Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley recently appeared on a panel at GDC 2017 and talked about the very first Civilization video game:
"Let's go back in time to 1990," game developer Sid Meier said to a Thursday crowd at the annual Game Developers Conference. "Back when there was no Civilization."
Meier's silly double entendre framed a "post-mortem" look at the origins and lessons learned from the landmark PC game. With the help of producer and developing partner Bruce Shelley, the hour-long conversation was marked by equal parts history, depth, and humor—which seemed appropriate, considering the game in question juggled the same three elements so elegantly back in 1991.
Development on Civilization began after the completion of Railroad Tycoon during the development of Covert Action and with the momentum of Pirates!, "one of the first open-world games." All those games put wind into the duo's PC game-making sails. "We were young and audacious," Meier says. "It was a time where we thought we could do anything, so, sure, let's take on 'civilization.'"
Meier described a train ride in early 1990 with Shelley in which the duo discussed the elements they liked about Railroad Tycoon, particularly how its disparate systems (building, operation, finances, manufacturing, etc.) added up to let players "make a lot of interesting decisions." Perhaps running an entire civilization would offer a similar mix of crisscrossing systems, Meier posited. (Plus, making a game "more epic" didn't cost any additional budget.)
Shelley recalled losing track of that particular conversation—"Sid always had half-a-dozen prototypes on his computer," he noted. But he remembered a conversation about the British PC war game Empire, which they were both fond of. Meier asked Shelley for "ten things he'd change" about that game, to which Shelley offered a list of a dozen. In May of 1990, Meier responded by dropping a single 5-1/4-inch disk on Shelley's desk: the first playable version of Civilization. "I saved it as a historical artifact," he told the crowd.
[...] Meier admitted that the game's first prototype disc was missing one key Civilization component: turn-based play. His original version of the game looked more like SimCity, with real-time, "zone this area for a purpose" management mechanics. The game "came together" once Meier switched to turn-based play, which was more like the war-gaming board games he loved, anyway. (Turns also immediately offered a tangible benefit, he said: an addictive, "one more turn" quality.)
[...] In terms of development errors, Meier points to a lack of mod support as top on his list. "This is something we did horribly wrong," he said. "Modding and scenarios became such a wonderful important part of Civ as it proceeded through the years. We didn't have the vision that anybody could design anything better than we could!"
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @01:23PM (10 children)
I sometimes wonder how many hours I spend playing all the civilization games. The first games didn't offer timers as far as I can remember. Civ 5 did offer played time via Steam and that is showing the scarey amount of 1523h played, Civ 6 still hasn't ranked up more then a few hundred hours ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @02:07PM
Sucked up a lot of my time back in the DOS/Win 3.1 days. Changes in the later games just didn't do it for me, and I migrated to freeciv (back in its 2d and slightly more stable savegame days.) which then enjoyed many hours played during late nights with friends I only knew over the internet :)
Been a number of years since I've done that though. Older you get the few chances you find to get all those people together for an uninterrupted night of gaming. PBEM is an option, but not many people have either the memory or attention span to game like that anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @02:58PM (8 children)
I haven't tried Civ 5 or 6 yet. It seemed like a lot of people were upset about 5 being less complex, but I like that they've moved to hexes. How are they?
Civ 4 Beyond the Sword (BtS) easily has the most time of any game on my Steam, a lot of that because of the Caveman2Cosmos mod. Do 5 or 6 have equivalents yet?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday March 05 2017, @03:12PM (2 children)
4 BTS is probably my favorite now, on balance, although 2 and 3 shine in areas and are worth pulling back out now and then.
Caveman2Cosmos huh? I'll try to take a look. Final Frontier, Realism Invictus, and History Rewritten are the ones that have sucked up most of my time.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Sunday March 05 2017, @05:46PM
Personally I prefer sticking to Multiplayer in the regular Civ4 BTS. Most mods are not well polished. C2C has a lot of "Bloat" rather than additions in my opinion, but to each his own.
Civ4 is the last Civ game for me. The franchise has taken a direction with 5 on that I cannot agree with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @04:25AM
My favorite Civ5 quote, forgot where I got it from (probably CivFanatics forum):
ThERat: Whatever happened to the so called 3 layered AI [in Civ5]? Which of those actually works? I guess none
SevenSpirits: Well, there the strategic AI, which is responsible for not building horsemen or upgrading obsolete units. Then there is the operational AI, which coordinates troop movement to critical destinations through flatland next to enemy units. So that all seems fine, maybe the problem is that the tactical AI is broken?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday March 05 2017, @10:57PM (4 children)
I keep hearing how civ5 was the end of an era, horrible game, totally not a civ any more, etc. but honestly I liked it, especially after some expansion content showed up (which brought back some complexity) and some bugs got fixed. Prior to getting 5, I spent most of my civ time with civ1 (civNET, specifically), civ2, and later freeciv. I rather liked the move to hexes, but that might be because I've had a fondness for hex tiles since...I think Nobunaga's Ambition.
