Ars Technica - War Stories: Civilization with Sid Meier - [dramatic music] - So allegedly, there's a bug in my code where, you know, Gandhi is kinda set up to have a very low aggressiveness rating so if something happens in the game to kind of reduce that a little bit, it wraps around to become, like, the largest integer number, where he becomes very aggressive and kinda leads to this nuclear confrontation. It's possible that I put a bug in there but it was not intentional. Hi, I'm Sid Meier, the creator of Civilization. This is how we built a game that makes you wanna take just one more turn. [dramatic music] MicroProse actually kinda started as a flight simulator company and after a while, I kinda felt we had exhausted that genre and wanted to try new things so we made Pirates! We made Covert Action, "Railroad Tycoon and then eventually Civilization. Civilization actually evolved out of a couple of projects that we had done previously. Railroad Tycoon, I think, is probably the primary one that kind of was our first so-called God game. A game which was more about building than it was about blowing things up and I remember Bruce Shelley and I were on a train ride to New York for some event and we said, you know, well that was fun. That was a fun game. What should we do next? And it was like, well, what's bigger? What's more epic? What's cooler than railroads? How about the story of all of civilization. Civilization is a game that allows you to experience 6,000 years of history, staring very small with a first city. You control a civilization. You explore the world. You interact with other leaders. You develop technology to expand the things that you can do. You engage in military operations. It sounds very complicated but everything is done in a very understandable way and it starts small and kind of layers on these additional elements as the game progresses so you feel kind of in control. The idea for a tech tree, which I think was unique and original to Civilization came from a book that I was looking at. This one had kind of a timeline of history in it, where it would lay out different political advancements or social policies or military things and I would get, I went kinda with my yellow marker, went through that book and said, Okay, bronze working is here, iron working, you know, gun powder. That almost became the template for the tech tree and it just felt like a very easy to understand mechanism for showing the player how things are connected, giving them kind of an insight into the future, giving them goals and things to look forward to. You know, two steps down the tech tree, I can get to this and it felt like just something to very much hang the structure of the game on. Something that would start simple and again, grow and grow and grow as you got further and further into the game. Every game is different. Every game is your unique story about how you guided your civilization from antiquity into the space age. [dramatic music] So we have this phrase which is the Valley of Despair that every project seems to go through, this Valley of Despair. Like, halfway through, you know, this game is not fun. Nobody likes it. I can't figure out how to make this work. It's not working. Nobody likes me. I don't know, nobody will talk to me. This is terrible. Civ went through that in the kind of transition between the real time version and the turn-based version. So our first approach to this grand topic of civilization was inspired a lot by Sim City. The idea of zoning and part of your map to build a new city, maybe creating a zone over here for farmers and having everything happen in kind of a real time process where you watched it gradually grow and now you're ready to zone this. Maybe you want to zone this area for mining and you'd kinda do these things in the first prototypes that we created. You do these things and kinda sit back and watch it kind of happen and that was kind of okay but it really didn't engage you as much as we really felt the game needed to. So we actually put that prototype away for a while and we completed another game, which was Covert Action, which I'd started and also put away but I think actually, Bill Stealey, our President, was part of this said, "Sid, you need to finish that Covert Action game" which was probably a good thing 'cause that kind of took us away from the real-time zone-based version of Civilization. The conceit behind that game was creating an interactive story. The idea of creating a story, but that was gonna turn out differently each time and was kinda controlled by the player. You know, interactive literature, an interactive spy story, and what we derived from Covert Action was what we called the "Covert Action" rule, which was a failing we thought of the game was that these action sequences were kind of intense and immersive enough that by the time you finished them you had kind of forgotten, you'd lost the thread of the plot. What was gonna happen, and what was I trying to prevent, or when is that gonna, so it was almost like two good games in one package actually kind of conflict with each other. So it's interesting to think what would've happened if Civ had never become a turn-based game. If it had stayed a real-time game. I think a good example of that is Age of Empires. At the time, we could have never had that many units running around on the screen and we didn't have the technology to make an Age of Empires. Had we had that technology, maybe would've gone in that