Ultimately, the decision was up to me. They didn’t ask, per se, but I could have put my foot down. I reached out to Brian to gauge his feeling on it, and he surprised me by being strongly in favor of putting my name on the box. After all, it was his first major venture as a lead designer, no matter what the packaging said, and if the game sold poorly he might not get to do another. Like me, Brian wasn’t much concerned with accolades; he just wanted to bring his ideas to life with minimal obstruction.
I’d helped him a lot, he pointed out. He’d been in my office asking questions more times than either of us could remember. And I had to admit, there was nothing about the game that I would change—the ending might not have been to my personal taste, but it was a valid design choice, and Brian had executed it flawlessly. Colonization was a great product, built on all the same principles I would have built it on.
So I conceded. “Sid Meier’s” now meant “Sid Meier mentored and approved” instead of “Sid Meier personally coded.” I think some part of me probably knew it was inevitable. I’d seen enough promotional decisions by now to understand that they inched relentlessly forward as long as you let them. To refuse at this point would be an overt rejection of Brian’s work, which would have been both unfair and inaccurate. The situation was good for him, good for the company, good for me, and arguably good for consumers, who were being bombarded with bandwagon strategy titles in the wake of Civ’s success, and deserved some guarantee of the quality inside.
But I also knew it was time for a hard line, in my own mind, of what I would and wouldn’t accept in the future. I would never put my name on something I didn’t truly approve of, for a start. I would never put my name on a game if the lead designer didn’t want me to, and I certainly wouldn’t let them sell my name to the highest bidder. I hoped I’d never see the day where I’d have to fight the issue, but I resolved that I would if I had to.
The discrepancy didn’t go unnoticed in the press, but only a few were cynical about it. One argued that since I had created a new genre, it made perfect sense that it should be named after me, just as it would have been if I’d discovered a species or a new disease (a parallel some addicted Civilization players found especially relevant). Fortunately, the gaming writer Alan Emrich soon coined a more permanent name for the genre, “4X,” representing the four main objectives of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. I don’t know what I would have done if my name had become generically synonymous with all strategy games, but I’m grateful to Alan for stepping in. Not only was it a clever and succinct way to summarize the essential elements of strategy gaming, but as a programmer in the era of limited disk space, I couldn’t help but appreciate a descriptor that could be shortened to just two characters.
The day after Colonization went gold, meaning the final product had been approved and stamped onto its gold master copy for distribution, Brian boarded a plane for England. His wife had been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Yorkshire, and she’d gone overseas at the start of the semester to begin her studies, while he’d been held hostage in America for months by the final testing and approval process for his game. From what I understand, Colonization’s gold date was also his birthday, so it was a double celebration. Now that he was free, he couldn’t pack his bags fast enough.
Fortunately for us, Brian’s leave was only temporary; fortunately for him, we had a project he could work on in relative isolation for the next nine months. If you’re old enough, you may recall—and if you’re not, just consider the horror—that in 1994 you had to buy an account through providers like CompuServe or Prodigy to access their curated version of “computer information services,” i.e., the internet. One ad from Popular Science magazine listed the many desirable features of a CompuServe membership, such as sixty emails a month and the ability to talk to “twice as many people” about parallel universes, all under the headline that users could “never outgrow” this comprehensive service.
For Brian to connect to our office directly across the Atlantic would have involved by-the-minute international phone charges. So instead, the plan was for him to dial in to our UK office through a local number first, and then use their corporate network to send updated versions of the game over email. Attachments had size limits, but then again, so did the final game. England’s hardware market didn’t overlap well with ours, so MicroProse also shelled out for a state-of-the-art “portable” Compaq computer for Brian to personally carry overseas. It was roughly the size and weight of a briefcase full of bricks, and the receipt he used to declare its value to the customs officer listed a retail price of $8,700, or over $14,000 today.
