciously rescinded it—along with every other Avalon Hill contract.
During the tense negotiations that followed, Activision secured the right to finish their game under its current title, as well as make future Call to Power sequels without the word Civilization attached. But Avalon Hill lost everything to MicroProse, including their 1830 railroad series, which had grown into quite a successful franchise by then. To avoid bankruptcy, they were forced to sell their company to the toy maker Hasbro.
Eight days after buying Avalon Hill, Hasbro also bought MicroProse.
Safe in our offices at Firaxis, we watched these corporate shenanigans with mild bemusement. Business maneuvering could probably make for a fun prototype, if the rest of it weren’t so boring all the time. At any rate, our hands were clean and they were going to stay that way. Whoever the name belonged to, it definitely wasn’t us, and we’d made peace with this slow, public strangling of our once-beloved title. All we could do was keep making good games, and trust that quality would be more important than branding in the end.
Hasbro made one attempt to do something with the name on their own, releasing Civilization II: Test of Time through the MicroProse label in 1999, the same year as both Activision’s Civilization: Call to Power and our own Alpha Centauri. Again, the fans were not fooled. Our game was the only one that didn’t contain the word “Civilization,” and yet it was widely considered to be a more legitimate member of the series than either of the others. It didn’t hurt that the full title was Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, a name no company could buy.
Then, the real surprise happened. When Hasbro had acquired MicroProse, they also acquired at least one employee who had been around since the beginning of the Civilization series. Now a senior vice president of research and
development, Tony Parks had a strong nostalgia for those early days, and had apparently been as sad as we were to see the treatment the game had received in our absence. After the failure of their Test of Time release, Tony somehow convinced executives at Hasbro that they couldn’t fight public sentiment: Civilization belonged with the folks at Firaxis, and it would never make any money anywhere else. The fans were demanding it, and the best thing Hasbro could do would be to license the name back to us, and take their cut where they could.
Thus, against all odds, we were handed the opportunity to make Sid Meier’s Civilization III without even asking for it.
It might seem hard to understand, but I really didn’t resent all the other versions that had cropped up over the preceding nine years, insofar as they were willing to stand on their own merits. The first thing Bruce made when he left MicroProse was called Age of Empires, which was basically Civilization in real time, and it was wonderful! Rise of Nations, Age of Wonders, Europa Universalis, Imperialism, they’re all fine. It’s a philosophy I learned from the best: one of the things Dani Bunten Berry told me later in her life was how happy she was that I’d made Pirates!, because it had included all of the things she’d wanted to do with Seven Cities of Gold but couldn’t at the time—and now that someone else had taken up the mantle, she was free to leap ahead and pursue multiplayer. Dani understood that game design is an evolutionary process that we take part in together, and the growth of the industry is something we all benefit from. The ideas didn’t start with us, and they can’t end with us either.
One of my favorite anecdotes about “stealing” ideas comes from my friend Noah Falstein, who worked for Lucasfilm Games before taking the doomed position at 3DO. Noah had greatly enjoyed the sword fighting minigame in Pirates!, and when he was later tasked with creating a boxing minigame for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he couldn’t see doing it any other way. As he wrote many years later, “I stole . . . that is, lovingly paid tribute to Meier’s interface.” To be honest, they don’t look all that similar to me, but apparently he felt a fair amount of guilt over it.
Then, after Indiana Jones shipped, Noah was assigned to a new project that would soon revolutionize the adventure game genre called The Secret of Monkey Island. Though the comedic mishaps of their main character, Guybrush Threepwood, had nothing in common with my game, he was technically a pirate. This came back to haunt Noah when his codesigner tried to use their old Indiana Jones boxing code for a new sword fighting minigame in Monkey Island.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Noah told him in a panic. “This is a comedy game, and that’s . . . not very funny.”
It was, he acknowledged, “a pretty lame excuse.” But to put pirate characters back into my sword fighting interface would be too close for comfort, even in an industry that thrived on expropriation. He would either have to admit his original transgression to the team, or else come up with a better idea to replace it. But how do you make a sword fight funny? It seemed impossible. Self-preservation is a great motivator, though, and from somewhere deep in Noah’s subconscious, a helpful memory bubbled to the surface.
“You are using Bonetti’s Defense against me, ah?” said a thickly accented voice, swords clanging in the background.
“I thought it fitting, considering the rocky terrain,” came the suave reply.
Inigo Montoya pressed his advantage. “Naturally, you must suspect me to attack with Capo Ferro.”
“Naturally!” cried the Man in Black. “But I find that Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro, don’t you?”
“Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa . . . which I have!”
“In The Princess Bride,” Noah explained, “and indeed in a lot of old pirate classics going back to Errol Flynn, the sword wielders’ physical dexterity ran a distant second to their skills with insults and rejoinders.” With this flash of insight, Noah suggested that they build the duels around the combatants’ rapier wits instead, offering a multiple-choice selection of biting replies for every mocking parry. The result was indeed hilarious, and The Secret of Monkey Island’s “insult sword fighting” ended up being one of the most celebrated features of the game.
