Transcription
Game changers, as IGN's look at the people behind the games that changed the industry, presented by Cup Noodles, supporting those just warming up for something much, much bigger.
For many people, Sid Meier's Civilization series practically defines strategy gaming. The 1991 original laid the foundation for one of the biggest franchises in gaming history and gave shape to an entire genre of 4X strategy games. While almost every strategy game since has looked to Civilization for inspiration, it's important to remember that Sid Meier and co-creator Bruce Shelley were very nearly creating a genre from scratch.
The inspiration for Civilization really came from a game, Railroad Tycoon, which we had just finished and was the first of our kind of "God" type games where you started small and built something really cool. And we were looking for a topic that was more epic than railroads, and we said, "Hey, what about the history of the world? That could be cool."
It was a massive shift in focus for Meier, whose previous games focused on smaller and more manageable topics. But Meier sees Civilization as a natural extension of lessons he learned from his earlier games. "I think all the games that we developed in that era—Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!, Civilization—were kind of based on things that I thought were cool as a kid," he says. "You know, if a kid goes through a pirates phase or building a railroad phase. So the idea of kind of taking those passions that I had as a child and turning them into games was really what motivated me, uh, to to make these games."
But when it came to making a game about all of human history, the size and scale of the project was immediately daunting. The scope of the game was pretty intense, but we found some mechanics that kind of brought it down to a very simplistic level. The individual systems—combat, economics, diplomacy, resource gathering—all were very manageable. And so, once we had those systems, it was kind of the interaction between them that made the game interesting. And so I think we kind of boiled down history into its very essential elements.
What Meier needed was a hook on which the rest of Civilization's game design could be built, and that hook was an emphasis on founding and growing cities. "So in doing some research on civilization, I kind of, uh, found out that that Civilization became interesting when people formed cities and started to specialize in different skills," he explains. "And so cities became kind of the the core of Civilization gameplay. Uh, you were able to build buildings there; you were able to decide on your different policies; it gave you a reason to explore and expand and also to affect different government types and policies. So all the all the kind of interesting parts of civilization revolved around what you did in your cities."
The most important trick that Civilization pulled was convincing players that they were playing a very simple, intuitive game when they're actually playing a very complicated one. To this day, Civilization is still considered one of the most accessible strategy games around, despite also being an incredibly complex one. Making that complexity easily digestible was Meier's objective.
The kind of core design element behind Civilization was the idea of starting small and gradually layering in more and more interesting and and deep uh aspects of the game. So the the game kind of draws you in with a a settler, a little bit of expansion, gradually your tech advances and things like that. So we found the game was more interesting when you had to trade off military versus economic and expansion versus uh, you know, keeping your people happy. Players found that every decision in Civ is in itself pretty simple and straightforward, but over the course of a long game, their consequences can go in any number of directions. That quality gave Civilization its now-legendary "just one more turn" appeal.
"I think Civilization has interesting decisions on many different levels, and that's kind of what what uh gives it that one more turn uh quality," Meier says. "That you have macro interesting decisions: I'm going to I'm going to focus on my my military; am I going to focus on expansion; am I going to try and build a strong economy; am I going to try and keep my people happy? So there these kind of macro decisions to be made, and they're all interesting trade-offs. Uh, what building do I build next? What unit do I build? Those are all uh decisions that have uh kind of long-term and short-term consequences, uh, that makes them all kind of interesting and and and really encourages the player to project and their strategy and think into the future as to what's going to happen next, and that kind of keeps you playing for that next turn and that next turn after that."
The formula worked, but while Civilization would become a smash hit and spawn countless sequels and imitators, MicroProse, the game's publisher, wasn't quite sure what to make of it while it was in development. Civilization, at the beginning, was actually very much a sideline project for for MicroProse. We were known for simulators and military games, so it was really just Bruce Shelley and I working on the game for a very long time until we got a little closer to the end, then we brought in our artist and our sound team. But it was really kind of a sideline for for MicroProse until it uh turned into something that that was really playable and fun.
Civilization itself came out in an era when strategy games weren't as dominant as they would grow to be in the following decades. As gamers were looking for something new, and uh, the time Civ came out, it was something different. Strategy was a was a dirty word at the time. Strategy games were boring and they only appealed to hardcore gamers and they were very complex and things like that. I think Civ in a way made the world uh safe for strategy games, more than any other developer.
Meier became synonymous with his games; his name appears on the boxes to this day, long after he stopped leading their development. But Sid Meier the man is quick to differentiate himself from Sid Meier the brand. "In my mind, there are kind of two Sid Meiers," he says. "There's there's the me that's actually working on games and and and and making games, designing games and playing games and having fun with games, and then there's the the Sid Meier brand that goes on the on the box. Those are two different people in my mind, really, uh, cuz I'm thinking about kind of the next game that I'm working on; that's my focus generally. That Sid is living in the past with the glories of the the good old days. I try not to worry too much about where they intersect."
Yep. Meier is understandably proud of his legacy and of Civilization, which exploded the myth that games were just mindless time wasters. "I think Civilization gave the industry a little more credibility that games could be about more than blowing things up, or a game that kind of took on all of history kind of said that perhaps gaming is not just a waste of time," he says. "That you know we we hear stories about kids learning about history or impressing their teachers with their knowledge of of Caesar or or you know Genghis Khan or whatever, have you, or kind of knowing something about history because of playing Civilization. So I think Civilization introduced the idea that you could possibly spend your time wisely by playing games, which is a radical concept."
That wraps up our first round of Game Changers. If you like these videos, let us know, and be sure to check out our other series like In Five Minutes and Secret Origins. Until next time, stick with us here at IGN.