Sid Meier's Memoir! Read online

  Sid Meier’s

  MEMOIR!

  A Life in

  Computer Games

  Sid Meier

  written with Jennifer Lee Noonan

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  To the worldwide community of computer, console, and mobile gamers (and their long-suffering spouses, parents, and significant others).

  CONTENTS

  ONE BILLION HOURS: An Introduction

  1. WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

  2. ADAPTATION

  3. CRUISING ALTITUDE

  4. D-DAY

  5. COLLECTIVE EFFORT

  6. AHOY!

  7. AND THEN BILL BOUGHT AN AIRPLANE

  8. OVERT PROTRACTION

  9. HANG ON A SECOND

  10. ALL ABOARD

  11. HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, PART I

  12. TURNING POINTS

  13. IF IT AIN'T BAROQUE

  14. SEQUEL-ISH

  15. THE DISPERSING

  16. INTERESTING DECISIONS

  17. BACK TO THE FUTURE

  18. EXTINCTION

  19. ARTIFICIAL TURF

  20. INTO THE WIND

  21. HIGHER EDUCATION

  22. FUZZY MATH

  23. SOCIAL MOBILITY

  24. FUNNY BUSINESS

  25. BEYOND

  Special Thanks!

  Sid Meier’s Complete Gameography!

  Index!

  Sid Meier’s

  MEMOIR!

  ONE BILLION HOURS

  An Introduction

  A BILLION HOURS AGO, Neanderthals were making spearheads in the Stone Age. A billion hours from now, it will be the year 116,174 AD, assuming the calendar system holds up that long. With a billion hours to play with, you could make roughly 13,000 round trips to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light, or play a back-to-back marathon of every Star Trek movie ever made for every person in New York . . . twice.

  Or, you could spend it all playing Sid Meier’s Civilization. So I’m told.

  One billion hours is the sort of number that is humbling to the point of incomprehensibility—and it’s a wildly conservative estimate, at that. The game distribution service Steam only began collecting player data in earnest within the last decade, and one billion is actually the number of hours played on Civilization V, specifically, from its release in 2010 up through 2016. A six-year window into one game in a series that (as of this printing) spans twenty-nine years and twelve editions, not to mention the expansion packs.

  To imagine the hours devoted to all the incarnations of Civ since 1991 is, well, incomprehensible. I wouldn’t want to try. What’s more, any fair assessment of Civ’s success would have to include all the other games I’ve crafted along the way—including titles like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, which were popular series* in their own right, but also overlooked gems like C.P.U. Bach and SimGolf. I’d even want to acknowledge projects that started strong but fizzled early, because sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it.

  What follows is a largely chronological examination of all the games I’ve produced over my lifetime, from the wildly successful to the completely unheard of. It’s a thorough list, including a few that were developed outside the traditional career model where you do things like “make money” and “get sued if you copy other people’s ideas.” Just as every sprawling empire can be traced back to a single settler, my reputation as a benevolent industry patriarch wasn’t built in a day, and the truth is I was once a young kid who didn’t know there were rules, making games out of not-so-original ideas for maximum fun and minimum (often nonexistent) profit. Fortunately, I’ve been told the statute of limitations has expired, so I’m ready to come clean. But whether they took a billion lines of code—not an impossible estimate for all of the Civ products combined—or less than a hundred, there is one thing every game in this book has in common. They are fundamentally comprised, as all games are, of a series of interesting decisions.

  Like most sweeping definitions, this one requires a little unpacking, which I’ll get into in Chapter 16. But the most important takeaway is that it’s a mindset that looks outward, rather than inward. We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. “Interesting” might be subject to personal taste to some degree, but the gift of agency—that is, the ability of players to exert free will over their surroundings rather than obediently following a narrative—is what sets games apart from other media, regardless of whether that agency is expressed through a computer keyboard, plastic tokens, physical movement, or entirely in the mind. Without a player’s input, there can be no game; conversely, it takes only a single interaction to transform an observer into a participant, and thus a player.

  Of course, it’s still incumbent upon us as designers to make that decision-making enjoyable, and that’s not always an easy task. I don’t claim, for example, that the decision over what to have for lunch would necessarily make for a good game—only that it has the potential to be turned into one, or at least part of one. No subject is universally boring; everything contains a core of fascination somewhere, and the primary job of a game designer is not to make something fun, but to find the fun. I have a habit (some might call it a compulsion) of analyzing how things work, examining their effects on people, and parsing out which elements are fundamentally compelling and which are just window dressing. Once you isolate the most interesting part of any given decision, then you’re ready to build an interactive experience for the player that feels fascinatingly new, yet comfortingly familiar. That’s my philosophy, anyway. It seems to have worked out pretty well.

  I’m often asked in interviews when I got interested in games, usually with the implied hope that I’ll identify a prodigiously early moment in my childhood when I suddenly knew I was a game designer. Interviewers seem especially keen to discover some talismanic object of inspiration—perhaps it was the 630-page illustrated Civil War book that my father gave me in elementary school, or the train station I lived next to in Switzerland, or an Errol Flynn swashbuckling classic flickering on our tiny, black-and-white television—and they want me to say that in that instant, I felt the flash of destiny. How else can one explain the relatively uncommon path I’ve taken in life, if not in terms of sudden twists and critical junctures?

