The Sid Meier Story Part 2

he made them good. Or of course side Meyer's just one name among many instrumental programmers who really helped define what video games were all about in those early computer game days to the point where you would you know, one of the things that Meyer likes to talk about if you ever listen to interviews or read an interview with him, he he talks about these nostalgic early days of computer programming, back before there were genres of computer

games right right, and and all of the constraints of trying to make something that worked and worked well when the equipment that you had and the amount of memory that you had to play with were so limited limited. Yeah, and and the fact that you know, back then you could just make whatever you thought would make a good game. And his philosophy was if it's fun, put it in, and if it's not fun, take it out. And that would find the fun. Yeah, that was I mean, you

see this phrase over and over and over again. Find the fun, give the players interesting choices. Those were two of the main things he would stress over and over again. And uh and it worked really well for him. So when we left off at the end of the last episode, he had just left the company that he had co founded, Micropros. Right. Um and and I we should mention as If two came out that year as well, which had been designed by Brian Reynolds, who who was a young programmer who

had started working with sid Meyer. Yep, so Civilization to uh, you know, sid Meyer had input on Civilization too. Mainly it was he was a playtester. He would play it and give feedback to Brian Reynolds. In fact, that's really how sid Meyer likes to design games as well. He likes to build something he then we'll hand it off to someone he really trusts to play it, get feedback from that person, say what was fun, what wasn't fun? Did you find anything confusing? And then tweak it based

on their feedback. Yeah, and then sometimes and then continue that cycle. Sometimes this would take a course over like a day. He would hand over a game a person would play it, they'd hand it back at the end of the day and say all right, well, here are the things I have to tell you, and then sid Meyer would go home, reprogram the game, and come back the next morning and say here's the new version, and it would start all over again. It's kind of crazy,

but that's sort of how Sidmyer likes to work. And he doesn't tend to do things like draw up a detailed plan of what a game is supposed to be and then try and follow the blueprint. Instead, he builds, tests, rebuilds right. And part of why he left Micropros was that it was becoming that kind of corporate environment where I think, you know, they were asking him to do that kind of stuff, and he was like, that's not how I work, not really. I do this because I

love to make games. I don't do it so then I'm not trying to create franchises so much as I'm trying to create compelling games. And the two are not necessarily uh separate. But I don't want to be pigeoned like I don't want to be I don't want to be framed in this this context where I only create civilization games from now on because Civilization one sold so well. Okay, so Meyer, Brian Reynolds, and Jeff Briggs all leave Micropros and um uh start up a new company called for

Access Games. Right, so for Access Games. That's um that that company name comes from a fusion of two words, right, fiery and access even like for Tree. Okay, you know, I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna argue that they can do what they want. However, they like this is still in the Baltimore area. Um, they occasionally like to say, you know, we we like to think of it as Silicon Valley East, or or we like to think of Silicon Valleys, um Valley West. Nice, I like

to think of it as John Waters Computer Development. Anyway. So so Sidmyer his his title at for Access is director of Creative Development. You might ask, what does director of creative development mean? What is what's his actual job responsibility? And it's to do what Sidmyer does, to do what he wants. Yeah. He he essentially has a job where he gets to concentrate on the projects that interest and

excite him. Because, as it turns out, if Sid Meyer is excited and interested in something, a lot of gamers tend to be interested and excited about it too. So it's kind of this philosophy of if you let the game designer who is really looking at creating a fun experience do his or her thing, you end up with a very marketable product. This is not always the case, obviously, if you're if your game designer is not really good at judging what is fun, then clearly that's a very

poor decision. But in this particular case, uh and and the company was really started out very small. It was only ten to fifteen people. Um and uh Meyer said of the company at the time, the convicts are running the asylum. It's great fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he knows. Also that year awarded a US patent for a quote system for real time music composition and synthesis end quote. Al Right, that was that? That was that a CPU

bach that I mentioned in the previous episode. Yes, so cpu Bok was a program that would allow you to compose your own music, which I think is an amazing idea. It did not do well. It wasn't a commercial success at all, Um, but but it also um said, Meyer is deeply interested in music. He Um has has gone on record saying that he Guitar Hero is one of the games that he just really wishes he had thought of first, and that he's fascinated by its ability to

bring people who aren't familiar with music into that world. Right, I've seen I've seen him say that he has two regrets. That he's not the one who invented Tetris and he's not the one who invented Guitar Hero. He also supposedly um he's um very involved in one of his local churches and writes, composes music for the choir, and plays

the organ. Yeah. Um. Speaking of his personal life, Fraxis hired a woman named Susan Brickensum, who had previously worked for the U. S. Navy in the Department of Defense,

