The Sid Meier Story Part 1

work has been incredibly influential. He's talked about as a revolutionary or a hero to other game developers. I think he was named in the top five and one survey from two thousand nine, right, and he has won numerous awards. We are, of course talking about sid Meyer. Uh And so anyone out there who has played a lot of computer games, you've probably heard sid Meyer's name, particularly since his name is often it's part of the brand. Yeah,

it's featured on the actual game titles. So before we get into this, I want to give a shout out. We grab our our information from numerous resources while we're researching our topics, but one article in particular for this this part of the podcast was incredibly helpful. And that was an article written by Jason Schreyer over at Kotaku, and it was called sid Meyer The Father of Civilization,

So civilization civilization being one of the many titles. Yeah, anyway that I would say, that's a must read if you are interested in sid Meyer and the story of civilization as well as just the story of the companies that sid Meier has been a part of. Go check out that article. It was based on a series of interviews with UM with sid Meyer, UM, a fellow named Bill Steely and Um one of the other participants in the companies, but a series of interviews from so so

it's all really great fresh information. Um. There's another really terrific article I wanted to mention and um uh an article in Ghana Sutra called the History of Civilization that was written by BENJ. Edwards and it was based on a sid Meyer interview as well. And both of these were just terrific instrumental, Yeah, fantastic stuff. You guys should go read those and and the civilization centric article will become really important for the second part of our podcast.

But this first one we're going to focus mostly on sid Meyer's background and his early years in computer game development. He was born on February nineteen fifty four in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. Wait a minute, this guy's Canadian okay shows over must that must explain why he's why he's so nice. That does explain why he's so nice, and and that's not us being silly or anything. He's been called one of

the nicest video game developers by multiple people. Yeah, it seems like everyone who works with him, who has given an interview that we could find on the interwebs was was just full of nothing but nice things to say about the man personally. I've watched several interviews with him where he, you know, he was being interviewed by other people, and again, he just comes across as sort of a very genuine personal guy who loves to design games. So it's gonna be really hard for me to be snarky

in this podcast, But I find places. I think you will find a way. So um So. He he went to the University of Michigan and graduated with a degree in computer science. This was back when you know, that wasn't really a common thing. Yeah. In fact, back in those days, he was programming computers through punch cards. So, if you've listened to earlier episodes of tech Stuff, I mean way back in the day, you've heard of us talk about these punch cards that were uh, you know,

it was a painstaking process. Your your your program might consist of more than a hundred punch cards, and you had to keep them in a precise order for the program to work properly. If you were to have an accident and you had not numbered your punch cards, that's it. Your programs ruined. So yeah, um, this the first computer that he used was at the University of Michigan. It

was an IBM three sixty main frames. Um learned how the program in fortran as I recall, right, yeah, yeah, he at some point used this I mean you know that this was all time sharing and and uh you had to sign up for for use of the thing.

And at some point he designed a tic tac toe game for it, supposedly and almost got kicked out for wasting computer time right right, essentially, from what I understand, one of the administrators of the program called up the person who was responsible for securing that computer for the university and said, do you have any idea what the student is doing? He is wasting valuable resources on games?

Who would ever waste a computer on games? As it turns out, that was probably one of the silliest things that someone could say. Also, when he was a kid, he had already grown interested in the concept of games. I mean, of course, he was a very imaginative child. He talked about how he would play with little toy

soldiers and reenact battles with them. And he credits the gift that was given to him, a book called the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, as getting him interested in history, and that obviously becomes very important with some of the titles that he would produce. So right right, I also remember reading that he played a lot of risk as a kid. Yes, so he he liked games, he liked history. These were things that really interested him. And he loved computers and it still does

love computers and programming. So when you look at all three of these factors, the computer programing, genuine verd urged to conquer the world. That's but in a nice way. You know, he's doing it for your own good, Lauren. It's it's not that he's got any malice. He just it's through the development of technology, which we all know is a terrific way to win. As Dr Horrible would say, the world's mess and he just needs to rule it.