Also helps that Civ5 has a Linux port; it worked fine in wine so I already owned it, but I appreciate that they got Aspyr to port it and it works well. No idea about how good or bad 6 is, though, since I'm still waiting to see if it gets a port.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 06 2017, @07:56PM (1 child)
Also helps that Civ5 has a Linux port
I haven't played Civ since Civ3, as I'd moved completely to linux before 2003 (I'd moved in 2000 and my gaming time was spent on RT2 which loki sold, but I installed windows to play civ3 for a year or so)
Trouble is now Civ5 requires a graphics card which just won't work on my laptop
Intel Integrated video chipsets (GMA 9XX, HD 3XXX) will not run Civilization V for SteamOS and Linux, and are unsupported.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday March 07 2017, @12:55AM
That sucks, and it's also why I try to avoid getting systems with Intel integrated GPUs. They've always been pretty terrible, with the only benefit being lower power consumption because they can't do anything useful :/
You might be able to coerce the Windows version into running via wine, though; I played Civ5 that way for a bit while waiting on the Linux port and it worked well. I have an nvidia gpu, though, so no idea how that'll work out for you.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday March 06 2017, @08:23PM (1 child)
Linux-port got released about a month ago [phoronix.com]
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday March 07 2017, @12:48AM
Nice! Last I heard they were still being cagey on whether they were going to bother making one, so I wasn't following it too closely. I'll have to pick it up sometime and check it out. Going to add it to my wishlist so I don't forget about it...
Thanks for mentioning that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @04:41PM (1 child)
Sid is a bit of a self-righteous narcissist, and frankly the only great idea he's ever had may have been the inception of the original Civilization. Assuming it _was_ his idea. Most of his fame today is from titles he had little or nothing to do with, but it doesn't stop him from prepending his name to the titles. Pretty sure he's some kind of religious figurehead, actually; he's always prominently displaying cross iconography and condescending to people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday March 05 2017, @10:52PM
It is a bit disturbing how Meier constantly seem to downplay the Avalon Hill games that had existed since 1980, or was it 1981. He makes it sound like he just kind borrowed the name, there was some copyright-battle that he lost I would assume since the game had to be called Sid Meiers Civilization and not just Civilization. Avalon Hill released their Advanced Civilization the same year as the first Sid Civ game came out for the Amiga ('91 as I recall). I would say he borrowed a tad more then the name. More or less everything that is part of the boardgame is also in the computer game, some concepts are tweaked a bit and changed around but they are in essence from the boardgame - in the boardgame you collect resources cards (furs, wheat etc) and you trade these in for "points" that you use to buy technology cards, the technology cards are sort of in a tech tree in that you get discounts on certain techs if you have other techs or if they are of a certain type and color).
* About the Sid Meier Civ games *
Civ1 - was so different from most other games when it came out. I played it a fair amount on the Amiga. It was a bit annoying tho since harddrives wasn't all that common at the time so it was all on floppies (or one floppy probably and then a "save" disk).
Civ2 - I skipped since I still used Amiga and it wasn't released for that platform and I didn't fancy running some Macintosh emulator just to run it.
Civ3 - I played a lot of this. It had some quite excellent mods that made it a lot of fun - seem to recall a warhammer fantasy battle theme and remake. It was great.
Civ4 - I didn't really like it when it was released. They had changed a lot of the things I really liked about Civ 3 and I found it to be an inferior product compared to the previous game.
Civ5 - I got back to playing Civ again with this expansion and played a disgusting amount of it. I didn't really like the base game very much, so once again there was mods that made it playable.
Civ6 - I really like a lot of the concepts that they introduced with the game, like you don't build everything in the city center but you build districts and in those districts you build the buildings, wonders take a land tile etc. Sadly they really dropped the ball on game mechanics at release. The tech tree was completely f*cked up and you could make these horrible shortcuts and it completely broke the game, there was some mods once again that came to the rescue and corrected this and slowed it down so you could actually play the game and not just race to the end of the tech tree. I like the new more soft and cartoon-like graphics. Some of the tech tree issues are apparently fixed in the latest patch (or whatever they call it these days - the new stuff with the Australian civilization added) but I have not really had much time to look at it or play with it yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @06:31PM
i first started playing civ3 on windows many years ago. liked civ 4 a lot. haven't played since moving to linux. now they have 4 and 5 available for linux via steam but so far i've been able to resist. I just don't want to install or play a closed source game. If steam would show the license status and have a filter for it, the linux numbers might improve a little. The way their website is now doesn't even allow me to shop FOSS games exclusively(AFAIK). I have a problem financially supporting steam/games the way things are now. rather donate to/play 0ad even though it's not perfect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @04:22AM
https://www.humblebundle.com/civilization-bundle [humblebundle.com]
For $1+, Civ 3 & 4.