UM to be the head of human resources. And this would be important in a couple of years when she and sid Meier got married and and and these days she refers to her title as Master of Miscellaneous, Right, I'm sure, I mean it was an important hire at the time anyway, because she was a terrific she was she was very good at personnel and very good with people,

and and still is is pretty instrumental in the company. Again, when you talk about like interviews with sid Meyer, a lot of them mentioned that she, Susan is hanging out right and and she she serves as sort of an additional memory for Meyer, who has done a lot, you know, but Meyer tends to he's a very affable kind of guy, and Susan wild chime in and say what he's really saying. Well, actually, yeah, by the way, shout out to all you act Accutron

tweeter you see all are great. Yeah, I can't wait to see the will Actually he's about this episode ven MicroProse. You know, this is after Meyer has already left. But Micropros publishes Magic the Gathering, which reportedly was the last game title at Micropros that sid Meyer had personally worked on in some capacity before he had left, So at that point, moving forward, the Micropros games that would come

out did not have sid Meyer's involvement. Moving ahead, a couple of years in, sid Meyer was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement. He was only the second person to ever receive that award. The first one was she get a Minamoto big which name who you might know from doing like Mario and Donkey Kong and Legend of Zelda and numerous other games. So Sidney or not not not bad, you know, not bad to be number two when that's

number one. He also launched, not literally, I guess, sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri game, which was was it kind of spinoff of Civilization? Yeah, it's sort of like, well, you know how at the end of Civilization, if you've if you followed the future tech pathway to trying to win, you launched that that face colony out to Alpha Centauri. Well, now we're starting you in Alpha Centauri. Yeah. Interesting little

side note, did you know? Oh well, never mind, I'm gonna leave that for the trivia at the end of this podcast. There's there's a fun little side note about Alpha Centauri, but we'll talk about that at the trivia section. So in two thousand, sid Meyer proposes a dinosaur themed game. I've seen this. I've seen this refer to as um uh sid Meyer's version of the white Whale. Yes, it's his, it's his albatross, it's his white whale. It's his metaphor for the things that he wanted to do that he

never quite got right. Um and it's not that he launched a game that did poorly. No, he never launched a game. He started to really think that a diasaur based game has the potential for being really fun, but he tried different approaches and none of them seemed to be quite fun enough to him to merit an actual game. He tried a real time version, he tried to turn based version more like Civilization, and even tried a card based game something like Magic the Gathering, but he never

felt it was quite good enough. Yeah, he was. He was kind of obsessed with that. He made UM Jake Solomon, who was the third person from that Katako interview whose name I had completely forgotten at the top of the previous podcast, UM play a version of this during his interview, Like like Jake was trying to interview and Meyer was like, can you play this game? What did you think about the game? And Solomon got very the idea that this wasn't part of the interview because it was just Meyer

going like, I really want feedback. Yeah. He said that maybe Meyer was looking at for personality traits based upon my responses, but I think he really just wanted to know what I thought about the game. Um, he thought Solomon also reported related to to this, and and also some other stuff that that Meyer once said playing games is a series of interesting decisions, but making games is

a series of heartbreaking disappointments. Right. So, Meyer, sad that he can't get this dinosaur game to work, goes home, and he stays home for about two weeks and employees wonder what the heck is up with Meyer. Meyer comes back and they says, Okay, I've got a pro type game to show you, guys. It's totally different. And they're like, what, Like, you were gone for two weeks. We thought you were all depressed. Like yeah, He's like, yeah, I made sim Golf.

So he showed off sim Golf, which was actually, you know, it is a game that allows you to create your own golf courses along the lines of railroad Tycoon again. Right, So he he shows this off and uh and they say, yeah, we could sell this, this is a marketable game, and uh. It kind of again shows that he creates games by just diving in and building them rather than planning them out in advance. It's not that he had planned on

making sim golf. He was still thinking about that dinosaur game and then came up with a totally different approach and uh so again that was just a pro type. Obviously he would go in and refine it before it would be marketed as sim Golf. But that's how it was born. Now, in two thousand one a company from France called Info Grams and I almost I always want to drop the R out of it, constantly info Games. But info Grams comes in and purchases from Hasbro a

a subsidiary, the Hasbro Interactive subsidiary. Why is this important because that because Hasbro had purchased micro Prose a couple of years previous. So um that was that was Sid Meier's old company was micro Prose, and it had been acquired by Hasbro. Hasbro could not really make their interactive

division work very well. This was I remember actually following this news while it was happening and seeing that it was really frustrating because it had Hasbro Interactive involved more than just Micropros, that they had swept up a few companies, and there was a lot of frustration that Hasbro had bought up a lot of talent, or at least brands that were very recognizable and didn't really manage to do

