After a long, pointed silence, the employee seemed to suddenly remember something. “Hey, I happen to have a couple of passes left to the premiere, are you interested?”
I sighed. “We’re really trying to find that theater with the stars’ footprints in cement. When does this premiere start?” My tone made it clear that unless the thing was starting in the next five minutes, we weren’t going to wait around.
“The movie starts in about five minutes,” he said.
“Oh.”
“There’s free popcorn and soda, and these passes will get you in to the post-premiere party next door, with more free food and drinks, and a chance to meet some of the stars of the movie. Plus, you’ll get a free T-shirt!”
Well, who could say no to a free T-shirt? Moments later, Susan and I found ourselves in the upper balcony of the El Capitan Theatre, watching the world premiere of a dinosaur movie while I secretly went through my own dinosaur-themed existential crisis. It was a pleasant but bizarre set of circumstances, and I vaguely pondered whether this was some kind of sign—maybe I should be doing my game in 3D, like the movie. Or maybe the lesson was its wholesome plot, and I should go back to one of the earlier prototypes that hadn’t focused so much on combat. One of my favorite bits in DinoCraft had been the little babies that followed the grownups around, and maybe that sense of generational growth had been the right angle to pursue after all. Or maybe this was all just further evidence that a strategy game could never capture the essence of dinosaurs after all.
Before I could decide what this whole weird coincidence might signify, though, I was hit with an even weirder one. After the post-premiere party, which was every bit as good as promised, we finally managed to get across the street to our original destination, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. As the name implies, this 1927 Hollywood landmark is a beautiful, but not exactly subdued, shrine to faux-Asian kitsch. Elaborately carved square turrets flank either side of a courtyard, which recedes far back from the street before rising up into a three-story red pagoda. Stone lions guard the entrance, and dragon motifs cover practically everything. If it were built today, public reaction would probably place it somewhere between gaudy and offensive, but as a relic from the Golden Age of movies, we’re fortunately allowed to keep enjoying it.
Over the years, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre had hosted hundreds of blockbuster premieres, from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars, but its main attraction was the courtyard. Legend has it that either a famous actress, or perhaps one of the theater’s cofounders, accidentally stepped in the wet cement during construction, and this gave them the idea to permanently memorialize the hand- and footprints of movie icons in the floor of their entryway. With less than 250 of them allotted after almost a century of operation, some consider the humble concrete blocks to be the most prestigious award Hollywood can offer. Many contain little messages of inspiration or thanks, and a few actors have pressed iconic items into the cement as well, such as Groucho Marx’s cigar, or Daniel Radcliffe’s wand from the Harry Potter movies.
As Susan and I crossed the threshold for a glimpse of all this movie history, I happened to look down at my feet. “Sid Dear,” the pavement read, “My wish is for your success.”
Once again, I briefly questioned my sanity, but the words were real. Someone named Norma Talmadge had written a message to me all the way back in May 1927. Nor was she the only one: Mary Pickford and Cecil B. deMille had each written “Greetings to Sid” on either side of Norma’s block, and just above that, Douglas Fairbanks wished me good luck. Opposite him, Bebe Daniels went so far as to call me “Our King of Showmen,” while Barbara Stanwyck declared her outright love. The whole courtyard, it seemed, was rooting for me.
Thanks to some historical pamphlets, we quickly figured out that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre had been built by a man named Sid Grauman, who was both an entrepreneur and a close friend to all of the early stars. Nonetheless, I chose to take their messages personally. I mean, there aren’t that many people in the world named Sid, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sharing.
Clark Gable called me a great guy, and both Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger wished me many happy trails. Humphrey Bogart wrote, “May you never die till I kill you,” while John Wayne insisted, “There are not enough words.” Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and countless more all mentioned me by name, and I took their encouragement to heart.
I had spent most of the weekend coming to terms with the inevitable abandonment of my beloved dinosaur game, and this historical pep talk didn’t change that reality. I’d have to pull the plug once we got back to Baltimore, and face the disappointment of my team, my publisher, and worst of all, my fans. It wouldn’t feel good at all. But at that moment, walking out of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre into the bright California sun, what I felt instead was the conviction that it was going to be okay. If the creative lifespan of an industry was longer than any one person enshrined in this courtyard, then it was certainly longer than a single project. Time kept marching on, and there would always be more cool ideas and fun adventures on the horizon.
* Achievement Unlocked: To Infinity and Beyond—Collect a piggy bank, toy soldiers, T. rex, and Mr. Potato Head.
19
ARTIFICIAL TURF
Sid Meier’s SimGolf (2002)
MY COWORKER JAKE SOLOMON once asked me point blank, “What’s your guilty pleasure?” It should be mentioned that he did this on stage in front of a few hundred people, which is not usually the ideal place to unburden your soul. Fortunately, the answer came easily.
“Excess,” I told him with a pained smile. The drawback of being able to isolate the interesting part of any given thing is that you are constantly interested by every given thing. I routinely find myself stumbling into new hobbies almost by accident, and as with my work life, I seem incapable of doing anything halfheartedly.