So anyway, uh yeah, he began to wonder, would it be like if you could go and you know, with your own abilities, if you were to be able to go back into history and take control of some massive force that had been instrumental in a battle, and and you were to control them and make different decisions, what would be the outcome? And this was kind of the seed that would be planted in his head later on

down the road. So, uh, he loved programming, he loved hacking electronics, and he he would build his own version of of games he saw out there, and yeah he had at eight and um would yeah program his own kind of versions of like Space Invaders I think is one of them in basic. Yeah, he said that that was one of the earliest games that he developed for the personal computer. The eight hundred, by the way, had

sixteen kilobytes of memory. Yeah yeah, so, uh, you know, I'm sure Space Invaders probably was stressing that machine out a little bit. Yeah. Probably. I am being a little silly snarky there, but uh but yeah, he he started

making these. He began to work for General Instruments Corporation as a programmer, and he also would occasionally bring in some of the games he had created and put them up on the offices network, and you know, would eventually have to have them taken down because productivity in the office would take a dive. Yeah, it turns out his manager would call up that old university guy up and say, hey,

do you know what your former student is doing. Actually that that's not entirely true, but the same sort of thing. He was creating games and sharing them and taking enjoyment from other people, having a fun time with his games. And he met someone at General Instruments Corporation who would become instrumental in those early early days. Uh. A guy who has a great nickname is John Wild. Bill Steely usually just called Bill, yeah or wild Bill or wild but yeah, this this was a guy who had been

UM major in the Air Force. Yeah. In fact, I think at the time he still was an active major. He was a former fighter pilot. So, um, if you guys don't know what fighter pilots are like, I recommend watching the documentary Top Gun. Now, keep in mind that's Navy pilots, not air force pilots. What you're just staring at me like like in judgment. I can't I can't imagine. Why do you not have the need the need for speed?

All right? So, anyway, according to that Kotaku article we talked about said Meyer, Meyer and Steely both attended an electronics trade conference and while they were there, they just kind of were exploring and they apparently found a room full of old arcade machines. Actually at that time they were new arcade machines, right right, Um, they started playing a bunch of them, and Meyer was just beating Steely's but at all of Steely was getting a little frustrated.

And then they found the red baron. The red baron being a flight sim yeah kind of yeah, it was, yeah, for for what it was at the time, sort of a flight simulator. It is kind of a shooter that was a World War Two based air airplane shooter end up. And Steely takes one look at it and he says, this is me. I got this. I'm a fighter pilot.

I am going to rule this. And so Steely stepped up to the box first and uh and and got like like on the top three of the Yeah, I think he actually managed to land the high score, you know, like like points something like that. So yeah, And it turns to Myron's like beat that torp, and Meyers steps up and calmly takes control of the arcade machine. What happened, Lauren? He doubled Steely's score. Yeah, And then Steely looks and and says, wait a minute. I am a fighter pilot.

I am a major in the United States Air Force. How did you manage to do that? Meyer says, well, while you were playing, I just memorized the algorithms that the computer was using. Yeah, that's something you know. I actually used to do very similar things when I was at the arcade. I would my dad watch the way the computer reacted to other people. I would watch and watch people play for a good half hour to an hour before I would ever put a quarter in, so

I could see what was happening. And I wouldn't just wander in blind because the quarters I had were few and precious to me, and I did want to play these arcade games, but I wanted to make the experience last as long as possible. Now, I will go ahead and tell you my algorithm recognized recognization skills are really minor compared to what Meyer was able to do. Well,

that's that's fair. I think. I think being worse at s admire than at computer algorithms is it's probably okay, Okay, I don't have to feel like I don't have to have some sort of inferiority complex over that. No, no, But so so according to the story, um at there after this debacle, um, you know, Meyer kind of casually throughout like, you know, this was a pretty okay game, but I could totally write a better one. And Steely's like, uh, if you can do that, I can totally sell that game.