much with them. So anyway, Since Info Grames bought Hasbro Interactive, it also meant that they got the rights to the Civilization franchise and the name Micropros and the rights to the Atari brand were also purchased in this acquisition. So at this point Micropros as a distinct entity ceased to be. It was just a name, just like Atari ceased to be. It became just a name. So dark days for some people. As as far as if you were to ask them about what what do you feel about how do you

feel about this? I feel really sad because these these were instrumental companies in the early days of video games and computer games UM, and now they were just reduced to a brand name. There was really no no identity behind that. Uh. At two thousand two, Meyer got inducted to another Hall of Fame, this time by the Computer Museum. So so he's He's in several halls that are famous. That was also in some golf was actually released UM in a two thousand three Info Grames Info Grames, that's

my fault. I need a transposition error. It's info Grames. I'm looking at the same notes that you're looking at, and you said it the way I wrote it. So I wrote it wrong. That's all excellent, Yes, C three C three is the point of this sentence, right. So Civilization three comes out from Info Grames, but the development of CIV three came from for acxis. So the you know, sid Meier of course founded for Access. So the company that Sidmire helped found ended up developing Civilization three and

it was just published by Infogrames. Jeff Briggs was the lead game designer for three. And that's when another video game designer named Sarn Johnson began to work on this title, on Civilization three, or or he had worked on it. Now he had joined for Access back in two thousand. Before he had joined for Access, he had worked for Electronic Arts and uh, and he'll become important later to two thousand four is when take two Interactive, which is that might be a name that a lot of our

video game players are familiar with. It's a publishing company. Yeah. They they own a rock star in two k UM, which which I responsible for, like Grand Theft, Auto Grant. The five comes out September sevent waits and like that NBA two k and they they buy the rights to the Civilization franchise from Info Grames. For twenty two point three million dollars. In two thousand five, take to Interact of then acquires for Access for twenty six point seven

million dollars. So once again you have all the components that are associated with the Civilization computer game series together under one roof. So it took some years that they split off and did some crazy splintering stuff, but now they're all part of the same company. And I believe two thousand four, I'm sorry, two thousand five was also the year that CE four was released, and uh, we're up to five now as I recall, So two thousand seven Civilization five is the current title, is what I'm

trying to at. But in two thousand seven, Soren Johnson, the developer I was talking about earlier, he leaves for Access to go back to e A, and he goes to work with an old peer of Sid Meyers, Will Write, who had made some city. Yeah, so Will Wright has his own. We could do our another podcast just on will Rap. I'd be great. Yeah, yeah sometime, Well, don't worry people who aren't big into video games. Well we'll

let some time. Yeah, well because breathing room. But he goes to work with Will Wright on a game called Spore, which had crazy buzz, so much hype, so much hype. Yeah, the idea of this artificially intelligent, super advanced uh component to this game, and that I was going to give you unprecedented control over the evolution of creatures and you

could share them with each other and cross breed. And the execution was what some would argue somewhat lacking compared to the buzz that surrounded it in its early days. It was one of those games that got delayed several times and it just didn't seem to live up to its potential. But that was its interesting that another person who had worked with Sidmyer went on to go and work with one of Meyer's early peers. Eventually, by the way, Sore and Johnson would actually leave e A again. That

would be the second time he had left Electronic Arts. Uh. That would be in and then he goes to join Zinga. Oh of um all of the little apps, yeah, the platform games, yeah, the apps and the mobile games uh and uh and that company it struggled quite a bit recently, yes, But in eleven that same year when Sare and Johnson had left, that's when Sieve World comes out. Now, this was a game that sid Meier was lead developer on. Civil World was a flash based game that used Facebook

as the platform. So you know those games when you go on to Facebook you get all those invites from your friends who don't like you, who want you to play. Was it candy Crush something I I've literally never played a Facebook game, so I would not know. I did early, early, early on in the days of Facebook, and then decided, you know, this is the these these games don't really appeal to me. Now, it may have been that I was playing poorly developed games, right, But anyways, this was

sid Meier's approach to getting into this. So they launched it inleven, but they shut it down in early It just, I guess wasn't working properly. It just didn't align with the rest of the company's vision. But anyway, that was one of the latest titles that sid Meier had a direct hand in developing. For Access was named the number

one developer of the year by Game Informer magazine. X Com had come out that year, a sci fi strategy game that hit a lot of critical and popular acclaim right, and actually, if you if you look back at the history of sid Meyer, you'll see that there's an earlier game called X Calm. This was a sort of a reimagination of that earlier game. And I know a lot of people who are huge X com fans. I have not played it, but all the people I know who have played it, they just rent and rave and say

this is fantastic. Jake Solomon, who I was talking about earlier, was the one who directed that one. Got you. So that's when the the well, first of all, that's this year when we're recording that hill, Welcome to the present. I'm reading the notes and I just present when we all got our jet packs and all food came in pilform. That's actually the the The latest title that Sidmyer has

