In fact, I realized, the definition of success itself should be personal. Just like in Pirates!, where the player could choose to terrorize the seas, hone their fencing skills, or win the heart of every governor’s daughter in the New World, the ruler of a great civilization didn’t necessarily have to dominate through brute military strength. A rich nation could outspend its enemies; a scientific one could defeat them with superior technology; a highly artistic one could siphon immigrants their way through desirable lifestyle alone. Victory conditions in Civ would require a complicated algorithm that weighed all of these factors and more, and I couldn’t wait to program it.
Right as I was gaining momentum, however, the executive team began pushing in a completely new direction. Bill, especially, was taken with the idea of expanding into coin-operated arcade games. I had a fair amount of nostalgia for the genre myself—he and I had started our business over an arcade experience, after all. But for me, it didn’t extend past nostalgia. Arcades had been falling in popularity for years, and the cost to manufacture the entire cabinet would be significant. In the home computer market, we let the players buy their own hardware.
Besides, I pointed out, even if we could afford to jump into a new format, the games I wanted to make weren’t suited to quick head-to-head challenges. Bill assured me that the new venture wouldn’t replace our existing goals, but I knew that many of the executives still saw the success of Railroad Tycoon and Pirates! as an anomaly. They had even canceled a sequel to Railroad Tycoon that Bruce and I had been outlining while I pondered Civ in the back of my mind. To them, strategy titles were something they indulgently let me get away with, not a viable business model.
Bill was adamant that the arcade market was poised to make a comeback, and I felt that it was a mistake. Over the course of several conversations, it became clear that neither one of us was going to convince the other, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be compromised on. We couldn’t make half an arcade game.
I didn’t like this new direction for the company, but I also recognized that business decisions can’t be made by committee. One person needed to be at the helm, and I still didn’t want it to be me. Bill and I agreed that the best option was for him to buy out my half of the company, giving him the freedom to steer while protecting me from risky maneuvers. Outwardly nothing would change, and no one beyond the executive team would know about the arrangement for years to come. I still sat in the same chair, attended the same meetings, collaborated with the same folks. But on paper, I became an independent contractor, receiving payment and royalties only for the games I personally created.
It was the right time for everyone involved, because while I no longer had a vote in company projects, no one else had a vote in what I worked on, either. I had been afraid—rightly so, as it would turn out—that the executives would not recognize the potential in Civilization, and now I, too, had the freedom to steer without fear of getting canceled. It was a little sad to see the end of the partnership that had built MicroProse, but neither one of us wanted me to leave, and this seemed like the best way to address both of our needs. Bill and I had always worked well together precisely because we were opposites, and it was probably inevitable that we would end up pursuing different paths in the long run. Creatively we’d been drifting apart ever since Pirates!, and this new arrangement was not so much a dramatic change as it was an overdue acknowledgement of reality. But from my perspective, there was no bitterness; it was just the natural progression of our careers.
Unlike me, Bruce still had official assignments within the company, so he and I settled into a routine of concentrated feedback. Before I went home each night, I would leave a disk on his office chair with the latest version of the game. When he came in early the next morning, he would spend some time testing out new features, then sit down and share his thoughts with me when I arrived. I would go work on the game all day while he kept up with his own responsibilities, and that evening, the process would begin again.
Eventually, Bruce migrated to Civ full-time, and word got out that this new project was something serious. Folks began dropping by Bruce’s office to check it out, which I didn’t mind, but for a long time he was the only one allowed to play it. Aside from his skill in looking past broken and nonexistent parts of the game, Bruce also didn’t suffer from excessive deference. With the release of Covert Action, MicroProse had now put my name on the box three times, and people were starting to treat me differently around the office in subtle but definite ways. It made me uncomfortable, but worse than that, it was detrimental to the final product. I didn’t want to spend my day convincing people that they were allowed to tell me what they hated about the game. Bruce was always polite, of course, but if something felt wrong to him, he wouldn’t hesitate to tell me.
I’ve never been able to decide if it was a mistake to keep Civ isolated as long as I did. On the one hand, I do think it’s better to have as many eyes as possible on a product while it’s in development. You want to make a game that appeals to everyone, not just your favorite kind of player. But on the other hand, Bruce and I spoke each other’s language so well that the process might have taken longer with others on board. He was both playtester and designer, which meant his feedback was rooted in real solutions, while I was both designer and programmer, which meant I didn’t have to waste my time on a bunch of meetings with myself.
Sid Meier’s Covert Action advertisement.
© 1991 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM.
The idea of not wasting time is perhaps the most important factor in my whole career. Each new version of a game—or anything else it suits you to make—is another opportunity to take a step forward. The more iterations you can rapidly cycle through, the more precise your final product will be.