And so Meyer did it. Meyer went home and over the next few months designed a a fighter pilot game. Yeah. In fact, depending upon which version of the story you see, and there are different versions, I mean, keep in mind that a lot of the information about these early days, this is stuff that people are talking about decades after it happened. Oh sure, and it's it's all it's all very kind of colloquial, and everyone was kind of joking around about it and remembering it fondly. But you know, yeah,

so so get a little fuzzy with the details. But depending upon whom you ask, It was like a couple of weeks beforehand. Then he came back. And again this also gets a little confusing because, um, there are different reports on what the very first game Sidmyer made what it was called. But according to the Kataku article, the one that they settled on as being this is the game we're going to try and sell was called hell Cat Ace. That was a World War two combat flight simulator.

And it was more than just a shoot them up, you know, top scroll game or something. This was a game that actually allowed you to take control of World War two aircraft and do some advanced piloting maneuvers, things like impleman turns and loops and you could stall your plane out or roll it and all that kind of stuff.

And so they started with with supposedly like like dollars in startup and you know, self printed copies of the game and like xerox copies of the instruction manual and put them in zip block bags and and started taking them to hobby stores around town. Yeah. In fact, this was in Baltimore, Maryland, right right, Yes, uh, yeah, it was Baltimore, Maryland is where they were based out of.

Because that's where General Instruments had their headquarters. And this is not this is not an unusual story, by the way. This is how early computer games really got started. You had programmers who are working out of their homes usually most of the time. They were doing this on their own time. It was not a full time gig yet, and they would produce stuff, put them in these bags, and then sell them at a computer store. And the computer store would would then mark up the price or whatever.

And often you would walk in and there'd be a bulletin board on the side of the wall in the computer store. Because keep in mind, these were not computer game stores. These were stores that sold computers and computer components. This was just something else you could buy in that store.

So you would go and there'd be a bolton board and there would be thumb tax that would have these games, you know, tacked to the side of the bolten board and going you basically you would base your your purchase decision on what the artwork look like on the xerox sheet that was showing through. Yeah, yeah, and I mean and this was all in the early eighties. I'd say eight to eighty one probably is when all of this

was occurring. Yeah. Yeah. This is at the very dawn of the personal computer revolution, and of course at this time the people who owned the personal computers are in large part hobbyists. There are we're starting to see other people by personal computers by the early eighties, but it's largely still hobbyists. It's a niche market. So um, what I love is the story about how Steely would convince

stores to carry Hellcat a ce. See. He would actually travel all the way from New York down to Washington, d C. That was the area that he would consider his territory, not just Baltimore. So I'm going to quote him from the Kotaku article. Now, this is actually what Steely told the reporter. He said, I would call computer stores and ask to buy Hellcat Ace, and when they didn't have it, I would yell and scream at them, what kind of computer store are you? And then I'd

hang up. I would do that three times in three weeks, each time pretending to be a different person. And the fourth week I'd call and say, hello, this is John Steely. I'm a representative with micropros this I've got this game called Hellcat Ace, and they'd say, hey, whoa whoa everyone's been calling about that. Can you help us get that game? Nice one? Steely? Yeah, and you can you can? You know this this illustrates the kind of relationship that Steely

and Meyer had at this time. You know, Steely was very much the public persona and very much the get him a salesman. And as it turns out, I mean again, if you read interviews where you see interviews with Meyer, you learned that this is exactly the way Meyer wanted things to go. Because Meyer was a business guy, you know, he he wanted the freedom to be able to develop the games that he thought would be fun and and this was a great arrangement. He didn't have to worry

about the business side. He that did not interest him at all. I mean, he certainly wanted to make a living off of it. That was his dream job, but he did not want to be the one to have to handle all those details. That's not his strong suit. He just wanted to concentrate on making the And this

reminds me a lot. I mean, Lauren and I both have a lot of friends who are artists, who are actors or musicians, and many of them on you know, wish that they could do that that they could have, and some of them do have managers or whatever that you know. That's that's I hear. I hear that all the time, like someone just going like, why can't someone just market this for me? I just want to write another thing. Why can't someone else book me for the

next gig? Because because it's already pouring your love and energy into what you want to do, that that's that takes up a lot, you know, and then too, on top of that, be the one who's responsible for all the business side can be absolutely draining. So Maya really had a great thing going here. He had he had the guy who was going to do all the legwork and he got to do all the development work. So it's a great relationship for both guys at this time.