developed came out this year. It's called Ace Patrol and it was in fact Sidmyer's first game specifically for mobile platforms, meaning you know, smartphones, tablet second thing, and uh, the way the game works, it's it's a World War One airplane strategy game. So you're you're controlling pilots who are flying various types of aircraft and you go into dog fights,

but you're not controlling the airplanes. It's turn based, so you know, you try and have your pilot, takedown other pilots, and as you progress through the game, you can upgrade your pilot skills and the airplanes capabilities. Um and uh so it plays a lot like other strategy games. Uh. Actually, just two days before we were recording this, on August Ace Patrol was released for PC on Steam. So you can play it either on a mobile platform or you

can play it on on Steam. What it's interesting here is it also gives us a little bit of an insight into Myer's opinions about some of the ways that games are being marketed these days. Um, like freemium games. Now, these are the games that are free for you to download, but if you want specific items or you want to get access to certain levels, you have to pay. Right and it's a frequent model for for mobile games. Right e A is really big on this, for instance, and

you know it does a lot of thing it does too. Yeah, there are a lot of different companies that are trying this. And then you're seeing this not just on things like mobile platforms, but also in consoles where you can get consoles where you end up having the stuff that you can pay extra for and get access to, or or n PC games a lot of the MMOs and involve

elements like that. Now, some of these games also allow you to eventually earn those items if you play long enough, but they're trying to create an incentive for players to spend the money to get earlier access to this stuff. So Meyer was asked about his opinion on this, and he said that building a game like that is about

designing unhappiness, which that's pretty tough. Yeah. He's essentially saying that you your goal when you are designing a freemium game where you're trying to give people the incentive to buy more stuff, is that you have to design a game so not fun that people will pay to make it fun. He says that kind of goes against the grain of game design. That's, uh, that's a kind of

harsh and b I think entirely true. Yeah. I mean, when you think of it that way, you're like, that's totally not the way the game developers are thinking about when they're designing the game. But from a consumer standpoint, yeah, I can see that saying we won this game to be engaging enough so that someone wants to download it, but not so engaging that they feel that they fulfilled. They have to pay to really get that fulfilling experience, and that myers like I don't want to be part

of that. So with the iOS version of Ace Patrol, you could pay five dollars and get the whole game. You could try to play it for free, and you get the first few levels, but then you would be prompted to say, all right, if you enjoyed this, go ahead and purchase it. If not, then thank you for

playing um. And if you only wanted to play one of the nationalities in the game, you could pay a dollar per nationality, so you could, you know, have had a little bit of that freemium thing, but only in the sense of kind of this is the trial version. Now you can buy the full version, not so much of Oh you want your playing to go faster, spend

a dollar now. Another interesting thing that I read is that Meyer says he's no longer involved in Civilization titles, but but that that he feels like they're in good hands. And the last one, Civilization five, was designed by John Schaefer, and uh, you know again, like they'll they'll come to Sidmire for input, they'll ask him for his opinions. But he says he's no longer actively part of those teams, which he's fine with. He he wants to be able

to concentrate on whatever interests him. And again, he doesn't necessarily want to get caught in this trappic like like we want you to be a franchise generator. He doesn't want that. So I've got some trivia. So here's some Sidmyer trivia. And the first bit is that sid Meyer appears as a character in the Alien Crossfire expansion pack for sid Meier's Alpha Centauri game. So there's a a secret hidden faction in the this expansion pack for Alpha Centauri,

and the secret faction is called the Faraxians. So, uh, if you unlocked the Farraxians, you would unlock them either with sid Meyer as the leader or Brian Reynolds as the leader, and that would appear as the leader for the rest of the game. Uh. And then according to the two thousand eight Guinness Book of World Records, sid Meyer holds the record for most video game awards ever received. Um. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Like we've said, we talked about his wife and the fact that her her she

consider is her new title Master of Miscellaneous that. By the way, it's not a formal title, it's not her official title. Now, that's just kind of what she's like. That's what I consider myself. Uh. And according to his employees, like we said, he's a very personal friendly guy. He's got like an open door policy. Anyone can come in and talk to him. Apparently he's really dedicated to his work.

If he's really interested in a project, you will find him even working on weekends and working long hours if he's if he's really excited. It's kind of like the way that players play Civilization where they have to take that next turn. They can't they can't quit yet, They're just gonna do one more turn, just one more turn. All right, So we're gonna have another part of this podcast. We're gonna really talk about Civilization and its development process

and it's impact on the industry. But before we get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So let's talk about Civilization. This is, of course, the biggest title I think you could you could argue that Sidmyer has ever produced, while I would a that Pirates remains my favorite. Uh. Do you can't deny the fact that Civilization has had a huge impact. So did you know that the original Civilization was only three megabytes in size?