For $average+ ($9.15 ATM), also Civ 5.
Civ 3&4 are also available at GOG, though quite a bit more expensive than the bundle:
https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_civilization_iii_complete [gog.com]
https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_civilization_iv_the_complete_edition [gog.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @01:40PM (2 children)
When PC games were great, around 1987.
* Pirates! was awesome. I fondly remember the PC beeper music that sounded awesome despite the fact that the bleeper can only play one note at a time. There was classical organ music in the original (maybe Bach) and it sounded just wonderful. I have no idea how they pulled that off, I've never heard better PC beeper music before or since. Loved the freedom to decide for myself in true role playing fashion.
* Empire, war game of the century. Loved it. My only regret that towards the end playing a single turn would take absolutely forever as you'd have to move millions of units by hand.
* Meier's Alpha Centauri was also epic but this is much later, 1999 or so.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday March 06 2017, @01:53PM
Mandatory trivia: Empire was by Walter Bright, creator of the D programming language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @08:19AM
> I fondly remember the PC beeper music that sounded awesome despite the fact that the bleeper can only play one note at a time. There was classical organ music in the original (maybe Bach) and it sounded just wonderful. I have no idea how they pulled that off
Young padawan, the answer is that the PC beeper could be controlled via interleaved controls.
I wrote some stuff but why sound smart? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker#Pulse-width_modulation [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 06 2017, @07:39PM
At my school back in 1997/98 they put everyone in for a GCSE (end of school exam at age 16) exam in RE. I wasn't particularly bothered about RE - time was better spent revising things like biology and geography, and the teacher - being a pragmatic sort of a chap who was interesting in teaching what different religions did, said "if you don't want to do it don't bother with the exam"
In the mock exam one of the question, the question was something like "write down a creation story". Presumably acceptable answers include pretty much anything on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths [wikipedia.org]
However I went for a far better one. I think I had a few errors in it, and may have skipped a line, but it went something like this:
In the beginning the earth was without form, and void.
But the sun shone upon the sleeping earth,
And deep inside the brittle crust, massive forces waited to be unleashed.
The seas parted, and great continents were formed.
Mountains arose, earthquakes spawned massive tidal waves.
Volcanoes erupted and spewed forth fiery lava,
And charged the atmosphere with strange gasses.
Into this swirling maelstrom of fire and air and water,
The first stirrings of life appeared.
Tiny organisms, cells and amoeba, clinging to tiny sheltered habitats.
But the seeds of life grew, and strengthened, and spread, and diversified, and prospered.
And soon every continent and climate teemed with life.
And with life came instinct, and specialization, natural selection, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals.
And finally there evolved a species known as man.
And there appeared the first faint glimmers of intelligence.
The fruits of intelligence were many:
Fire, tools, and weapons,
The hunt, farming, and the sharing of food,
The family, the village, and the tribe.
Now it required but one more ingredient:
A great leader to unite the quarrelling tribes,
To harness the power of the land,
To build a legacy that would stand the test of time:
A CIVILIZATION!
The RE teacher than marked my test was one of those people that believe parables. He was not impressed.
He was even less impressed when later on for another question I simply wrote "I AM A fish" four hundred times. No funny dance or fainting of course.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday March 11 2017, @05:48PM
Having played a fair bit of Civ6 so far, nowhere near the previous games yet tho, there is one mod I would really recommend to make the game playable until Firaxis fixes this - doubtful if they ever will. Chao's quick UI mod - it brings back build queues and in general makes everything nicer UI wise - less stupid rumor spam, quicker visuals of what districts are in a town etc. I don't think I would be playing the game at all if it wasn't for this mod. It works with most of the dlc stuff and other mods so far. Not sure if it works on other platforms besides windows but I think it should since it's not of an executable nature. The only thing I really click-off are the automatic lenses cause they are a bit intrusive and it makes the game look less appealing when you have them on - certainly so the automatic worker lense, it's nice and helpful in seeing what to do but it makes the whole UI look horrible.
https://github.com/chaorace/cqui [github.com]