So um. At first the two continue to work exclusively for general instruments and they would sell these games and time and their free time. But eventually Steely was making enough money doing this that he could try and create his own company. In fact, according to Steely, at the height of this, before he had even founded Micropros, they were making about two hundred thousand dollars a year just

on computer game sales and and and micropros Uh. Jonathan mentioned this name, and that quote from Steely was they had already started calling themselves micropros Um, which would be the name of their company in our next bullet point. We'll talk about that, but um, but yeah, they had not actually founded any kind of official company yet, right, it was. It was kind of a name because otherwise you'd say, we're two guys who are wanting to sell this game to you, and that just doesn't work quite

as it doesn't doesn't have that ring to it. So yeah, yeah, yeah, So they're still working for General Instruments at that point, but that would quickly come upon a time where Steely realized this is something we can do ourselves and we don't need a day job anymore, or at least Steely didn't at first. So Steely makes a big jump and decides to leave General Instruments in order to work full

time on the micropros project. Now, there's a lot more to talk talk about with MicroProse, but before we do that, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor. Back to the show, all right, So we've got Steely. He has left to found micropros himself. Now for the first year and a half or so of Micropros. This is two by the way. For that first year and a half, Meyer was still working at General Instruments as a full time employee and producing games in his off time. Uh,

Steely was concentrating full time on selling the games. And it wasn't until about midnight three that Meyer felt comfortable leaving General Instruments and working full time for Micropros. It was also that was about the time when Steely could

actually afford to hire him on as a full time employee. So, uh, now we've got this, this whole company that's starting up, and it's it's good now to talk about what Meyer thinks is important when you're making a video game, because that informs all all of his decisions moving forward as

far as game design is concerned. Right, and um, Meyer talks a lot about um, you know, a good game being a series of meaningful choices, give the player interesting choices, choices that are meaningful and interesting, and that is what makes a game fun. And and I think that that's you know, it's such a simple philosophy. It's one of those things that's the that it's deceptively simple, because creating something that actually feels like a meaningful choice to a

player is easier said than done. But but Meyer was was really adamant about He says that if it if it feels like it doesn't matter what you choose to do, or or if what you do has little to no impact on the game, it's not that satisfying. It might be challenging to play, but it's not necessarily a satisfying experience, right And and he also um he He also talks a lot about wanting to to give players the choice to create their own storylines, to not direct the storyline

to directly right right. He didn't want it to have like his games to have a linear plot for example. So we think about a lot of games. We talk about games all the time on tech stuff in the other shows that we do as well. Yeah, we actually just did an episode on forward thinking about storytelling, which this was reminding me of so much, right right, So, so for example, we talked in that episode of forward thinking. By the way, if you guys are not watching and

listening to forward Thinking, go check it out. I think you would really dig it. If you enjoy tech stuff, you'll totally enjoy forward thinking. Yeah, I write a friend Joe joins us for the podcast, and he's just terrific. He is, and he has that the the ax that he brings to every podcast. He has a mystical ax. Yeah, the plastic. Yeah, just don't worry. We're not in danger right, well,

no more so than usual at any rate. In that podcast, in the Storytelling podcast, we talked a lot about the the video game The Last of Us, which is out for the PlayStation three now. The Last of Us is, in my opinion, a wonderful video game. I love it very much. However, it is somewhat linear and you could argue that the choices the player makes do not in the end impact the story that much, which is not the approach that Sidmyer likes to take. He likes to

take a different approach. This does not mean that one approach is automatically better or worse than the other. They are different with different goals. So yeah, my favorite quote from Meyer about this is I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want and then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know, right, And that's you know that that is a very valid point of view.