I didn't know that, but only because I read the same research that you did. Also, Yeah, that would that would help. Yeah, that but that's kind of that's kind of eye opening. Now, like you a video game being like multiple gigs and one of the most successful or at least highest critical acclaimed video games ever made only free megabytes. Yeah, it was created for the IBM PC UM, which at the time only had memory, right, Yeah, so so you know you had those limited constraints that we

talked about earlier. By the way, who was it that handled almost all the programming on that first Civilization game? Do you know? I do not know? It's Sid Meyer. He did all the programming himself, pretty much. He said that, you know, essentially all the coding was due to him. He was the one who was coding everything for Civilization. He said that he did some of the art design as well, and a few of his art designs may have made it into the final game, but he's not sure. Um,

he was working very closely with a specific person. Bruce Campbell Show Bruce Campbell, Shelley, thank you um and and and that was that was they were called within the company, the A team supposedly and um and Like like Jonathan was talking about earlier, Shelley would play test, Meyer would tweak the game and just rinse, repeat, Yeah. They would just do this over and over again. Shelley would be like, this game is great, but here's the stuff that I

thought needed a little work. And Meyer would go back and tweak it and bring it back the next morning and say try it again. And they would just do this several times in order to kind of refine the game. Now here's some interesting background here. So Bruce Campbell Shelley came to micro Pros. This is back in the acroprose days. He came to Micropros from another company called Avalon Hill. Right, yeah, okay, now now Avalon Hill had um what was a board

game company. Yeah, they would publish board games. And one of the board games they published was originally published by another company in England and designed by Francis Tresham. This was called Civilization. Yeah, so Civilization the board game. Francis Francis Tresham was the guy who designed it. Uh, and it was published in written When it came over to America. Avalon Hill purchased the license to publish it in the

United States. So Avalon Hills not the company that that ultimately owned Civilization, They just had a license for it in the un right. So that's one connection between the board game Civilization and the computer game Civilization. That would be Shelley who he did not work on the board game conversion for Civilization, but he did work on another game that Tresham had developed called eighteen twenty nine that

was a real road designing game board game. Yeah, and they when they brought over to America, they changed the title it was no longer but anyway, again it was a railroad. It was a railroad kind of a railroad empire game, all right, much like Railroad Tycoon, which Shelley also worked on, right, so they now Now, they did say that things like these board games served as inspiration, but when you look at the actual mechanics and the way the actual games play out there, really the similarities

are mainly on a surface level. They don't go very deeply like and once you get into game mechanics it separates out quite a bit, right, right, Um, And you know, like the board game Civilization for example, Um didn't really go into anywhere near modern or futuristic technology. It stopped and kind of the Middle Ages, ancient to Middle Ages. That was pretty much the domain of the original board game.

And you know, Meyer has said that he was certainly aware of the board game, that he had a copy that he had looked through, but it that he hadn't actually played it until after he finished building Civilization. Shelley says that he had played the board game, obviously having worked for Avalon Hill, but that that Meyer. He also says, you know, Meyer hadn't played it until after he had

finished the development of the actual Civilization video game. But this is where, you know, one of the things we can talk about, along with the developmental issues of trying to get this game actually to to publish in the environment that was micropros at that time, is the issues

with this game. Now. They didn't want to encounter any legal problems with this this computer game once they decided they were going to call it Civilization, so they licensed the name Civilization from Avalon Hill, which again was the u S publisher for the game. Right So um the the by the way, the British company that published it originally was called Heartland trefoil, and I'm sure I'm saying trefoil wrong because the way the UK works, they'd say,

oh it's spelled tref oil, but it's now throat wobbler mangrove. So, um, I apologize, that's a money Python reference. I apologize if I am, you know, if if all the UK fans out there are just wincing every time I try and say this. So getting back into the actual development of Civilization,

this was not a smooth process. We mentioned it in the previous podcast that they were experiencing some reluctance on the part of Micropros because Steely, who was the president of Micropros, he was really focused on those combat signulations and he reportedly just didn't get Civilization. He just didn't see where the appeal was. He didn't think it was going to be successful. Also, because Meyer had moved away from being a direct employee of Micropros, he was no

longer head of development. The new VP of Development did not have any incentive to promote Sidmyer games because he did not receive any sort of bonus from those games. He would receive bonuses from any games developed internally by micro a Prose employees, so he would focus on those and push those out ahead of anything else. So, uh, while Siedmyer would get a budget from Micropros to work on games, he would get an upfront budget, he didn't

get a lot of other support. And he and Shelly have both said that that meant the development for Civilization stretched out longer than it was supposed to, and in fact, the game ended up slipping its its original ship date. And this is a real kicker. Apparently that meant that their own personal bonuses were affected. Meyer and Shelly their bonuses were and and their team. There was more than