I found it especially ironic that Noah would cite Errol Flynn, since Flynn’s movies had originally inspired me as well. Games may steal from games, but everything we do is stolen from non-game stuff to begin with. My inspirations were history, art, and science, and those guys stole from each other just like I stole from them. Do enough research, and you can always find an older version of any idea. We’re occasionally credited, for example, with inventing the line “Consequences, shmonsequences” in Civilization II, but actually, it was first said by Daffy Duck in a cartoon from 1957, and Daffy’s creators got the derisive “shm-” format from turn-of-the-century Yiddish immigrants. It’s all part of our shared human culture—or dare I say it, human civilization.
Someday, if we’re lucky, an entirely new industry will steal from us. They’ll transform our work into something so unimaginably different, we’ll feel like Errol Flynn confronted with his future pixelated form. The difference between creativity and theft is that creativity adds, and each addition creates potential that wasn’t there before. If we don’t share our ideas and help one another build, we’ll never get tall enough to find out what’s next.
Another more general concept that I took from Seven Cities of Gold was that the anticipation of each new story line was at least as important as the story itself. Dan didn’t just design the game you could see and play, he also designed parts of the game that would take place entirely in your head. While the computer took several minutes generating your world, for example, clever messages spooled across the screen, like “Eroding Canyons,” and “Creating Lovely Rivers,” thus rendering a whole planet-forging cinematic in your mind without wasting a byte of disk space. Dan taught me that it was more powerful for the player to envision than to see, and for a while, my early Civilization prototype included those same kinds of messages, following his example to the letter.
Mine were eventually replaced with a real cinematic—I did have thirty-two times more memory to play around with than he did, after all—but that sense of aspirational hope remained at the heart of the “one more turn” phenomenon that Civ is famous for. Whether it’s exploring a new area, sparring with a neighbor, developing a fancy technology, or building one of the Wonders of the World, you always have multiple irons in the fire. Winning this battle might be a good stopping point, but then you’ll only be two turns away from mastering chemistry, so you figure you might as well wrap that up. By then, Genghis Khan* is marching toward you, and you can’t just let that threat sit in limbo, so you go ahead and mobilize your troops. Meanwhile your Wonder is almost halfway done, and you really want to get it taken care of, because after that . . .
A huge portion of Civilization happens in this nebulous “after that” realm, stacking potential paths on top of actual. A bad game strands you in the past (as in, “What just happened?”) while a mediocre one keeps you in the present (“Sure, this is cool.”). But a really good game keeps you focused on what’s yet to come. It’s the underlying basis for that elusive “moment to learn, lifetime to master” quality. As with chess, you can teach a young person how to look ahead one or two moves, and she’ll have fun, yet an experienced player can be engrossed by the same game, because there are enough variables to project ten, fifteen, or even twenty moves into the future. A game that runs on speculation can expand or shrink to fit any player’s comfort level.
It is true, though, that once you get this “one more turn” thing rolling, “no more turns” can become a hard thing to choose. The very first review of Civilization called it “one of those ‘compulsive-addictive’ games that one can easily stay up until 4:00 a.m. playing.” In 1992, Computer Gaming World held a poetry contest, in which 40 percent of the entries were about my games in particular, including rhymes like “His newborn was eighteen / When he glanced from the screen.” Fellow game de
signer Peter Molyneux once told a reporter that his bladder had almost exploded while playing Civ, and in later years, marketing created a fake ad for a CivAnon twelve-step support group, giving me a cameo as the clueless janitor who ends everyone’s sobriety by inadvertently revealing the new version’s release date. Civilization has even made me late to my own meetings about Civilization, so it’s not like I’m immune to its charms. But I’ve never been too concerned about the supposedly slippery slope we’re on. The spectrum from interesting, to compelling, to addicting is long and nuanced.
Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, was once asked about the addictiveness of his game, and whether he was disturbed by it. “No, what else would people be doing?” he scoffed. “They’d read a stupid book, go see a movie? No, playing a game is a good thing.”
Of course he only meant “a book that happens to be stupid,” rather than “all books are stupid,” but in fact, the value of books has not always been taken for granted. Just as this generation has fretted over the perils of gaming, the generation that grew up with the occasional county fair for entertainment considered books to be a genuine danger to their children.
“Compulsive reading,” wrote the eighteenth-century historian Johann Gottfried Hoche, “is a foolish and harmful abuse of an otherwise good thing, truly a great evil, as contagious as the yellow fever in Philadelphia.”
Later, the generation that grew up with public libraries was horrified by the proliferation of movies, leading the “purity department” of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to write scathing editorials against this so-called “addictive” activity. Then, the Academy Awards were invented, movies became understood as an art form, and everyone turned their reactionary instincts toward gaming.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 19