The Fathers of Civilization

The Fathers of Civilization

An interview with Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley

by Tom Chick, CG Online, 31/8 2001

We asked Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, the brain trust behind Civilization and, individually, two of the most creative and successful PC game designers of all time, a few questions about their time in the gaming business. Here's what they had to say.

Describe the team that created Civilization.

Sid Meier: It was really small, especially at the beginning. Basically, I did the programming and the initial art just to get things going. I worked with Bruce [Shelley], who was kind of my sounding board. He and I were the two primary people at the beginning. A third of the way through or so, we started adding artists to it, started doing some sounds and things like that. But the team never got really large. I'd say we had maybe ten people at the end.

Bruce Shelley: In the beginning, Sid and I had talked a lot about what the game might be like. We talked about the things we liked. We talked about Railroad Tycoon and the SimCity elements of the game. We talked about Empire. I think at one point he asked me about Empire and he said what would be ten things you would change about Empire if you could. Plus there was the board game Civilization. Those were some of the games we talked about. He basically did all the prototyping by himself. Once he had a build that was playable, we began an iterative process of talking about the game, then he'd re-code it, we'd play it for a day and then we'd talk again. I usually came to work earlier than he did, but at some time in the morning, he'd come in with a new version of the game, he'd give it to me, and he'd say "Okay, play this for a couple of hours and tell me what you think." Then we'd get together in the afternoon and I'd give him feedback on what I was liking and what I wasn't liking. Then he'd work on a new version. So basically, he built a new version of the game every day for roughly a year. Actually, I still have a prototype that existed a year and a half before Civilization was published, from 1990. It's recognizable as Civilization in an early stage.

How did the game design evolve over time?

SM: The first approach was real time, kind of a SimCity-oriented flavor, but ramped up to a global scale. The civilization aspect added on to that, with the larger scale, multiple cities, with history, with time passing and significant things happening as time went on. There really wasn't a game that provided that general sense of 'history is cool and interesting'. I worked on that maybe two or three months and it didn't generate enough spark. It always had a hands-off feel, "I'm trying to make something happen, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't." You didn't really feel like "The Emperor" or "The King," making things happen. So we put it away and during that time, I spent a fair amount of time playing Empire, a turn-based conquer-the-world game. I said, let me try this approach with the Civilization idea, and we tried it and it was immediately clearly more fun and more interesting.

As a development process, how smoothly did Civilization go compared to the other games you've worked on?

SM: In one sense, it did not go smoothly, since I started with one approach, pursued that for a while, then put the game on the shelf, worked on other things, and came back to it later with some new ideas. From that point on, it went quite smoothly.

BS: We had started working on the game way back in May of 1990, but the president of the company [Bill Stealey, who co-founded Microprose with Meier] had wanted to do this spy game he'd already invested some money in or something and Sid had agreed to do it. So we had to stop working on Civilization to do this game called Covert Action. So once we got that done, we picked up Civilization again and worked on it for the next year.

Did you have any reservations about how commercially successful Civilization would be?

SM: In those days, strategy was a dirty word. If you called your game a strategy game, it was the kiss of death. Strategy games in those days were generally hex-based, complicated games about the military. They were so hard to play, you had to be a fanatic. Also in those days, Microprose was known for their F-15 flying game and Silent Service submarine game. It was a departure for me as a designer, and for the company, and from what other people were doing at the time. We had faith in our game, it was a good game and it really grabbed you in ways that other games didn't. But it was still different and that was the source of my uncertainty. We were, in our minds, breaking a fair amount of new ground, but a lot of things we tried just worked out so well. So we felt a lot of pride, a sense of accomplishment, that we had built something special.

BS: I felt it was clearly the coolest game I'd ever played. I just thought it was going to be a blockbuster hit as soon as it came out. It was an exciting feeling, to be on the edge of game development at the time. I remember the other people in the company would come in to watch me or Sid play and they were all itching to have a chance to play. But he said "I want to keep the team small right now," so he wouldn't let the other guys play. He didn't want a lot of input. He just wanted to rely on him and myself. I know this sounds crazy, but I'm not really a hardcore gamer. I play the games that appeal more to the casual market. So if I was liking it, then chances were maybe a wide audience would like it. I was kind of like everyguy when it came to playing games. And actually, the president of the company wasn't too excited about this game. He really didn't want it. He wanted another flight simulator.

When did you realize how successful it was going to be?

SM: It definitely went out very low key. It took at least three months for there to be some level of word-of-mouth to develop, getting a sense that people were buying the game and retailers were re-ordering it. It started off fairly slow, but it kind of grew over time as people tried it out and told their friends about it. As opposed to most games that go out strong and then kind of really taper off as time goes by, this game was selling more and people were talking about it more over time, and we were starting to get letters from people who were playing and who were totally absorbed by it. At that point, we realized that other people were getting the same feeling for the game as we had when we were developing it.