just the two of them working on this. They had a team of people, right, I think it was about about ten eight to ten depending upon the source you read. So I have about ten people working on this game, and their bonuses are affected by the fact that the

game did not ship on time. However, Shelly points out in interviews, he says, look, the reason why our game didn't ship on time is because Micropros was dragging their feet and that it was a man They kept putting us on other projects and therefore we couldn't There was no way for us to ship on time because they would pull us off of the work we needed to do to get the game finished. So, in other words, management would make decisions that affected our work and then

punish us when the work wasn't being done. And so it's it's you know, it's a terrible catch twenty two to share, and it's kind of easy to see after after this process, why a lot of these people started ditching, yes, sorry, to leave the company and go somewhere else, and why ultimately Meyer and two of his fellow designers would leave

and found for Access. So they eventually, despite all odds against them, finished Civilization, and it of course publishes in ninety one, I believe, and it ends up not getting a whole lot of support from micropros. The marketing department doesn't spend a lot of money, so they have to rely upon gamers who purchased is the game to go out and tell all their gaming buddies, Hey, you guys have got to try this. This game is amazing, which

fortunately they did. Yeah and uh, and this game was a huge leap from those early games sid Meuyer made back in the day when sid Meyer made a game that was in a ziploc bag with a Zerox piece of paper that had the game art on one side and the instructions on the other. Civilization shipped with a manual that was probably around two hundred pages in length. I remember that. I remember that one of the things that that Shelley did. Sid Meyer says the most important

thing that Shelley did was play the game. He says that was the most important thing that Shelley did because he played the game and would tell sid Meyer which things were working in which weren't. But if he had to say what the second most important thing was, Shelley took it upon himself to do two things. He helped write the manual and he wrote the civil Opedia, now the civil Opedia for any one who has not played Civilization.

The Civilipedia is an in game reference that gives you more information about everything in the game, every single unit, every military unit. It tells you more about them, gives you a historical context. It tells you about all the different buildings you can build. Uh. There are wonders of the world that you can design in Civilization, and they are based off the actual amazing things that humans have created, things like the pyramids and you know, the hanging gardens

of babble on that kind of thing. Ah, so he rode up entries for all of the stuff. I get that, I've gotten the feeling that Chili is a tiny bit of a history. Nerd um And and Sidmyer too. Yeah, although they both said that they didn't do a whole lot of research when they first started working on Civilization. They just wanted it to be a fun game, right, and so so that most of the you know, knowledge

that's in there is kind of elementary level. Although I have seen reports about three in particular being used in classroom settings, and I can imagine that. I mean, and when you look at the actual game mechanics, because we've talked a lot about thing is like you know, developing your your your social abilities, or developing the wonders of the world or future technology or trying to conquer it

gets so much more complex than that, right. You've got the different nationalities, each of which have their own abilities or you know pros and cons when you first start off, like I remember when I would play Sief two and I would play as the Germans. For some reason, I would end up with two settlers instead of one, which gave me an amazing advantage because I could use one set of settlers to build a city, and the second set of settlers could irrigate around the city and make

it a more viable location. Other nations might start with only one settler, but they get more technology bonuses at the very beginning of the game. Then you would have things like what sort of government your civilization used, like is it a despotic system, is it capitalism, is it communism, socialism?

And that would affect gameplay from that point forward. So it was the game and can when you would start off, would be very simple, This is pure sid Meier approach, very simple, and you would add levels of complexity as the game would go on until you get to a point where if you were to jump into that game maybe two turns in and that's how the game started,

you think there's no way I can play this. This is way too complicated, right right you you learned with the game and UM and that was something That's two really built on as well. They started adding a lot of the concepts they had wanted to incorporate and to save one but UM but just felt like they were over complicating things right now. In the earliest days of civilization, when they were developing it. I meant to mention this earlier,

but I I definitely think it's important. It's it's interesting that it was not a turn based game when they first started developing it, right, it was. It was originally um like sim City, which Sidmire has has referenced as being one of the big influences of the game. The three big ones are sim City, Risk and Railroad Tycoon.

Right right, um uh, but yes, he was saying that it was it was real time, right, everything was passing and so and so things, things were happening, um, you know, as you would kind of build something and let your settlers do their thing, and and he found that this was very dull and reduced the player to a viewer. Yeah, you became it was a more passive experience. You weren't taking an active role. And that's when he made the decision.

