But of course the conference did eventually outgrow this youthful phase, as did the industry as a whole. In 1999, they dropped “Computer” from the name in order to include console games, then formally added mobile gaming in 2002. They split entry fees to provide different levels of access, and subdivided major presentation tracks like “art” and “design” into increasingly nuanced series like “localization” and “community management.” By the early 2000s, they had graduated into venues too large to comfortably walk across, and in 2018, they welcomed a record-breaking 28,000 attendees. But it’s never stopped being fun. Games are still the heart of it, and as long as that’s the case, I think it can go on beating forever.
Though MicroProse accepted many more awards over the years, there were some distinctions that even CGDC couldn’t offer. Shortly after Gunship was released, it received the rare but by no means desirable honor of being banned. Once upon a time, I had been flattered by GI’s clampdown on ASCII spaceships, but this prohibition covered an entire country, and the accusation was a little more serious than loss of productivity. According to the West German government, Gunship was guilty of “promoting militarism,” which made it “particularly suited to disorient youths socially and ethically.”
Germany has a complicated relationship with its last hundred years of history. In 1986, a sizeable percentage of the population still held the horrors of World War II in living memory. There was—and still is—a profound sense that the cultural conditions leading up to it must never be allowed to happen again, and many corrective measures were imposed both internally and externally during the postwar years. One of the longest-lasting has been a media oversight committee known as the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien, or BPjM.
The BPjM maintained the “Youth Dangerous Publications List” (a name that has been retranslated at least once over the years, so it is often referred to as simply “the index”), and it had the power to censor any material that was deemed “morally corrupting and coarsening for the young user.” This included themes of anti-Semitism and extreme violence, of course, but also less obvious subjects like alcohol abuse and suicide. More to the point, they rejected anything thought to be glorifying military action.
With the exception of this last aversion, it was a pretty standard list, the kinds of things that would earn a game a “Mature” rating in the United States today. In Germany, however, it was not just a question of refusing to sell to minors, as retailers do here. Media on the index could not be sold or advertised anywhere that children could potentially see it at all. If a store in Germany wanted to carry our game, they would now be required to have a separate “adults only” section of their store, including its own entrance out of sight from the main doors. Generally speaking, there was only one type of material sold that way, and it’s fair to say those shoppers were not our usual customer base.
Having noticed Gunship, the BPjM was inspired to look back at the rest of our catalog, and retroactively blacklisted Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle as well, which had by then been selling for years without incident. It was a significant financial hit, as well as a personal one, since Germany accounted for about $1.5 million in sales for MicroProse, and we had planned to use it as a toehold to expand our distribution across the rest of Europe.
Bill harbored suspicions, in fact, that the complaint raised against us was purely a business move by more established European distributors, since other well-known military games by our competitors had somehow passed muster and remained off the index, such as Gato, Sub Battle Simulator, and Up Periscope. He filed a vigorous appeal and held press conferences to increase public outcry, but our hearings were inexplicably delayed more than once, and years passed before the games were finally removed from the index. By then, they were technologically obsolete, and wouldn’t be selling many more copies anyway.
The one consolation in all of it was that the conversation about computer game censorship had been raised to the international level. At the same time that Bill was fighting our battle with the BPjM, Dungeons & Dragons came under fire in America from a number of religious groups, and a Massachusetts woman managed to get a novelization of a Zork game banned from her local school library. Meanwhile, a US postal worker refused to deliver copies of Boy’s Life magazine because they contained an ad for the Enchanter trilogy of games. The UK newspaper the Independent ran a front-page story on censorship in gaming that mentioned us specifically, and some believe that the high-profile nature of our case played a part in the eventual creation of the US self-regulatory group the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
These days, Germany has softened its stance a little, and considers media harmful to minors only if it “tends to endanger their process of developing a socially responsible and self-reliant personality.” World War II content is examined on a case-by-case basis for artistic merit, as well as a clear statement of opposition—players can fight against the Nazis as the Allied Forces, for example, but Call of Duty: Black Ops still had to remove the Rolling Stones’ song “Sympathy for the Devil” from its German soundtrack because of a passing lyrical reference that placed the singer on the wrong side of a blitzkrieg. And though the ban on militarism in general has been lifted, a relatively conservative definition of violence remains, so publishers often choose to create a modified version of their game for the German market rather than risk being locked out. Killing aliens or robots is considered less inflammatory than killing humans, for instance, and it doesn’t take much to change the bad guys’ blood from red to green, or switch their skin tones to gray and toss in a few electric sparks.