It's also very challenging to do in a way that it's a designer, right, because letting the player come to those conclusions for themselves is very tricky. Yeah, because if you just give a player an open world and no direction at all, then it's really hard to get something going, to make something happen. Uh. You might be able to make some tiny thing or or temporary thing happen, but there's if there's not enough to tie a game together,

then it's again more confusing than satisfying. So finding that balance is really tricky. But but he did it well enough that the next year when the video game industry crash happened. Yeah, oh, and how it happened, it happened

a whole bunch um. Uh. You know that there were just so many, so many games that were not great that we're being pushed out very quickly by development teams for for the Atari, right, Yeah, especially things I mean, obviously we've talked about this so many times, but but titles like ports like pac Man for there, or of course the one that everyone always quotes, including myself, et the Extraterrestrial, the the game that was so bad that

they grounded up and buried it in the desert Um. Yeah, it's you know, these were these were games that that flooded the market. It diluted the market, It made everything less valuable. Plus you had lots of different consoles hitting the market all at once, and it just there was just too much and it could not support itself. And eventually the industry collapsed in on itself. And you would think, okay, so they tiny throw it up from the previous year.

That doesn't look good for them. But but they but they lived through it. Um they continued selling games. Yeah. Part of it was that they were developing computer games, not console games, and a lot of people were moving toward computers and they were feeling you know, kind of like exactly, so in a way, they were in the right place at the right time. Plus with sid Meier's philosophy of you know, you're you're taking this simple approach and then adding complexity, and that makes a simple game

into a very deep and compelling game. But you make it you add that complexity in a way that the player can can uh grow and learn with as opposed to just throwing everything at them at once. This approach really worked out well and so uh, one of the games that was released and I actually found gameplay video footage of this. I remember this one. I remember Floyd of the Jungle. You remember Floyd of the Jungle. I

very dimly have this man until image. Yeah. So it's it's a platformer game, a side scrolling platform were not even side scrolling, it's just a side view but the platform or game kind of similar to the old Donkey Kong game. And your character could run around, jump and climb up vines to try and rescue other characters from impending jungle doom. And up to four people could play at the same time, which made it, you know, kind of a remarkable game. This is a computer game where

you four people are all playing. Uh, they're all trying to race around and and save this vaguely feminine figure from doom, the more feminine blob it's opposed to the more masculine block. Yes, well you you were you knew it was supposed to be a princess. But the idea was that, uh that you know, you were competing against these up to three other players to try and rescue her first, and they are all these other obstacles and dangerous animals in the way. That's a that's a terrific

gender normative thing right there. That's anyway, that's simpler times. It was three anyway. Um, So I remember the eighties, So it was around then that that Meyer started going to game developer conferences. There was one in particular out in San Jose, Um where he met up with with people like Will Wright who would go on to create some city um and uh Dan Bunten of Mule. So anyone who's played Mule that was ah. That was a

very popular game in the early eighties as well. And mostly these guys would meet up and they talked about how they liked each other's games a lot. Yeah, it sounded like they all just would just nerd out, like I like your game, you like my game, I like

your game. Yeah, But there was no real collaboration. In fact, Meyer would say, like, you know, we admired each other, we thought that the games were fun, and I think that they influenced each other, um indirectly, you know, take sure parts of each other's work that they admired, and they would look at something and say, wow, I never thought that a computer game could do that. How did they do that? How how could we use something that's

similar to that? So it wasn't so much like like I wouldn't say it's plagiarism, but it was certainly taking inspiration from the work of others. Uh yeah. And and Meyers said that they were all kind of really focused on what they themselves were doing to the point where they didn't really want to share it with anyone else.

They wanted to be able to build it themselves and then release it and kind of continue this this uh, this trend of oh, that game you made was really great, as opposed to come here and help me make this really great game. So it's kind of there's like a little bit of competition and a little bit of showmanship going on, but it was it was a lot of mutual appreciation as well. So by five a game called fifteen Strike Eagle, another another combat combat flight sim um,

had had been released and went gold yep. And then you got the game called Silent Service, which was a submarine simulation game. Now, these simulation games, this is what Steely wanted to seize, especially military based right right, because he this was this made sense to him. This was the stuff that he thought had a strong following in the in the computer game world, and as a member

of the armed Forces. It was something that spoke directly to him, so he was fully behind this, and in fact, Meyer would say that there were times where where Steely essentially just one admire to churn out, not continue making flight sims over and over and over. Right, churn out is probably a too too harsh a term, but yeah, that's exact Meyers too polite to say that, but I

feel like that's how he was probably feeling. Right. So sid Meyer creates a game that goes outside this realm of the military simulator, and it's the game I alluded to back in the when I was talking about Pirates, because sid Meyer's Pirates comes out Pirates with an exclamation point. This game, Oh, I will never forget the exclamation point. Okay,