As an example, I like to play the guitar. I know a fair number of chords, and when I’m playing music with friends I’ll occasionally hand over the keyboards to someone else, so I can pretend to be a rock star in short bursts. But I wouldn’t consider myself astronomically talented at, or obsessed with, playing the guitar—I’m just interested in it. Therefore, I own about twenty of them.
In my defense, some are for convenience. I keep two at the office and two in our church building, because you never know whether the acoustic or electric mood will strike, and I don’t want to haul them back and forth all the time. The rest are either hanging on display at home or in various states of storage, but they do get played, as I keep insisting to Susan.
Then there are the radio-controlled airplanes, and the historical memorabilia, and the golf clubs . . . like I said, guitars are just one hobby of mine. I’m a nerd, and nerds always want to have the latest gadget. I can justify my extensive collection of game consoles as part of my job, at least, but for the most part I have to make a conscious effort to keep the accumulation below pathological levels. I once got to visit George Lucas’s library at Skywalker Ranch, which has a ladder leading up to a second-floor balcony where you can access another several thousand books. It’s probably a good thing that I’ve never lived in a house that could hold that many books, but a grand, sprawling library is the first room I’d install if I did.
One important deterrent I’ve learned is to limit myself to a trickle of information, because it only takes a few minutes with a magazine before I start thinking that this set of titanium-alloy golf clubs will finally take my game to the next level, or that digitally superior guitar amp will really make my Paul Reed Smith hollowbody sound like it was meant to. A few years back, I canceled all my subscriptions for my own well-being, and since then, I’ve been doing better. But in late 2000, when we killed the dinosaur game, I was still getting two or three different golfing magazines delivered—and I wasn’t even playing regularly.
It was in one of these magazines, hiding among the course reviews and backswing improvement articles, that I discovered a contest for designing gol
f holes. Apparently there was more to it than just laying down an oblong putting green and digging a sand trap or two. There were even course designers who were as famous as the pro tour players who stood on their creations.
Interesting.
Like Railroad Tycoon, my golfing prototype started out as a model builder rather than a competitive simulator, and I again developed it while on vacation to clear my head from a stalled title. Of course, the expectations for a prototype were much higher now, and the length of a vacation was still the same, so what was impressive in 1990 should have transitioned to impossible in 2000. But one of the secrets of being a game designer is that you get to reuse your stuff—writers can’t plagiarize their own passages; artists can’t add details to a portrait and call it new; but I can rearrange existing pieces of code into a completely different game within just a few hours. Gettysburg! already had big grassy fields, and soldiers who could walk around. All I had to do was swap out those Union grays for an argyle vest, and my golfing prototype was halfway done.
The internet offers plenty of hijackable material these days, as well. John Williams unwittingly loaned me his Jurassic Park soundtrack for the dinosaur game, while the art came from a series of prehistoric-themed postage stamps. Gettysburg! used pictures from my own Civil War books until our artists could replace them. As long as you’re talking about a temporary mockup that will never leave the office, anything is fair game. The point of a prototype is just to get across as quickly as possible what the experience could potentially feel like, if we spent the time on it.
“This feels like it could be part of the Sims universe,” Bing Gordon told me when I got back from vacation and showed him my new golfing prototype. “We should get you guys in touch with Maxis.”
In the years since SimCity, Will Wright had produced several sequels and spinoffs through his studio, including SimCity 2000 (released in 1993) and SimCity 3000 (released in 1999). There had been a brief time, in fact, when Civ II was going to be called Civilization 2000 as an indirect homage to Will’s game, but we decided that there was no point in trying to make sequels sound less sequel-y. Maxis eventually came to the same conclusion, truncating their next title to SimCity 4. But like me, Will had handed his series over to fresh talent by then, and in the actual year 2000, he had released his latest triumph, The Sims. It had been a monumental hit, of course, and as the publisher for both our studios, Electronic Arts was hungry for crossover products.
So we consulted with Will a few times, and ended up with SimGolf, which had a reasonable blend of both Sims and Tycoon-style elements. The menu was a traditional Sims interface, and the golfers spoke that curious string of nonsense syllables that Maxis had labeled Simlish. (After several months of development, we were practically fluent in it ourselves, and would regularly shout “myshuno!” to get each other’s attention in the office.) But the way to keep your customers happy in SimGolf was through environmental design, rather than manipulation of their behavior, and you still had to watch your bank statements no matter how happy the people were.
With the basics in place, I was now brought back to the central question inspired by the magazine contest: what makes a “good” golf hole? How do you score the aesthetics of fun? If the beauty of Bach could be analyzed and mathematically described, then the psychological appeal of golf surely could be, too. Unlike music, however, I didn’t have years of experience on the putting green to draw my own patterns from. I had to talk to some real golfers.
Fortunately, my Firaxis cofounder Jeff Briggs had a brother-in-law named Jonathan who was a member of a prestigious club up in New York. Somehow, Jeff convinced him to come down to Maryland along with one of his professional golfing buddies. Presumably, the focus of their trip was to play a few rounds at Caves Valley or one of the country clubs in Bethesda, but they generously took the time to meet us for lunch one afternoon to discuss what made these courses superior.