direction, but it's interesting to compare Age of Empires with Civilization. I mean Age of Empires focuses on a smaller area. The individual decisions are more minute, and so in order to keep the complexity under control it focuses on a shorter period of time in a smaller area of the world, of the map. I think those are smart decisions. I think there's a certain amount of complexity that the player can kind of enjoy, and there's a larger amount that becomes work. So I think that trying to do a real-time version of Civ that tried to cover the expanse of what the turn-based game does would just be completely overwhelming. [dramatic music] I think the turning point for Civ was when we switched from real-time to turn-based, and that really only happened because I finished another game in the interim. I put the real-time game on the shelf, finished Covert Action and kind of came back to it with kind of fresh eyes, and had this idea about you know, making it turn-based, giving a lot of different things to do. Control individual units, et cetera, and that was what really made the difference in the game. Probably what triggered that in my mind was having played a game called Empire which had the characteristics of unveiling and exploring a map and had individual units moving around. And I kinda remember that those aha moments of another enemy unit showing up and you say oh, they're over there. Now I see how this is gonna work, or the kind of immersion that moving individual units gave you. I realized that was something that was missing from our original prototype and we slammed it in there and all of a sudden, magic started to happen. Civilization is now known for the one more turn phenomenon, and I would love to say that we, you know on day one we said this has gotta have one more turn. We actually didn't realize there was such a thing as one more turn until really the game was out there, and we started getting feedback from players, and we would get these letters like you know I couldn't stop playing. I looked up at the clock and it was three o'clock in the morning. So we said we gotta figure out what's going on here, because this is unique. This is cool. How do we make sure that we keep this? And so we kind of analyzed what was happening, and it was this idea of the game giving you short term and medium term, and long term goals that were all kind of in your mind at one time, and you might complete a short term goal, but bang another short term goal popped up, and you're still working on this medium term goal and there was never a time in the game where you kind of had completed everything that you wanted to do. You were always looking forward to when I get that new technology I can do this. When I explore that new continent, this is gonna happen. So there's always these things that you're looking forward to. The game is actually playing out in your mind, anticipating what's happening. You're almost not playing it the moment you're playing into the future, and then that future is just one more turn ahead so we've created this phenomenon that we really didn't anticipate, but we're now proud to acclaim. [dramatic music] So my advice if you find yourself in the Valley of Despair is to try something new and different. We have another rule which is the double it or cut it in half rule, which is if you're gonna make a change, make it dramatic. If the number's wrong, don't add 10% or take away 3%. Double it or cut it in half, you know, so that if you try a lot of dramatic changes, something is gonna stick, something's gonna work, and it's gonna show you a new direction and you can climb out of the Valley of Despair. [dramatic music] When the 25th anniversary of Civilization rolled around, I realized we had in our basement some of the original computers that were used to create the game. I thought it'd be fun to try to resurrect those. There were actually two of these Compaq Deskpro 386 computers that I'd saved for all those years, and we brought 'em in here and tried to fire them up. One of them actually exploded when we plugged it in. There was a bunch of dust around the power supply that caught fire, and the fan blew flames out the back of it so we shut that one down. But we were able to fire this computer up. The only problem was the battery had died, and we couldn't boot it because there was no power. We finally managed to do that by finding a floppy disk, but now we can't turn the machine off because we won't be able to turn it back on again. So it's been running here for over a year, but this is the computer that the majority of Civ development was done on. And it's running the fabulous DOS operating system here. So I'm gonna go into the directory which I've called civilized, and run this early version of the game. Here are the options, this is where it starts. Start a new game. Earth, play on the earth. This is the beginning of Civilization here. So we'll start a new game. An early version of our intro sequence. This is really something we did to make this game feel epic. These are all kind of temporary graphics that I did with DPaint, and finally hired a real artist to eventually replace these. And to me this is the classic Civilization visual. That first settler with a tiny little bit of the world revealed, and the rest of the world to explore. Basically anything can happen from this point on. Where do you place your city? What's gonna happen next? It's all ready to unfold in the epic saga of Civilization. [dramatic music]