  But from my perspective, there was no turning point. I never made the conscious decision to embrace gaming, because as far as I can tell gaming already is the default, straightforward path. Not only does it span a billion hours of history—ancient Sumerians were throwing dice as early as 5000 BC, and cruder games almost certainly go back as far as the Neanderthals—but it’s a deeply embedded human instinct. A newborn baby will play tug-of-war with its own foot before it even understands who the foot belongs to. Everyone starts out life as a gamer, and I was no different. First, I laughed at peekaboo, then I lined up toy soldiers, then I played board games, then I made fun computer programs. To me, it seems like the most logical progression in the world. The question “When did you start?” would be better framed as “Why didn’t you stop?”—but even then, I won’t have a good answer. I find it mind-boggling that a life spent dedicated to gaming is the exception, rather than the rule.

  If my gravestone reads “Sid Meier, creator of Civilization” and nothing else, I’ll be fine with that. It’s a good game to be known for, and I’m proud of the positive impact it’s had on so many players’ lives. But it won’t be the whole story.

  This is the whole story.

  * Achievement Unlocked: A Journey of 1,000 Miles—Read one page.


  1

  WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

  Hellcat Ace (1982)

  *

  Chopper Rescue (1982)

  *

  Floyd of the Jungle (1982)

  THE STORY OF HOW I STARTED my first videogame company has become almost legendary within the gaming community, but like most legends, the version you’ve heard has probably been inflated a bit along the way. Yes, it happened in Las Vegas. Yes, it was based on a dare of sorts. Alcohol may have been involved, at least for one of the participants. But the actual company wasn’t formed until months later, and regardless, I’m not a fan of viewing the past as some inevitable march to destiny. At the time, it didn’t feel that way at all.

  I began my career as a systems analyst for General Instrument, installing networked cash register systems in retail stores throughout my home state of Michigan. Working with computers was satisfying, and I was grateful to have what amounted to a very good job for a recent graduate. I wasn’t desperate to unleash my creativity on the world, or even thinking very hard about the future of the industry. At best, you could call it a state of ignorant bliss: there was no such thing as a retail computer game, only free bits of code passed between hobbyists, so it would have been difficult for me to harbor secret dreams of becoming a professional computer game designer. That’s not to say I didn’t know what cool was—I’d programmed my first game just a few months after entering college—but cool was cool, and work was work, and the two never overlapped.

  Actually, that’s not entirely true. There was one slightly cool division at GI called AmTote, which made electronic scoreboards. Rumor has it they designed all of the original game show equipment for The Price Is Right, but their main product was a vertical gambling odds tracker called the Mighty Totalizator. Despite sounding like a bad sci-fi weapon, the totalizator was invented (and presumably named) by the Australian Sir George Julius, back in 1913. Gambling riots were a regular problem in those days, usually in response to low payouts on what should have been a long-odds pick. If, for example, a hot tip ran through the crowd about a last-minute injury to the champion, then extra bets would be placed on the underdog, potentially eliminating his underdog status. A bookie’s odds are only a reflection of where everyone else’s money is, and the faster those numbers could be updated and displayed to the crowd, the safer the men inside the ticket booths would be.

  Julius’s invention was one of the earliest examples of a mechanized computer, and contained enough bicycle gears and piano wire to fill an entire stable at the horse track where it was first installed. Fortunately, totalizators had become less spacious by the 1970s, but they were still no less fun to say out loud.

  In any case, one of the side benefits of working for a company that makes gambling machines is corporate functions tend to take place in Las Vegas. It took several years and a few promotions, but finally, I was sent to my first major conference. Games of random chance weren’t my thing, and I certainly didn’t relish sitting through three days of meetings, but unlike many fellow introverts I do enjoy the sensory onslaught of the Vegas experience—and, perhaps more in line with my nerd reputation, I love blackjack. Most casinos offered low stakes games for just two dollars a hand in those days, and this seemed like a reasonable risk to take against my ability to work the odds with my own biological totalizator.

  It also didn’t hurt that Vegas had more videogame arcades than anywhere in the world.

  Before any of that could happen, though, I would have to grind through several literal boss encounters in the convention hall each day. Things were already looking bleak by the first afternoon, and I wasn’t sure I’d survive the closing seminar on business strategy, or market growth, or whatever tedious thing it was. So in a last ditch effort to stay awake, I turned and struck up a quiet conversation with the coworker seated next to me, a man named Bill Stealey.

  He was in a different department, so we had never really met, but we had a passing recognition of each other as employees of the same large company. We had probably even been on the same flight out from Maryland, though I couldn’t really picture Bill sitting passively in coach—much easier to imagine him knocking on the cockpit door to give the crew a few pointers. Bill was a reserve Air Force pilot who had fought his way into the program despite wearing glasses, and he was so proud of his training that he’d printed “Fighter Pilot Supreme” on all his business cards.