“It needs to be easy,” someone declared. “Nobody actually likes a hard course.”
“Then why not make the green into a giant funnel?” I asked. “Anywhere you hit, the ball goes in.”
“Right,” he said thoughtfully. “Yeah, okay. So, you want it to look hard, but still play easy.”
Over the next hour, we narrowed it down even further. What these guys really liked best, it turned out, was when a hole was easy for them, but hard for others. If Jonathan were especially good at chip shots, for example, then he had the most fun on holes that relied heavily on them. Golfers wanted to be the star in their world just as much as gamers did.
Slowly a scoring system began to form in my mind. We would run four hypothetical players through each hole. One would be completely average, and each of the three others would have a special talent—accuracy, distance, or curving their shots. At the end of the hole, we would compare how the three unique players performed against the average guy, and rate your hole design based on the difference. So if the average player could hit the ball around 200 yards, and the distance player usually went for 250, then you would ideally build a hill at 225 yards out. The distance hitter would make it over the top, while the average one saw his ball roll backward, and the bigger deviation meant a higher score for you.
The interesting thing about this system was there was essentially no AI involved. We had to lay out the complicated assessment algorithms, but the computer was never tasked with creating a good golf hole itself. There were no competitors encroaching on your land, and no calculated setbacks in the form of weather or financial upset. It was my first project without any element of antagonism since Solo Flight—and even that had come with a demo mode that could fly the plane without input, despite not being utilized in the main game.
Railroad Tycoon had come close to shipping without AI, but near the end of development we decided that the added urgency would be an improvement. This was around the same time that its working title, The Golden Age of Railroads, converted to the more aggressive Tycoon descriptor. Unfortunately, because we implemented the code less than a month before the game’s release, I didn’t have time to fully develop it. So rather than creating progressively smarter versions of the AI, each increasing difficulty level was defined by how much the computer was allowed to cheat. Robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan lived up to their job titles by taking on more debt than the player could, building stations in unsuitable terrain, and apparently blackmailing their rivers into behaving even when the player had been flooded directly upstream. But the game also came with an option to turn the competition off, and very few players griped about it. Generally speaking, people who like trains really like trains, so most of them were just thrilled to have their fandom acknowledged.
Even if we had taken the time to create more-nuanced algorithms, the truth is it wouldn’t have changed much. Highly realistic AI gets accused of cheating even more often than its dishonest brethren, because on some level, all players are unnerved by the idea that a computer could outsmart them. Part of the fun is learning the patterns of the AI and successfully predicting them, and when computers don’t act like computers, the only psychologically safe assumption is that they must have accessed information they shouldn’t have. AI isn’t allowed to gamble, or behave randomly, or get lucky—even though humans do all of these things on a daily basis—not because we can’t program it, but because experience tells us that players will get frustrated and quit. The same phenomenon doesn’t happen when both opponents are humans, because they’ve already tempered their expectations for the possibility that the other guy is crazy. Computers are too smart to be crazy, so if they start acting that way, we can’t shake the suspicion that they know something we don’t. Thus, from the designer’s perspective, brilliant AI is usually not our highest priority.
Even the AI in Civilization, which was more involved than most, is nothing compared to what real AI can accomplish. In 2011, an MIT professor used a machine-learning algorithm to teach a computer to play Civ II without any underlying instructions. S
tarting with random clicks and feedback from the game on whether an action was successful, the computer eventually picked up enough patterns to win the game 46 percent of the time. Once it was provided with a text version of the manual for word association—searching for passages that contained the same words displayed on the screen, and making educated guesses about what to do next given the words surrounding them—the success rate went up to 79 percent. Though I dreamed about this sort of thing early in my career, it’s frankly a little terrifying now that it’s here, and I’m happy sticking with the simpler expectations of our players instead.
SimGolf was well-received, though nearly every reviewer noted with surprise how whimsical the game was. One called it “warm, fuzzy, and pastel—a world sprung straight from the pages of a JCPenney catalog.” I suspect they based their impression on my name, rather than any kind of objective cuteness index. Users tend to pigeonhole me into the hard strategy genre despite my varied résumé. But even if SimGolf were a little more playful than my last few titles, that was the best reason for me to be doing it. Something new is always more interesting than something I’ve already done.
By the time I’d finished the game, in fact, golf was ready to take a back seat to other interests, and it was only by accident that I got back into playing the live version many years later. It started after Susan returned home from a fundraising event with what she thought was wonderful news.
“I bought you a golf foursome!” she declared proudly.
“What?” I asked, certain that I’d misheard her. Those words didn’t even make any sense.
“The PGA Champions Tour is in Baltimore this year,” she said, “and they’re having a pro-am golf tournament the day before. I bid on the package, and I won, so now you and two friends get to play a round of golf with a famous player on the Tour.”
“But it’s been years since I played,” I protested, probably setting down a golf magazine while I said it. “You realize there’s going to be people there, right?” Never mind the public embarrassment; I could easily see myself shanking the ball into the crowd. “I could kill someone!”
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 21