There is a well-known story about Michelangelo, who supposedly said of his famous David statue that he “simply chipped away anything that didn’t look like David.” There’s no evidence he actually said it, and versions of the quote have been attributed to a number of other artists as well. But I think the popularity of the story reveals what most people imagine the creative process to be, versus what it actually is. Of course, I can’t speak for every other creative person out there, but for me personally, I can’t chip away at marble. I only know how to sculpt with clay.
Start with a lump. Add a bit here. Does that make it look more or less interesting? Add another bit—no, that went too far. Scrape it off.
Mistakes are a given, and the important thing is to catch as many as you can, as fast as you can. Ideally, you’ll reevaluate your creation every single day, perhaps even multiple times a day, and each iteration is an opportunity not to pat yourself on the back, but to figure out where you’ve already gone wrong.
This is not to say that every step needs to be tiny. Efficiency is the goal, which means many iterations, but also getting as much information as possible out of each iteration. One of my big rules has always been, “double it, or cut it in half.” Don’t waste your time adjusting something by 5 percent, then another 5 percent, then another . . . just double it, and see if it even had the effect you thought it was going to have at all. If it went too far, now you know you’re on the right track, and can drop back down accordingly. But maybe it still didn’t go far enough, and you’ve just saved yourself a dozen iterations inching upward 5 percent at a time. Less than a month before Civilization was published, I cut the size of the map in half. Of course a game about the entire history of civilization has to have a large map, but it turned out that the size wasn’t as important as the sense of relentless progress. With a smaller map, the game moved faster, and that in turn made the map feel more epic than it had when it was twice as big—and if I’d been afraid to deviate too severely from what we already had, I never would have gotten to the right size in time before the game shipped.
This is also why I never write design documents. Some managers are irrationally devoted to them, expecting to see the entire game laid out in descriptive t
ext and PowerPoint slides before a single line of code is ever written. But to me, that’s like drawing a map before you’ve visited the terrain: “I’ve decided there will be a mountain here.” Lewis and Clark would have been laughed out of the room if they showed up with a design document. Instead, they just said, “We’ll get back to you,” and started walking. The mountain is where the mountain is, and your job is to find it, not insist where it should have been.
Here are some bits of clay that I thought belonged in Civ, but later scraped off:
First, the real-time clock. That was really more like tossing the clay in the trash and getting a new lump.
Then, I toyed briefly with the cyclical rise and fall of nations. Though historically accurate, this was like flooding the railroad bridge on a grand scale. The moment the Krakatoa volcano blew up, or the bubonic plague came marching through, all anybody wanted to do was reload from a saved game.
The branching tech tree of advancements was a pretty good idea from the start, but the actual elements of it flip-flopped all over the place for months until it felt right. For a while, there was a whole secondary tech tree of minor skills like beer brewing (obviously a source of happiness points for your population,) but we had to ditch it for being too unwieldy.
For a while, I tried to include land mines as a weapon, but I couldn’t get the game’s AI to place them intelligently, or to stop walking over their own mines, without dragging the processing speed to a crawl. Out they went.
There were religious leaders, and then there weren’t.
There were Germans, and then there weren’t—and then there were again.
The point is, there are bad things in my games, at least until I manage to pin them down, but I don’t let the possibility of mistakes hold me back. I won’t ponder for hours whether a feature would be a good idea, I just throw it in the game and find out for sure. If it’s clunky, I cut it back out again. There is no map before you’ve explored the wilderness, and no overriding artistic vision on Day One. There’s just the hard, consistent work of making something a little better each day, and being as efficient as possible in your discovery of what it’s going to turn out to be.
12
TURNING POINTS
Pirates! Gold (1993)
*
Sid Meier’s
Railroad Tycoon Deluxe (1993)
THAT CHRISTMAS, WE TOOK A trip with my parents and siblings to a ski resort in Massanutten, Virginia. Ryan was seven months old, so his snow activities were limited, but he got to experience the baby version of a ski lift as he was passed joyfully from family member to family member. It was interesting to see how my two younger siblings interacted with him, since they were now roughly the same age as I’d been when they were born.
My sister, Vicky, had arrived during my sophomore year of high school, after my parents evidently got a second wind. Then my brother, Bruce, came along a year before I graduated. (Though relatively rare today, the name peaked in popularity just as my coworker Bruce Shelley was born in the late forties, and remained in the top 100 until several years after my brother was born in the early seventies, resulting in the odd bit of trivia that the first two people ever to play Civilization were both named Bruce.)
Like most teenagers, I was very wrapped up in my own interests, which, while diverse, did not include babies. They were too young to be siblings in the traditional sense, but I wasn’t comfortable with any kind of paternalistic role. No one who looked at fifteen-year-old Sid Meier would peg him as the “cool uncle” type. We grew closer once they matured into real people with personalities, of course, but in the beginning, it felt more like my parents had taken up some weird new hobby. I’d help my mother with the little ones if she asked, but in general, I looked at it as something she had signed up for, not me.