  True to form, Bill began regaling me in hushed tones with stories from his flying days. I could see the overlap of our life experiences was slim at best, but the topic wasn’t completely foreign to me, and I managed to offer up the fact that I’d been programming an airplane game in my spare time.

  Bill nodded, as much to himself as to me. He, too, had recently purchased an Atari 800 home computer, which he confided was only nominally for work. Mostly, he’d gotten it to play a new game called Star Raiders. “I really want to get into selling games,” he said. “This is the future!”

  I told him that I had just sold my first game, actually, to a small publisher named Acorn Software.

  “Oh?” Suddenly Bill looked very keen. “We should start a business!”

  “That’s an interesting idea,” I deflected politely. It wasn’t a bad suggestion, necessarily, but this was a man known for his gregarious enthusiasm. Even if he sincerely meant it in the moment, I thought, it was probably the kind of thing people said but never really pursued.

  After the conference wrapped up for the day, Bill and I decided to stroll around Las Vegas together in search of arcades, and eventually we came upon the MGM Grand. I didn’t keep score as we challenged each other on one flashing, beeping cabinet after another, but the way Bill tells it, I beat him at practically every game. Finally, he found his redemption: a World War I flight simulator called Red Baron.

  “All right, young man, now I’ll show you how it’s done,” he said, settling into the molded plastic seat.

  I watched over his shoulder as he concentrated a decade of actual piloting experience toward the slightly less perilous task of shooting down stick-figure biplanes among zigzag mountains. He scored well, though exactly how well is up for debate—I recall a score of around 3,000, compared to his memory of 75,000. This is a fair ratio, as I generally tend to remember things being about one-twenty-fifth as sensational as Bill does. In this case, the evidence is on my side, as modern emulators show that ten minutes of perfect Red Baron gameplay leads to a score of just over 10,000. At roughly a thousand points per minute, I would have had to stand in witness of his flying skill for over an hour. But whatever the raw numbers were, it was a solid performance.

  Then it was my turn to play.

  “How did you do that?” Bill sputtered, staring wide-eyed at a final score that was roughly double his own (on that part we agree). “I’m an actual pilot! How could you possibly have beaten me?”

  I shrugged. “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.”

  “You did what?”

  “I’m a programmer,” I reminded him. “The AI of the enemy planes is very predictable, the only trick is to never let them get behind you. I could design a better game in two weeks.”

  “Then do it,” he insisted, his wounded pride already forgotten. “If you can do it, I can sell it.”

  And so we began. At the time it felt like a fun project, but not any sort of life-changing decision. The big moments rarely do, I think, and the danger of retroactive mythologizing is that it makes people want to hold out for something dramatic, rather than throwing themselves into every opportunity. The reality is I’d been fiddling around with game programming for years by then, and like I told Bill, I’d already sold one game—technically four, but we’ll get to that—before he and I ever talked. The first step is almost always to sit down and start working, and it’s almost never to fly to Vegas and wait for somebody to offer you a business venture.

  I had several prototypes in progress on my home computer, including a helicopter game that was almost finished, but I ha
d promised Bill airplanes. So I focused the rest of that summer on Hellcat Ace, named after the Grumman F6F Hellcat used by the Navy in World War II. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say I could create a better AI in two weeks, but there’s a pretty big gulf between better and best, and I always wanted to be on the far side of it.

  When I finally decided the game was as ready as it could be, I handed it over to Bill, and a day later he returned it to me with a list of bugs and military inaccuracies. That was when I knew that this partnership could really go somewhere. Bill wasn’t looking to make a quick buck on something he didn’t understand; he was as invested in the game quality as I was. I’m not sure he was as confident about me at that point, even after I took his suggestions in stride and updated the game. But he wasn’t the type of person who could back down once I’d answered his challenge. I’d proven I could design a better game, and now he had no choice but to prove that he could sell it.

  So with $1,500 in savings, we bought a stack of floppy disks, a package of label stickers, and a box of plastic baggies to put them in. This was standard packaging back then, even for professional releases—no one would have thought to waste an entire cardboard box on just a disk and a half-sheet of instructions. Meanwhile, printer technology was new enough that there was no such thing as a cheap consumer model. A printer was a printer, and the dot matrix in Bill’s basement could create labels just as fancy as any moderate-size company’s. All we needed was a logo.

  Bill wanted to name our new company Smuggers, the culmination of a joke he’d made up after I had invited him to join my users’ group. Though this phrase is often associated with the early chat rooms of the internet, a users’ group originally referred to a physical group of computer users meeting in the real world. Gatherings would take place in a local store, or occasionally someone’s living room, and we would all lug our giant computers and monitors with us so we could trade software in a true peer-to-peer fashion. I was not the founder or even the leader of our particular group, but Bill always called it “Sid Meier’s Users’ Group” so that he could impishly shorten it to SMUG. Fortunately, the other guys had a sense of humor about it, but it’s fair to say that Smuggers was not my first choice for our company name.