And this this was he was well into the development of the game, and he said that, you know, if you figure out six months into the development of a game that's not working, you have to have to change change it. And so he went from real time to turn based, and by turn based, it meant that you

could control the passage of time. Because it wasn't until you ended a turn that the clock would move forward, right, that that the you know, whatever you have implemented would go into effect, right right, and or that even that you would be able to take another turn. So uh, you know, civilization is based on whatever year it is, so uh, in early stages of the game, time passes

much more quickly. I think I can't remember if it's by decade or even by century when you first start off, but by the time you get toward the end game, it's going year by year. So the the idea being that progress is much more rapid later on in the game, so you have to divide up the time into smaller increments for that to be reflected. So uh, those are big changes. Yeah. Yeah, and this this would wind up being um really really integral to to what the game

was like. Um it's it's a lot of people talk about about being addictive, and and even even Meyer himself has said that he's been late to meetings because he was playing the game totally forgot he fell victim to his own trap. Yeah. No, I knew a lot of people who, especially in college. I knew a lot of kids in college who who were a little bleary eyed because they had been playing Civilization the night before and it just was one of those things where they're like,

I totally missed. Yeah, I got to bed at four am and got up at seven. Let's be serious, they got up at like two minutes before the class started. But anyway, uh yeah, So getting into more of the difficulty with Civilization, some of it, some of the really messy stuff happened after sid Meyer had left micropros um.

But one of the interesting things is that in Avalon Hill, the company the publisher for the Civilization board game, actually published Advanced Civilization, which was a computer version of the board game Civilization. So this if you were a fan of the old Civilization board game, you could buy this one and that would be the official one. Also, it should be noted that sid Meier's Civilization is now a

board game too, so that even more complicated. Yeah. I edited the House to Works article about this, so I learned way too much about it. It was done by Kevin Wilson, who also did Arkham Horror, which is which is pretty popular title it's in was published by Fantasy Flight, which is uh, you know, the kids who do a other video game board games like World Warcraft and StarCraft. And they're also the current publishers of Talisman. Oh man, yeah, I have. I haven't thought of that in years. Oh

I've I've I play it basically every year. That's one of one of my group favorites. I think it might have been the nineties when I last played Talisman. Well, speaking of the nineties, in ven, that's when the proverbial crep hits, the proverbial rotating oscillating thing. Yeah, so we've got an That's when Activision gets involved. So Activision purchases the rights to the Civilization name from Avalon Hill. Now remember Avalon Hill is the publishing company that had the

rights to publish the Civilization board game in the United States. Meanwhile, uh, Activision then creates a computer game called Civilization Call to Power. This was in no way connected to this admirer franchise games, right, So it's it's really just it's got the name Civilization, but other than that, and it is a it's an empire building type game, but other than that, it is not a it's not an entry into the Civilization franchise.

But then Activision goes on to sue Micropros over trademark infringement because now they own the name Civilization because they licensed it from Avalon Hill. Right. Meanwhile, Micropros had bought Heartland Trefoil, which was the original publisher before Avalon Hill of the Civilization board game. Right, this was the company that was founded by the guy who created the Civilization board game. So essentially what here's here's all this works out.

Activision goes out and buys the buys the rights to use Civilization according to the US publisher of this board game, sus Micropros. Micropros goes out and buys the original company to make the board game, and then sues Activision and says, you can't sue us for trademark infringement. We own the company that made the thing that you were claiming you were suing you. Yeah, so we're suing you instead in your face. I think that might have actually been in

the deposition. Uh So, Yeah, we've got this crazy lawsuit going on. Not keep in mind sid Meyer's not a part of this. He's just off on his own making his games, probably lulls a tiny man, probably thinking it's a little amusing. Yeah, the company has wound up settling all of this out of court. But that's the point when Hasbro comes in and buys Avalon Hill and then buys Micropros. So now Avalon Hill and Micropros are both under the same umbrella now there, which is hence why

they probably settled it. Yeah now now that now it doesn't even matter anymore because both parties in this trademark infringement spat are belonging to the same company. But as we learned, Hasbro Interactive did not last that long. They ended up selling that off to Infogrames and uh and that is the end of the the massive Civilization crazy story. Worry when it comes to just the name of the game.

I just I love the idea that you can go out and buy a company that made a product, uh and you know, years and years ago, and then someone else had made a product also years ago that had the same name and retroactively say I own that I'm suing you for trademark infringement for this thing that you made before I bought this company. That's our legal system, folks. It makes my nose bleed, yes, um, but so yeah,

so Civilization um kind of kind of big. Yeah. I would say that it really created a true genre now itself is often referred to as one of the God games, which became popular right around that time that Civilization came out. Other games like Populus or SimCity are are similar games where you are given the ability to create these massive things. It's not you taking on the role of a single character, but rather being the guiding force behind the creation of something.