I owned a game a version of this game. I want to say I even owned it on the Apple to E, which was probably a port of Pirates, because he would he programmed most of his games on the IBM PC once he moved away from the Atari eight hundred. So Pirates is ah it's a game where you take the role of an aspiring pirate. In fact, at the very beginning of the game, you are I think a stowaway aboard a pirate ship, and you end up challenging the captain for the control of the ship, and you

have a duel with the captain. Presuming that you win the duel, you then go on to captain a ship and you try and make your name in the Caribbean, and you can do things like uh, sack towns. Sometimes you can become a privateer for a particular nation. So you might sign a letter of mark with the British and now you can act upon behalf of the British. And so if if if Britain is at war with Spain, you can pirate Spain all you want. Yeah, and you can. You can get credit from the Brits while Spain is

shaking its fist and going out there. I want my silver back. But Sish Yeah noah bla Spano unfortunately. So but anyway, it was a whatever I look, I speak. I speak English and I speak it poorly anyway, so uh. It was very much kind of a swashbuckling sort of pirate game. It wasn't meant to be a historically accurate depiction of pirates, although it was set between the years that people generally think of as the Golden Age of piracy.

You could play very early on, like in the fifteen sixties if you wanted to, but it was more challenging because there were fewer reports to actually work with. So if you ticked off a faction, you quickly find yourself hard pressed to get rid of all that filthy luker you managed to get. Like, you know, when you were piating ships, you would end up with um with massive amounts of various goods, and so it wasn't just money.

You had to find a way to offload the goods, and you wanted to find a good sell price, which meant that you know, you didn't want to take everybody off. So I take it that you were a fan of this game. I liked it. I played this game a lot and uh and and there have been multiple revisions

of this game. We're not going to talk about every single game Sidmyer has had a hand in, obviously, and especially not the all of the sequels, because that that would be exhausted, but so so Pirates was literally that would be exhausting. That's the word that I was looking for. Anyway, exhaustive and exhausting. It's yeah, it's it was a great game.

Obviously I loved it very very much. Uh and they you know, re released it a couple of times with the revisions, including an Xbox version which I also owned. Um So, anyway, that this was a departure from those

military combat simulators. Um and and it was such a departure that the decision was made at some point to put sid Meier's name on the box, call it sid Meier's Pirates because previously um his you know, just to be like, hey, this developer that you like also had a hand in this one, right right, maybe you want to buy it? It was it was sort of the the establishment of a new brand, sid Meyer as a brand,

not just as a person. According to steely Um, this was a suggestion that happened at a dinner of the Software Publishers Association that Robin Williams made. Robin Williams was hanging out at the time and apparently made them laugh for like two hours straight, and then eventually he turned to stealing and said, what you should do is put this guy's name on the box and make him a superstar.

So again, your mileage may very people have different stories about why sid Meyer's name was attached to this this title, but the fact is it was, and that became kind of a kind of a trademark. Well, I mean really literally it is a trademark, but it kind of became a trademark in the sense that you would see a lot more games come out Sid Meyer's blah blah blah whatever the whatever the game title was, and um, you

know it was. It was interesting also because it gave Meyer another challenge besides just building something that wasn't a a combat simulator. Uh. He had to work within the technical challenges of developing a game that needed to look very lush and beautiful but within such limited processing power for the time or at the time. Yeah, and he began to develop some some pretty cool approaches to that, so he actually pushed the video game development process forward

just by innovating in that way. Um. In development for what would become Civilization started, um and and you know, like with Pirates, Steely really wasn't excited about the game um And in the beginning, and development would wind up getting delayed multiple times so that other projects could be pushed to the forefront. Yeah, we'll tell We'll tell the whole story behind the development of Civilization later on in

the second part. Of this, right, it is it is you know, I think that that's the part that's certainly the two of us are very interested in, and so we wanted to break it off. And and it's devote a lot of time too. It's it's so much stuff, and and it kind of overlaps with a lot of the other things that are happening in this timeline. We figured to make it more of a cohesive story if we just grouped it together. But by that's when Sid