There are a number of elements in Civilization that became hallmarks of good game design. The game's mechanics were immediately evident because they often relied on icons instead of numbers. Was that unique to Civilization?

SM: It would be tough to be absolutely sure, but I think that was fairly unique to Civilization. It was kind of influenced by two things. When we went to the turn-based idea of the game, we had this sense of what I call 'discreetness'. Everything is clear. Everything is done by integers. You move three squares. You need ten food to increase your population. There was a feeling of really being hands-on and we wanted to carry that through with the icons. The other thing is that the idea of a game about civilization is kind of scary, because it could easily get out of control and be totally unplayable, unmanageable, and gigantic. So we wanted to reassure people right at the beginning that these are concepts that were clear and we don't have some magical model churning away in the background, dividing a bunch of floating point numbers that would tell you at some point, "Congratulations! You've won or you've lost!" The icons reinforce that this isn't a complicated game.

What about Wonders of the World, which created the idea that by building certain structures, you can break or bend the game's mechanics?

SM: I think that was unique to Civilization. The inspiration for that was the idea that we wanted to present you as a player with familiar elements that would make you feel right at home. We did that with Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln. They were characters you would know. The other thing that struck me was 'what did I learn in high school about history?' The Pyramids. The Great Wall. Things like that. Those things have got to show up in the game, because when you see them, when you run into them, you go, "Oh, I know, I've heard of that, I'm a smart person, I know this stuff." So we wanted to put in the game, but then the question was "What effect would it have?" If it was going to be a Wonder of the World, it had better be pretty dramatic. That was another rule of the game: stuff had to really feel Important—so that you feel that you've played for a couple of hours and you've come a long way from where you started. Going along with that philosophy, we weren't hesitant to make Wonders really dramatic in their effect on the game, especially with the idea that there could only be one, and there would be a race to get to the Wonder that you wanted.

Where did the tech tree come from, the idea that as you play, you unlock new game mechanics? I presume it was at least partly inspired by the technologies in the board game Civilization?

SM: I actually hadn't played the board game before we designed Civilization, although I'd heard of it and I'd talked to people who played it. I've still only played it once, during the making of Civilization. One night a week, we played board games, somebody brought Civilization and we played it and it was fun, but that was really the first time I had actually played it.

BS: There was actually a lot of board gaming going on at MicroProse in those days after work. None of us were married at the time. So we played games.

What were your impressions of the board game? Did you draw much from it for your design?

SM: I was really impressed with the card part of it. It was a really clever use of cards—and the trading aspect. I guess the parts that impressed me were parts that didn't bear much of a connection to Civilization. Frankly, I was saddened by how much more we could do. The board game format felt so limiting at that point. We could do so much more with the computer game—things that were very difficult to do in the board game. We had all these technologies to use. It really impressed me how much power we had with the computer game.

So the idea of a tech tree wasn't drawn from another game?

SM: Our tech tree originally came from the same idea of bringing to the player these touchstones of history that they're familiar with. I think the fact that the game was about civilization meant you had to have these discoveries to progress, so it was a fairly early element of the game and it just fit very well. Civilization starts you off very simply and easily and gradually layers on more things and opens up more possibilities to you as you play, making it easier to play and also making you look forward to the next thing. The interesting thing about the tech tree is that I just kind of tossed it together with the idea that someday we'd go back and fix this thing. That would be the real tech tree, but for now I just kind of thought off the top of my head to come up with fifty or sixty important developments and linked them together. But we eventually got so used to that and enjoyed it. We made a few changes, but it was essentially the tech tree we ended up with.

Civilization is infamous for it's "one-more-turn" quality, which is mainly a product of the fact that there are constant milestones for the player to reach. How unique was this dynamic to Civilization?

SM: I think we'd been learning that over time and it came to real fruition in Civilization, the idea that it doesn't hurt to reward the player, to give them stuff and make them feel like they're making progress. We realized that players enjoyed developing a new technology, having something added to the palace, meeting a new ruler and having negotiation turn out well. Really, we had a lot of things we could work with and we could really bring the player along with lots of new things, discoveries and victories. There was no harm in that. We didn't have to require an hour of gameplay before you got promoted from sergeant to lieutenant and in another two hours you might make captain or something. In our early games, we'd been more stingy with rewards and promotion and encouragement. We found in Civilization that by adding more of that, we really promoted this phenomenon of people looking forward to "What's the next thing I'm going to accomplish? I know it's not going to be too far off so I'm going for that." And then once they got to that, there was something else happening. So the combination of being fairly generous with the rewards and the fairly rapid pace of the game led to the one-more-turn phenomenon. It's certainly not something we consciously designed into it. It came from some of the game ideas and philosophies we'd been developing over time and it came together with Civilization.