Personally, I never had any intention of making the kind of game that needed alteration, which is probably why the banning of my three titles stung as much as it did. But it opened my eyes to the fact that not every culture viewed games the same way, and that there was definitely such a thing as an American game. What would a truly international game look like, I wondered, with no cultural bias, and universal appeal? It was an interesting idea to ponder.
Bill had been glad to see me drifting back toward familiar themes with Gunship, and felt that now was the time for my triumphant return to the flight simulator genre. It just made sense: Sid and Wild Bill, the greatest maker and the greatest purveyor of airplane games, fresh off the helicopter and ready to blow everyone’s minds once again.
“So, when’s your next flight simulator going to be ready?” he asked.
I told him it didn’t really interest me. There was something else I wanted to work on.
He frowned. “Another wargame?”
Oh no, I assured him. Definitely not. “I have this idea for a game about pirates.”
* Achievement Unlocked: My Country ’Tis of—Read the word “the” 1,000 times.
6
AHOY!
Sid Meier’s Pirates! (1987)
THE IDEA FOR A PIRATE GAME had actually been floated in a meeting a couple of months earlier by Arnold Hendrick, as one of several backdrops that could be used to flavor our steady stream of combat titles. I liked the idea in general, and could easily program ship battles with black flags and cannons instead of deck guns and radar. But that wasn’t enough to excite me anymore. The Sid who cofounded MicroProse four years earlier would never have believed it was possible, but I was growing bored.
Mostly I was tired of hyperrealism. If real life were that exciting, who would need videogames in the first place? The flight simulator genre, especially, was forever clamoring for more dials to watch, more flaps to control, more accurate wind speed and wheel friction calculations—and no one seemed to notice that it had turned into work. Games weren’t supposed to train you to be a real pilot; they were supposed to let you pretend for an hour that you could be one if you wanted to. It wasn’t escapism if you didn’t actually get anywhere.
Likewise, it wasn’t enough to paint a seventeenth-century veneer over an otherwise straightforward boat simulator. When I thought of pirates, I didn’t think of arduous ship mane
uvers. I thought of sword fights, and swinging from ropes, and billowy white shirts with little string ties at the neckline for no reason. I thought of evil mustachioed Spaniards kidnapping damsels, and guys with peg legs singing about rum. I thought of swashbuckling, whatever that actually meant.
Pirates didn’t spend all day fighting one another, I told Bill. Pirates had adventures.
Unfortunately, the “adventure” moniker had already been co-opted by a certain type of game that was traditionally text-based, and involved approximately zero adventuring. Instead, most of the player’s time was spent arguing with the computer. The progression generally went something like this:
You are standing in a log cabin. There is a window to the north and a door to the east.
Look at the room.
I don’t understand.
Look at the cabin.
You see a bed and a desk.
Look at the desk.
It is a desk.
Open the desk.
The desk is locked.
Look at the window.
It is a window.
Open the window.
You can’t open the window.
Look at the bed.
It is a bed.
Look under the bed.
You see nothing of interest under the bed.
“Nothing of interest” was about right. These so-called adventure games weren’t a test of your wits; they were a test to see how long the designer could hide something in plain sight until you thought to ask about it directly. Around the office, we referred to them as “pick up the stick” games, and no one had any desire to make one—but I didn’t see why they should be given a monopoly, either. Adventuring didn’t have to mean blindly groping for a set path. It could mean making up your own story, being in charge of your fate just like a pirate would be. I wanted a game that only hit the high points, taking you from one exciting scene to the next and leaving out all the walking around, looking at, and picking up.
Bill tried to talk me out of it. “That’s crazy,” he said. “We’ve never made anything like that before.”
“I know,” I said. That was one of the best things about the idea.
“Nobody will buy it.”
I shrugged. I thought they would buy it, actually, but that was never my main motivation. I wanted to play a pirate game, which meant I was going to have to make a pirate game, since no one else had yet.
Bill could tell he wasn’t going to change my mind. “Well, we should at least put your name on it,” he muttered, throwing up one hand in surrender. “Sid Meier’s pirate-whatever. Then maybe the people who liked F-15 will recognize it’s you, and buy it anyway.”
I should mention that Bill has a much more glamorous version of this story, which starts long before the conversation he and I had. According to him, the idea to put my name on the box came during a dinner event for the Software Publishers Association, which had been formed only a few years earlier. They did the standard things industry groups do, like organize speakers and give awards, but their main purpose was fighting software piracy. It would be years before the SPA managed to convince lawmakers it was a serious issue, but in 1986 they would pay $100 to anyone with hard evidence that a dial-up bulletin board was distributing stolen games. They even successfully prosecuted a few cases. MicroProse was one of about 150 companies who attended their regular meetings, along with Sierra, Microsoft, Broderbund, and Robin Williams.