I did find my tiny roommates intriguing to examine from a distance, though, and even signed up for a child psychology course my freshman year of college. All things being equal, I would have preferred another math class, but there were token liberal arts requirements to satisfy, and I figured that Bruce and Vicky might give me an advantage over the other students. Not only was my exposure to young children probably more recent than everyone else’s, but if any research needed to be done, I had a captive pair of test subjects.
Sure enough, our final term paper was open topic, and I was ready with a slam dunk. Somewhere in the assigned reading there had been a section on the made-up languages between preverbal siblings, and I thought it would be noteworthy to document one of these unique communication patterns in the real world. With my superior grasp of data analysis, and the only real-life guinea pigs in the class, I was pretty sure I was about to do the Developmental Studies equivalent of a mic drop.
So I went home one weekend, and slipped a tape recorder into the room my brother and sister shared, ready to capture whatever mysterious words they babbled to each other before falling asleep each night. It was a low-stress and low-priority project for me, as far as college assignments went, so it wasn’t until a few days later that I finally got around to listening to my tape.
It was, effectively, silent. Turns out my siblings did not have a secret made-up language, or any language at all, save for a few grunts and snores. And it was far too late to change topics now. So instead, the paper became an exercise in creative writing, forcing me to pull a compelling, fact-based narrative out of thin air—which, in the long run, was probably more useful to my career than anything else the class could have taught me anyway.
Besides Vicky, I did have one sister my own age, but she passed away when I was young. We were fairly close, and I have many memories from before she got sick, but the years surrounding Dorothy’s death are, sadly, a bit of a blur.
I can remember my mother leaving me home alone in the evenings while she visited my sister in the hospital. I remember the quarter she’d give me each night to buy a bag of chips across the street, and watching the old sitcom My Mother the Car while I waited for her return. I remember getting only vague answers, but understanding enough to know that Dorothy wouldn’t be coming home with her any time soon.
I don’t remember how many years her illness dragged on, but I do remember that when my parents flew to Switzerland to retrieve me from my grandparents’ house, part of the trip involved a detour to Germany, where they visited a clinic that promised some kind of last-resort treatment that American doctors wouldn’t or couldn’t provide.
I remember the large swelling on the side of her neck. I remember learning later that her disease was called Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and that it is now mostly curable.
I remember walking to school alone.
I remember visiting her gravesite with my father, flowers in hand. And I remember considering for the first time, many decades later, that my trip to Switzerland may have served at least partially to shield me from what was going on at home, and that lengthening the stay might not have been entirely, 100 percent my idea.
It seems impossible to think that the experience had no lasting effects on me, but I’ve successfully blocked most of it from memory. Certainly everything must have been harder on my parents. As a parent now myself, I had a new understanding of their emotional reality—and yet somehow, I never worried about losing Ryan.
The day after he was born, something large and metal had fallen outside our hospital room with a horrendous crash. I jumped in surprise, as did Gigi and her parents. Babies up and down the hall began crying, but not Ryan. He glanced up curiously, then kept right on with whatever important baby thing he had been doing before the interruption. I’m not sure why, but at the time it seemed significant: an indicator of the boy, and eventually the man, to come. Ryan was calm and sensible, a rock that could withstand any storm. From that moment on, I just kind of decided he was indestructible.
So far, he was living up to the hype. Some babies would have fussed at all the disruption and over-stimulation of a big family holiday, but little seven-month-old Ryan was still at peace with whatever cam
e his way.
As usual, I had brought my computer with me to Massanutten, as well as the latest version of Civilization. I casually showed the prototype to my family, knowing that Bruce especially would be interested in trying it out. He had worked as a playtester at Micro-Prose during his last three summers in high school, living in our spare bedroom in Baltimore while he earned his place in the Crusade in Europe, Gunship, and Pirates! credits. But since going off to college, he’d been too busy to spend summers in Maryland, and possibly even too busy to play games at all. He was overdue for some fun.
Bruce started playing, commenting helpfully on this or that feature, until at some point I got called away to the living room. Eventually, someone asked where he was.
“Oh,” I said, looking around. “I think he’s still in the back, playing Civilization.”
I glanced at my watch. Six hours had gone by.
Up to that point, I knew the game was special only in the same way that I knew all my games were special—including the ones that had been disappointing in certain ways. No child is perfect, and you love them all anyway. Even now, with some games labeled as my legacy and others all but forgotten, each one holds an equal place in my own heart. You don’t stop inviting half your kids to Thanksgiving just because the other half become celebrities.
But when my brother disappeared for most of a day into a barely playable prototype, that got my attention. What made him stick with it? Where did the momentum come from? The game wasn’t terribly complex yet, just a few simple systems tossed together into one space, yet he’d apparently been conquering and surrendering the terrain over and over, just rearranging and exploring those same basic parameters.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 13