Meier's Railroad Tycoon comes out, and this was another big departure. Right. This was a business simulation game, not a combat simulation game, and it was a real time strategy game where you were trying to build railroads across the US and Europe. Um uh. This was also the year that um Myer's first son, I think only son, maybe Ryan, was born to his first wife, um And it was also around this time that um that Steely bought out Myers Shares

and MicroProse Um. This this was a voluntary move. Meyer, you know, knew that the company was starting to head into the direction of of consoles and arcade machines, and he wasn't really interested in pursuing that. He wasn't comfortable being tied down to a company that was making some choices that he felt were limiting his ability to create games. That was you know again, that's all he was really

concerned with. Yeah. Yeah, So so a new VP of Development took over from Meyer at Micropros um and and this new VP didn't receive personal bonuses on Myers releases, so which ended up being part of the sticky situation that they would get into this civilization with that that

that led to the de prioritization of some of these titles. Yeah, yeah, because he you know, Micropros was developing other games that Sid Meyer did not have a hand in, because there were there were more people working for Micropros now than just Steely and Meyer, and they were they were putting out a lot of games actually either um personally developing or porting from from smaller companies, right, or they were

publishing stuff that was being developed by other companies. So Micropros is not just a developer but also a publisher. So they were publishing some games that were developed by other developers. And so you know, the VP of Development, he's getting bonuses on games that were developed by Micropros, but not on games that were developed specifically by Sid Meyer, like because sid was a was a contractor at the time,

so he didn't have a technical control over this. Yes, so that uh, we're getting a little political, and we'll get more political when we get into the full civilization story. Um. But ninety that also was the point where, uh, the civilization work really starts to kick into high gear. He was coding it on an IBM PC at the time.

And then nine one, Uh you get to a point where civilization actually publishes, um, and uh, you know, it's it's a strategy game where you're actually trying to start with a very basic unit of a particular nationality and build a civilization and all that that entails almost prehistoric, early historic. Yeah. Yeah, to the point, well, civilization you haven't developed, you haven't developed reading and writing yet, because that's one of the first that's one of the first

technologies you can develop in the game. Yeah. So you start off as a nationality. You can choose which one, and they have different advantages and disadvantages. Uh. You start on a randomly generated map, although of course in later versions of Civilization, if you wanted to, you could start on the world map. Yea. The Earth's map at a varying sizes depending upon which version of civilization you're playing UH, and your goal was to try and create a civilization

winning the game. There were multiple ways to win. You could either when based on points, the game would end once it hit a certain year. I want to say, it's like twift UM then UH if you had the most points at that point. If you had the most points at that time, you would end up winning. Or you could getting points by UM by conquering and developing technologies yep and UH and creating UH improvements to your cities,

that kind of thing, so you know your population. Lots of different factors would would be involved in creating your final score. You could also take over other civilizations and if you managed to do that to everybody, you know one because there was no one to compete against UM. There was another way of getting UH winning by being the first to to send a space exploration colony out

to Alpha Centauri. Right. Because the you know the concept of the game if you've never played them or never really heard that much about them, is is that you are you are developing all of the technologies necessary for the civilization and it extends beyond the point where we currently are now into hypothetically, if you get there, you would eventually get to especially in things like Civilization too.

