She had been so pleased to present this gift to me, though, and I didn’t want to disappoint her by refusing. So I started taking lessons every week, to avoid both humiliation and potential manslaughter charges, and by the time the tournament rolled around, golf had grown from a latent diversion into a full-blown hobby. The irony was that a few weeks before the tournament, I pulled a muscle and couldn’t play after all. We gave the tickets to our golfer friend Jonathan, his son, and a former artist at MicroProse named Murray Taylor, and they had a great time. But as soon as I was healed, I was back out on the putting green with my newest set of high-tech golf clubs.
And while it does mean I’m perpetually short on closet space, I think having a slightly obsessive personality is a useful thing. On the one hand, it keeps me focused on the quality of my work, but on the other, it provides critical sources of outside inspiration, which often contribute in surprising ways. My game devoted entirely to Bach’s music might have been ahead of its time, for example, but his work influenced several other projects, and even made a notable appearance in SimGolf. Testing had revealed that when laying down tiles of fairway, the confirming sound effect of each square quickly escalated from helpful to annoying. So I replaced the ordinary clacking sound with the notes to a well-known Bach cantata called “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” (The title may be unfamiliar, but you’ve almost certainly heard it at a wedding or two.) With this tiny change, the most repetitive part of the game suddenly became one of the most endearing. Fans felt smart for recognizing the piece, amused by its presence, and subtly motivated to keep building so they could complete the tune. SimGolf wouldn’t have been as good if I hadn’t maintained an interest in music—and wouldn’t have existed at all if I hadn’t maintained an interest in golf. A designer who’s only interested in games will find it very hard to bring anything original to the table, and I’m sure this is true in other fields, too. Whatever it is you want to be good at, you have to make sure you continue to read, and learn, and seek joy elsewhere, because you never know where inspiration will strike.
20
INTO THE WIND
Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Live the Life (2004)
*
Sid Meier’s Railroads! (2006)
CIVILIZATION III SEEMED TO ACT as a falling domino, and over the next several years, nearly all of the loose MicroProse properties would be returned to us one by one. The next to come home was Pirates!, which Hasbro had sold to the French company Infogrames, who had then begun calling themselves Atari after those naming rights went up for sale. I’m sure it was mostly a financial decision on “Atari’s” part, just like it had been for Hasbro to let us make Civilization III, but it still felt really good to be acknowledged as the rightful caretakers of the Pirates! legacy.
With the seventeen-year gap, it made sense for a new Pirates! to look and feel very different from the original, but I found the transition surprisingly hard to cope with. Civilization had evolved gradually, but catapulting an old title into the modern age required both a technological and an emotional overhaul. I was especially resistant to the idea of 3D graphics, which were once again the hot new thing.
“It’s a flash in the pan,” I told the team. “It’s not going to stick.” The only thing 3D reminded me of was chunky old flight simulators and their attendant coding struggles. Years of successful 2D titles had convinced me that it was just a marketing gimmick, not to mention a huge resource hog—with so much processing power dedicated to that beautiful 3D environment, the rest of the game inevitably suffered. It didn’t matter how much everyone oohed and aahed in the first 30 seconds if there weren’t enough substance beneath it to keep them coming back for more. No, two was plenty of dimensions for me.
The team’s protests made it clear that I was alone in this line of thinking, but I held firm. We were talking about Pirates!—my first adventure game, my first break from company tradition, my first namesake—and it had to be done right.
All projects ebb and flow to a certain degree, and at some point most will reach “the Valley of Despair.” It’s that moment when it seems nothing is working, no one understands your vision, the interface is ugly, the gameplay is boring, and you can’t imagine how you’ll ever finish it. Usually it happens about halfway through the project, when the game gets too big to hold in your head all at once, and the days fill up with meetings, and every adjustment throws eight other variables out of whack. But occasionally, it happens earlier, when it turns out that the plan you were stubbornly clinging to wasn’t as good as you thought it was.
“Fine,” I thought miserably. “Let’s see what 3D would look like, just for the heck of it.”
We had all the latest tools at the office, but so far they’d only been used on some introductory cinematics for Civ III, plus one Firaxis logo screen that looked like a giant blimp flying by. I hadn’t fiddled around much with the technology, but it wasn’t my style to stand over someone else’s shoulder dictating what I wanted to see. So I spent a long Fourth of July weekend at the office, teaching myself how to use our new 3D engine just enough to create a ship battle prototype.
When I was young, my father and I used to go sailing on Cass Lake, which is right on the thumb knuckle of Michigan’s mitten shape. Though the majority of the shoreline is private property, the northern bank is within the scenic Dodge #4 State Park (the first three in the series being strangely nonexistent). In addition to sandy beaches and a few fishing spots, there is a wide public boat launch, and on pleasant weekends, you’ll find everything from canoes to small yachts easing their way down the shallow concrete ramp into the water.
Ours was a simple but convenient craft, easily strapped to the roof of our recently purchased gold station wagon. My dad had ordered a do-it-yourself kit called the “Go” that included a premade hull, mast, and sails, and required only a few sheets of plywood and some labor to complete the deck and make her watertight. Small boat kits were fairly common in those days, but this one was unusual because it had no rudder, and we would frequently get hailed by other recreational sailors as we carried it to shore.