And I think that that creation element is what's really key to all of this, and you know, it's it's it's interesting to me that's admire Um is so bent on these creative games and was less interested in the destructive elements of of the of the more violent military simulation he He admits that there is a component of violence in many of his games, but it tends to be violence in the abstract, right, So like there's there's

never any gore or blood. Right. If you have two units in Civilization fighting one another, it's essentially two tiles and one of the you know, they do a little statistical analysis and some randomization to figure out which tile wins and the other toile goes away, and that's the extent of your violence. So he feels that the violent parts are not necessary to make a fun, compelling game. He doesn't find that appealing to personally, so that that's

not part of what he does when he makes his games. Right, there has been some some criticism um lobbied against Civilization due to um like like, for example, they they left out slavery from the games, and that's a pretty big historical emission from multiple eras. Oh sure, sure, and and you know said sid Meier kind of said, like, well, it's not really pleasant. I don't really want to think about it. That's not really fun. Yeah, exactly. A game. In my view, a game's primary function is to be fun.

So it's not that I'm setting out to make the definitive, historically accurate empire building game. I'm out there to make something that is fun and challenging so that players have a good time when they're sitting down to play this title and see that. It's another interesting thing because not

all video game developers have this same philosophy. There's some who want to make a very compelling experience fun, right, or some who want to tell a very particular story, like like something like BioShock, which I think is a terrific story. Um but um, but it's not like you have a lot of a hand in it right. So it's obviously there are different philosophies. It's just it's very it's kind of refreshing to talk about someone who his whole focus was just let's make the most fun game

we can. That's that's the only real thing that we have to keep in mind. It doesn't need to, uh, you know, be genre defining. It doesn't have to be the start of a franchise. We just want to make something that when people loaded up, they're gonna have a good time. When they play, they're gonna want to keep playing it. Yeah. Um and he he did. Um. He and the rest of the Civilization development team did address some of the other concerns that people had a Um,

in future games, you could play as many other different societies. Um, it was pretty Western centric the first one. Yeah, he actually says, yeah, Yeah, I would say that first Civilizization game was very much Western centric because I made it, and that's I made it based upon my own my own experience and education. He also joked that that the reason that there were only six in um, different nationalities that you could play as was because they were at the end of the sixteen color e g A graphics.

We don't have any other That's all we could do, right, otherwise you're going to be confused. Actually, and the interesting thing I found in the later Civilization games was that the game itself would adapt to your play style, and if you were doing incredibly well early on, in order for it to become more challenging, it would start to not like stack the deck against you, which is the way some games work, and that I find very frustrating.

Like anyone who's played any racing games where you get way in the lead and then there's this rubber band effect where suddenly there's someone right behind. Yeah, like, how did that happen? I left everyone in the dust? Um, I'm looking at you. Burnout anyway, he the Civilization games. Instead, Let's say that you're playing and you're you're getting really militaristic very early on in the game, and so you're

you're hitting cities before they have a real defense mounted up. Uh, you could defeat a civilization, and normally you'd be playing against you know, a certain number, but it wouldn't be all the civilizations in the game. It would be a limited number of them. So maybe half of the civilizations that are in the game are active at one time. It would then populate part of the map with a

new civilization. Uh, so I'd be starting from scratch. It's not like the civilization would suddenly be on par with yours, come on with nuclear warheads, but it would mean that you wouldn't immediately conquered the world within you know, twenty

turns or something. Right. So yeah, it's and I also thought it was really interesting then the first Civilization, as they were developing it, they decided to cut the world's map in half because it was too big and uh and to also reduce the complexity of the technology tree, which had a two different trees originally, right, which which

they wound up putting some of that insive too. Yeah, because then they were like, well, once people got involved with Civilization one and they really liked it, we figured, well now we can put that stuff civilization too, because now everyone knows how to play right, Yeah, which is kind of funny. Yeah. So, um, I I had a couple of quotes from from Meyer that I thought kind

of rounded out all of this. Um. One of them was was from that Kataku interview UM in which he said, upon him being asked about retirement, I kind of feel like, I am retired, I'm doing what I want to do. I've been retired for a long time. I still love making games. So I've never really thought of that. Um And and the second one isn't a quote, it's more

of a summarized statement. But upon being asked whether he keeps track of his high score and civilization, he said that, um, he he doesn't because he knows it's just a number he can patch. Um, So he doesn't really see the value. Um, you know, it's it's too easy to cheat. And and and I feel like that's I feel like that's a pretty good summary of his overall just statement on the world. You know, like like he's not he's not keeping score. Yeah, no,

that's kind of cool. That's just the Again, he gets the satisfaction out of creating something that other people enjoy. Uh yeah, I can certainly identify with that. A lot of my job satisfaction comes from when you, listeners, get in touch with us and let's know what you think. Hey, listeners, you should get in touch with us and let us know what you think. That's the segue gets all the

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