One of the famous debates Civilization raised is the idea that a phalanx can sink a battleship. Is this a valid complaint and did you worry about these sort of historical inaccuracies during the development process?

SM: It didn't become an issue during development. I certainly believe gameplay is more important than historical accuracy, but it wasn't a crusade of mine. I felt, and I can justify in my mind, that the units needed to become stronger over time, but they didn't need to become overwhelmingly strong so that your units developed earlier were totally useless. I could imagine the battleship running aground as it tried to take on the phalanx. I know in Civilization II, there was some effort to rectify the situation, even though I didn't have a strong feeling that we should do that. But it never bothered me. I could imagine it. Especially with my phalanx and somebody else's battleship. I had no problem at all with that stupid battleship running aground. I understand the issue. And if it's my battleship and somebody else's phalanx, then I really understand the issue. But it didn't bother me during the development.

Civilization is also criticized for having an AI that cheats by getting advantages in terms of production and how it builds Wonders of the World. Is this a fair criticism?

SM: I think we did it fairly well in Civilization. Whenever you have a game with difficulty levels, there's going to be this. But I call it game balancing. In order to make gameplay harder and easier, something's got to change. We want to present a game that feels fair, but there are times where you really have to acknowledge the difference between a computer player and a human player. The clearest example of that in Civilization is the idea of nuclear weapons, that you have this power to really shake up the game and it's kind of bad for everybody when that happens. We give the player absolute flexibility on whether or not they want to do that. But the computer is a different case because we don't want somebody to play the game for ten, fifteen hours and then find that because the computer decided to launch nuclear weapons that the whole game is messed up. It's the equivalent of taking a chessboard when you're losing and turning it over and throwing all the pieces on the floor. It's okay for the human player to do that, but it's not okay for the computer to do that. So we do change the rules to a certain extent in the AI, but that's generally done to provide a better gaming experience. Fairness is good, but we're going to lean in the direction of making the game the most fun for the player.

Civilization was also widely criticized for the amount of micromanagement it required, specifically in the later game stages. Is this a fair criticism?

SM: I think it's partly a legitimate criticism. The game Empire, which I mentioned earlier, which kind of was some of the inspiration, had that problem ten times worse. So we really made an effort to deal with that in terms of the idea that in the late stages you'd be getting much more powerful and expensive units—not more units, necessarily, but better units—so they'd be more manageable. The cost of units would increase so that the rate of production would slow down. It's hard to avoid some of that in that your objective is to conquer the whole world, so things get bigger and bigger. It does lend a sense of real accomplishment to what you're doing if it's done with a certain amount of moderation. That's an area we probably could have done a little better job.

Some people regard the environmental model in Civilization, in which pollution and global warming figure prominently, as a political statement. Do any of your politics figure into this or is it strictly a matter of balancing gameplay?

SM: It's a gameplay factor. We very consciously avoid putting our political philosophy into the game. It takes you out of the fantasy and makes you aware that someone else designed this game if all of a sudden you run into something that really feels contrary to what you believe. We try and avoid that. Now, it did seem, and I think it turned out to be true, that building that element into Civilization, the pollution and things like that, gave you a new challenge as you got to the later parts of the game. We're trying to avoid this curve that goes up higher and higher, where things get ever more complex and there's the feeling you can grow without any limits or constraints. I think you always need to have trade-offs when you're making decisions. So pollution became that kind of thing. I have a hard time believing an argument that it wasn't at least somewhat realistic, somewhat plausible. But I don't think it was a political statement.

How do you feel about games like SimTex's titles that borrow heavily from your design? Or games like Call to Power that outright copy some of the specific mechanics from Civilization? Is that flattering or do you have any resentment that someone is basically stealing your work?

SM: It's mostly flattering. I acknowledge that some of the ideas in Civilization were inspired by other games and I think that's part of what keeps us all going forward is learning from what other people do. I know how hard it is to make a game, so I'm not anxious to criticize any other games out there. But if you're going to use other people's ideas, you need to also add a goodly number of your own. I love to see a great game based on some of the things we started, but that adds a new dimension. I think Age of Empires, for example, used the tech tree idea, the idea of history, et cetera, but they've added a lot of really cool stuff of their own and they've made a great game. That's the way the industry should work.

Source

This article originally appeared at CG Online :

• http://www.cgonline.com/features/010829-i1-f1.html
• http://www.cgonline.com/features/010829-i1-f1-pg2.html
• http://www.cgonline.com/features/010829-i1-f1-pg3.html
• http://www.cgonline.com/features/010829-i1-f1-pg4.html
• http://www.cgonline.com/features/010829-i1-f1-pg5.html

The interview was apparently lost after a site revision. It has been recreated here with the assistance of The Internet Archive.