“Hey, ah . . . there’s something wrong with your boat, buddy.”
“No, it’s fine,” my father would say, waving back cheerfully. In confirmation, he and I would climb into our little dinghy and deftly maneuver into the open water, using only the wind and a hard-earned familiarity with the physics of sailing.
The boat really wasn’t meant for two, especially not with the constant moving back and forth one has to do to keep the rigging pointed in the optimal direction. So once my father was satisfied with my navigation skills, he let me take the boat out by myself, standing on the ramp with his hands on his hips and giving occasional advice at the top of his lungs until I was too far out to hear him. Fatherly pride quickly gave way to boredom as I refused to return to shore, and soon he had to build a second boat for himself, this time entirely from scratch. We would sail side by side for hours, racing for short distances and admiring the fancy houses along the opposite shore, until my sense of the wind was second nature.
I had tried to bring a little bit of this experience into the original Pirates! by making the player contend with wind direction during battles. The way to move forward into the wind is by tacking, or sharply angling your ship back and forth, like a road winding up a steep mountain. I had assumed everyone knew this, but many players found the process counterintuitive, and it was generally considered one of the more frustrating aspects of the game. With 3D, however, I was able to include so much more nuance. The ship tilted with your turns, and steered from the helm in believable arcs rather than rotating from the middle like a dial. The sails billowed and twisted as they caught the wind, and fluttered helplessly when aimed too directly into it. For the first time, the maneuvering felt true enough for non-sailors to grasp what was going on.
Plus, it was a ton of fun to animate all the little pirates jumping off the enemy ship before it sank. We’d bent the “no one dies” rule a f
ew times over the years, but I wanted Pirates! to retain its sense of innocence, and if 3D could help us do that, so much the better.
Of course in retrospect, Pirates! had been the perfect instrument for 3D even without the swimming scallywags. It was the most story-based game I’d ever made, ideally suited for both picturesque environments and full-scale cinematics. The original’s main breakthrough had been an extravagance of still images on the screen, and now the remake could once again showcase the latest graphics technology.
Once I’d finally seen the light, the team was reinvigorated and the rest of the game fell easily into place. But to be honest, I’m still wary of 3D cinematics even today. Certainly there are appropriate uses for it, but 3D has an almost hallucinogenic ability to convince game designers that they’re moviemakers. Stephen Spielberg* can’t react in real time to the twitch of your wrist, or change the ending to suit your mood. His interaction with you, profound as it may be, is strictly one-way, and the worst thing we can do is subordinate our unique two-way abilities beneath a jealous imitation. Beautiful is nice, if you can swing it, but we don’t need to look any further than Minecraft to prove the modern-day value of gameplay independent from graphics.
Even with our priorities firmly in place, the new Pirates! had to contend with the constraints of added graphics more than once. In the opening 3D cinematic, for example, we introduced an overarching nemesis who could be hunted throughout the game. In keeping with the spirit of the original, Marquis Montalban’s nefarious story line remained optional, but simply assigning him a nationality—which we had to do, in order to animate his clothes and accent—caused problems for players who wanted to stay on good terms with the Spanish. Attacking a criminal within an ally’s borders wasn’t an impossible scenario, and we wouldn’t let it damage your friendship too badly. But if the player went so far as to court the governor’s daughter in Havana, she would soon be kidnapped by Montalban’s subordinates and whisked away to his home country—which is to say, the cantina next door to the governor’s house. We acknowledged the plot hole with a little humorous dialogue and moved on, but it illustrates how even a single cinematic cutscene can harden the story structure, and end up removing more plot than it adds.
Shortly after the modernized Pirates! was released, I found myself in Germany with a few hours to spare between press interviews. We decided to visit a tourist attraction in Hamburg called Miniatur Wunderland, home of the largest model train in the world. At the time, they had just finished their fifth major section, with a total of 560 trains pulling nearly 6,000 cars behind them. Several hundred other vehicles rolled freely on magnetic pathways hidden beneath the city streets, and each hour the model’s twenty-six computers ran a full day’s worth of drama: police cruisers pulled over speeding civilians, firetrucks responded to flickering windows leaking tendrils of real smoke, and a space shuttle periodically launched in search of tiny, tiny aliens.
It was both an adorable and perfectly timed experience. Fans had begun asking for other classic remakes almost as soon as the new Pirates! had been announced, and this little side trip to Hamburg was just the thing to get my creative juices flowing for an update to the original Railroad Tycoon.
There were ownership issues, as always. Immediately after my departure, MicroProse had sold the license to PopTop Software, who had later been acquired by Take-Two Interactive. Coincidentally, we were already in talks with Take-Two after they had purchased the Civilization license from Infogrames in late 2004, though the buyer’s name wasn’t made public for several months in order to keep the development of Civ IV under wraps. In just eight years, Firaxis had already had relationships with four different publishers—Electronic Arts, Hasbro, Infogrames, and Atari—and while some of these were technically the same group of people under a different name, there were always new executives to answer to, and the disruption to the workflow was the same. In the case of Hasbro, we didn’t even get the chance to release a single game before the corporate moniker had to be changed once again. Now, we were looking at a fifth relationship with Take-Two, and more than anything, we just wanted stability.
