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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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!"

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/sid-meier-tells-civilizations-origin-story-cites-childrens-history-books/ [arstechnica.com]

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