Yes, strange as it may seem, the comedian Robin Williams was connected to the Software Publishers Association. To my knowledge he never dabbled in game design himself, but he felt strongly that all creative jobs should be fairly compensated, and he had such a particular love for videogames that he named his daughter Zelda. According to lore, he and Bill were seated at the same table at an SPA event, and during the course of conversation, Robin pointed out that all the other entertainment industries promoted their stars by name, so why should gaming be any different?
Whether this was a passing comment or a hard sell on my name in particular, I have no idea, but Bill already had plenty of experience with fostering a cult of personality. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince the man who styled himself “Fighter Pilot Supreme” that his original instincts had been right after all—that perhaps the only problem with a photo of me and giant bags of money was that it hadn’t gone far enough. Either way, I can’t blame him for wanting to share credit on this one, since “Robin Williams told me to do it” is a pretty good defense for almost anything. All I know is Bill made the executive decision to call the game Sid Meier’s Pirate-Whatever, and I was too busy thinking about adventure game mechanics to question it.
The good news was there were very few preconceived notions back then about what a game was supposed to be. The bad news was there were no tried-and-true conventions, either. I could put in anything I wanted, but that also meant I was responsible at every turn for what to leave out, and there were exponentially more ways to fail. It was like trying to create a recipe without any knowledge of what ingredients taste good together. With no standard expectations to guide me, I might accidentally end up with the gaming equivalent of breakfast cereal with onions.
All I could do was keep asking myself, “Would I want to play this game?” As long as the answer was yes, the idea stayed in. I knew, for example, that I wanted to avoid the trap of a single narrative path. If the hypothetical log cabin wasn’t interesting, I wanted to be able to walk away from it, without ever needing to find the key hidden under the rug that no one told me about, or spending ten minutes convincing the computer to do normal key things with it. (“Unlock desk?” “Use key?” “Use key with desk?”) At the same time, though, too much freedom would leave the player blind. No one prefers fill-in-the-blank over multiple-choice. This was the real problem, I realized, with adventure games that tried to parse free-form commands: they had only one right answer, which was bad, but they also had an infinite number of wrong answers, which was worse.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! box art.
© 1987 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM.
Recent psychological studies have demonstrated the truth behind this theory of limiting choices. Our brains’ executive function, or decision-making capability, tires out over time. Like an overworked muscle, it doesn’t matter if you’re lifting weights at the gym or stacking sandbags to save your family’s home—the importance of the task has no bearing on your exhaustion. Insignificant decisions take just as much brain power as interesting ones, but without any of the satisfaction. One study found that participants scored lower on math tests after being given a large menu of lunch options, while those with fewer choices scored higher. The question of what to eat for lunch was relatively meaningless, but it took a toll. Another found that when giving free jam samples to people passing by, a purchase was more likely if there were only a few jars available, while the full array of flavors caused patrons to become overwhelmed and walk away sooner—even if they reported later that they preferred the table with more options.
There are different theories as to why people instinctively flock toward more choices even when the numbers show we are happier with fewer choices, but I think it has to do with humans’ innate curiosity. We want to try everything, which leads to frustration when we can’t. We don’t ever want to feel like we’ve missed out on something good. In fact, there is a whole class of so-called “completionist” players in videogames, who make it a point to collect every single item and score every single point possible. Most players are not that extreme, but even among moderate ones, the maxim holds. The more choices players have, the sooner they will tire of the game, and the more dissatisfied they will ultimately be. They might initially feel like they’re happier with more choice, but in the end they will walk away, just like the jam-tasters with too many flavors to choose from. It was my job, I thought, to whittle down the options and present only the best ones to the player.
So then: no wrong answers, and more than one right answer, but not too man
y. I began to jot down ideas. Pirates wooed beautiful young women, so that would be a choice. Pirates pieced together old treasure maps, so that would be a choice. Pirates sometimes had sword fights, so that would be a choice.
Real pirates didn’t do any of these things, of course. Real pirates slaughtered innocent people and got scurvy. Not fun. But this was a game, not a simulation, and the romanticized version of pirates was at least as prominent in culture, if not more. The classic film star Errol Flynn made four movies about brave and handsome swashbucklers, and none about greedy sociopaths.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 7