You would develop all the technologies in the game, and then you because that part of the game would continue. You know, you could continue to develop technologies. But because it went beyond what we are currently able to do, they would just call it future technology one future technology to future because you had gone beyond what you could

actually do in the game. Uh. And anyway, there were multiple ways of winning this game, and and that was part of what Sidmire thought would make it really compelling was the idea that you had multiple nationality, so that gave you a lot of incentive to play it in

different ways. And there were multiple ways of winning, so that meant that you could choose different strategies every time, right, um and uh and succeed it did, um despite despite the company not really giving it that much marketing power, it sold more than eight hundred thousand copies. Um. You know before the Internet, right, yeah, the Internet existed, but

no one the Web didn't. There was no Web yet, and hardly anyone who even knew about the Internet had access to it because again This was mostly uh, colleges and research institutions that had access to the Internet. The rest of us we might have email. That would be about the extent of it. So yeah, the fact that that this game had to succeed mainly they didn't get a lot of marketing behind it either. They mainly succeeded on word of mouth. And then eventually the magazine started

to review it, right because magazines existed. Yeah, that was a thing. Do you remember those um so around or so. Uh, Like I had said, MicroProse was trying to get into um into a lot of arcade arcade stuff, actually creating arcade cabinets based on old titles. In particular, they had tried to do a version of that fifteen Strike Eagle.

How that turn out poorly, really poorly, so poorly that um that they they did an I p O and initial public offering just for cash, I mean just it was like one of those desperate bid for cash kind of things. The company was falling into debt. Steely was starting to feel the squeeze from a financial standpoint, and uh eventually yeah. So so the next year he would wind up selling Micropros to Spectrum Hollobight Micropros is acquired by Spectrum Hollobight, and uh Steely would stick around until

nine and then he leaves Micropros. You know, this was a tough time for for the company. I mean already obviously Meyer had started to feel a little disenchanted, which is why he went to the whole tractor right right. And it was around ninety three that Meyer started backing off of development entirely. You know, he was he was a I think, um, trying not to stress himself out over creating the next Civilization after Civilization came out and

was so popular. Um, and uh if you end up developing a music application called a cpu bach yeah, And we'll talk about that a little bit later because that, uh, it comes out a little after ninety three, but that's when he started working on it. And uh, actually ninety four, that's when Brian Reynolds, who was another developer over at UH Micropros, ended up being the lead developer for sid

Meier's Colonization. I also played this game, and Colonization was a game where you, as a European explorer, would and with your band of Europeans, would come over and subjugate Native American tribes and build colonies and spread smallpox, except in a cheerful way. I'm sure that smallpox wasn't actually part of the game. Um wasn't. I don't remember smallpox being a part of the game. But you could, and you could choose different routes, right, You didn't have to

you know, you didn't. Yeah, you didn't have to slaughter everybody if you didn't want to. You could trade with them, you could try and build relationships. Sometimes they would react poorly to those relationships, which would just kind of make you want to go through the whole slaughter approach. Uh. Plus, those those Mayans had a lot of gold Man But anyway, um uh, it was a you know, it was a very kind of focused approach to that same sort of

civilization feel, but specifically under the New World colonization. And at that point you started seeing other games coming out under Micropros, some of the other games from other developers, not just Micropros, so things like dark Lands, which was a role playing game, or The Master of Orion, which

was a space strategy game. And now we're getting up to nineteen nine six, this is where we're going to We're going to conclude this part of the podcast with this year year, because this was the year that sid Meyer and uh and and Reynolds and another fellow by the name of Jeff Briggs left Micropros. Uh. This was they were feeling like the company was just moving in a direction that they didn't really care for. There were a lot of layoffs that were going on at this time. Yeah,

Spectrum was was managing them from the opposite coast. They were out west, and uh, you know, just yeah, no one felt like they were really meeting. They felt that like the magic of those group of people who really loved to make games was being sapped away by all the rest of the stuff that has to happen for business to work, or at least for business to work in this particular setup. And so they left Micropros and

founded a new company. But we're going to pick up from that point in our next episode, where we'll talk about the second half of sid Meyer's career, which is still going right now. Uh And guys, if you have any suggestions for topics that we should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, come on let us know about it, because if you just shout, unless we happen to be nearby, we're probably not gonna hear you, and maybe we don't even know what you're talking about, So rise an email. Alright,

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