So, instead of signing yet another licensing contract, we came to a much bigger agreement. Take-Two would first buy up all of the remaining MicroProse properties from Infogrames and elsewhere, and then acquire our studio outright. It would take a lot of paperwork, but the lawyers assured us that Humpty Dumpty could be put back together again.
The decision was dramatic, but relatively easy to make. We’d always suspected that Firaxis would end up with a permanent publisher at some point, and if it were inevitable, certainly this was the best way for it to happen—with everything handed back to us, and no more piecemeal negotiations over properties we’d invented in the first place. Take-Two considered our games to be a good counterbalance to some of their other franchises, like Grand Theft Auto, and they were happy to let us do our thing with minimal interference. So in January 2005, they unveiled themselves as the buyer of the Civilization license, revealed the upcoming release of Civ IV, and announced the acquisition of Firaxis all at once. It was a hefty press release. Two months later, we added Sid Meier’s Railroads! to the roster as well.
It was a little ironic that, after all that effort, we didn’t end up using the Tycoon brand. Owning the license was still prudent, since our game was clearly related, but we decided that we wanted a little distance between ourselves and the genre as a whole. PopTop’s sequels had been solid, but the last fifteen years had seen an absolute glut of “tycoon” titles, from studios of every size and quality. Players could be fish tycoons, toilet tycoons, moon tycoons—and that was just back in the early 2000s. These days, we can lord our business acumen over beard trimmers, Dairy Queen franchises, or even game development studios (who are presumably making their own tycoon games, like an entrepreneurial nesting doll). Not all of them were bad, but some were downright terrible, and the genre had evolved enough that what we were making just didn’t belong.
With Civ IV only a few months away from release, I knew I would be alone on the Railroads! design team for a while. Rather than wait around for an artist to become available, I installed a copy of our modeling software on my computer, and started learning how to use it. I’d mastered our 3D physics tools during Pirates!, but my early ship models had been swiped from somewhere—probably the Civ IV artists, now that I think about it—and I guess they didn’t have any useful train graphics to steal. So I had to make my own.
Obviously, I didn’t expect my art to stay in the final version of the game, but I made it anyway, because it’s important as a designer to sit in all the chairs. Understanding the needs of each department and learning their requisite tools will improve your output, ease communication with your coworkers, and provide a critical perspective when it comes time to admit you were wrong about an idea. But most importantly, it will make you more self-sufficient.
When I wanted to put a ballroom dancing minigame into the new Pirates!, for example, not everyone thought it sounded fun. I had to give them a demonstration, which meant creating, among other things, a tool to mark the beats of the music so the computer would know whether the player had nailed the rhythm. If I’d had to rely on someone else to put that together, it likely never would have happened—some still wished it hadn’t, but that was mostly due to a bug that made the timing harder than it was supposed to be. I still maintain the dancing was one of the neatest innovations in the remake.
Likewise, I doubt I could have sold a publisher on the idea of a golfing strategy game without a functioning prototype, and you can pretty much forget everything I made prior to 2000. Ideas are cheap; execution is valuable. When people used to ask me how to get into the industry, I’d say, “Get a copy of DPaint and a C++ compiler.” These days it’s more like, “Get a copy of Photoshop and a Unity tutorial,” but the principle hasn’t changed—there’s no guarantee your talents will be discovered, but they certainly won’t be if you never make anything. The best way to prove your idea is a g
ood one is to prove it, not with words but with actions. Sit in the programmer chair until you have something playable, then sit in the artist chair until you have something crudely recognizable, then sit in the tester chair and be honest with yourself about what’s fun and what’s not. You don’t need to be perfect at any one job, you just need to be good enough to prove your point, and inspire others to join you.
* Achievement Unlocked: This Belongs in a Museum—Go on a raid with Indiana Jones, George Lucas, John Williams, and Steven Spielberg.
21
HIGHER EDUCATION
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (2005) * Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization (2008) * Sid Meier’s Civilization V (2010)
OF ALL THE THINGS CIVILIZATION taught me, I never expected one of them to be empathy for politicians. It’s easy to criticize leaders for their choices, but it only takes a few rounds of nation-building before you begin to appreciate that it’s not as easy as it looks. Everything comes with a price—and if playing a game of Civ gives you a bit of perspective, then designing one gives you a whole wagon train of it.
This is part of the reason why each version of the game gets a new lead designer. After Brian’s sequel, Jeff Briggs stepped in for the third game, programmer Soren Johnson took the helm on Civ IV, and a designer named Jon Shafer rose to the challenge for Civ V. It’s good for the series to have a steady turnover of ideas, but it’s also a function of self-preservation in the face of utter, but loving, exhaustion. Previous Civ designers are like grandparents: we made our major sacrifice when we were young and full of energy, and now we get to enjoy all the good parts of raising the new generation, while their caretakers handle all the diapers and tantrums.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 22