The game, of course, was Civilization II. Again, management assumed I’d be involved, and for a little while I was. While Brian worked on updates to the main game, I prototyped a new battle system that would drop players into a separate, detailed battlefield screen during conflicts, then return them to the main world map once the tactical winner had been determined. But I wasn’t pleased with the results, and after several months I emailed Brian to let him know that it wasn’t happening, and he should stick with the current battle system. I think it was the right move for the series, and not just an extension of my burnout phase—being king is the heart of Civilization; slumming as a lowly general puts the player in an entirely different story (not to mention violates the Covert Action rule). Win-or-lose battles are not the only interesting choice on the path to good game design, but they’re the only choice that leads to Civ.
Brian sure changed a lot of other stuff, though. To be honest, I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on the builds he was sending back from England each week. Or any eye at all, really. With Colonization under his belt, I trusted Brian even more than before, and figured the in-progress deliveries were mostly just for the art and sound guys to get started on. But I knew he’d want to pick my brain once he was back in person, so shortly before his return, I sat down and fired up the latest version.
The first thing I noticed was that he’d added a sixth difficulty level called “Deity,” and the ability to adjust the aggressiveness of the barbarian tribes. Nice. Then, I was given the option to declare a gender. I made a mental note to watch for personalized text and graphics later on.
Time to select my tribe—wow, twenty-one choices. The original Civ had maxed out at fourteen. It wasn’t difficult to add them from a programming standpoint anymore, thanks to improved technology, but the historical research would have taken Brian some time. I was impressed.
One more dialog box to select the aesthetic style of my cities, and we were finally on the main screen.
My stomach dropped. Surely this was a joke.
Civilization II was built on a fancy new operating system called Windows 3.1, which kept a permanent line of menu options along the top of each program. Game, Kingdom, View, Orders—these all made perfect sense. But there, second from the end, was the word Cheat.
Cheating was an inherent part of the game now, right on the main screen? This was not good. For one thing, modifying the rules doesn’t really count as cheating anymore, it’s just an accepted form of gameplay. But the faster and easier gameplay becomes, the less it starts to count as a game at all. Like all storytelling, gaming is about the journey, and if you’re actively finding ways to jump to the end, then we haven’t made the fantasy compelling enough. A gripping novel would never start with an insert labeled, “Here’s the Last Page, in Case You Want to Read It Now.” Players who feel so inclined will instinctively find their own ways to cheat, and we shouldn’t have to help them out.
In fact, it’s our job to stop them when they succeed. Most bug fixes are not about broken code, they’re about closing design loopholes that players refuse to ignore. The first revision I sent out for Civ came after someone discovered you could blanket the land with a checkerboard of tiny cities, thus eliminating the cost of roads and irrigation. Alternatively, you could choose to play the right way—but the temptation was there, and the complaints made it clear that pl
ayers wanted us to protect them from themselves. So we introduced the concept of corruption, which favored fewer cities by increasing your people’s misery with each new set of local politicians. Normal gameplay was essentially unaffected, but now the city-spamming strategy resulted in a populace so unhappy that they could barely be bothered to grow food for themselves. Shortly after that, players found an even more complicated way to break the game, this time involving the Mongols and chariots, and a second revision had to go out. The original cheaters in that case needed a page and a half just to explain the strategy on the bulletin boards, so their creativity and determination were evident. There was no need for us to hand it to them on a silver platter.*
But Brian quietly ignored my advice, as he’d always been able to do, and Civ II shipped with a Cheat menu. Players could steal money directly from their enemies’ treasury, wipe out civilizations with a single click, reshape the land beneath their feet, and more. It didn’t inherently spoil anything about the core game, I just felt like it was shooting ourselves in the foot with regard to replayability. Once you have a foolproof way to win, there’s no reason to try again. Personally, I could choose to enhance my own enjoyment by ignoring the cheat option right in front of me, but I wasn’t sure the players could. We were the designers for a reason.
A few years later, I happened to watch over my son Ryan’s shoulder as he gleefully spawned a legion of tanks into the Middle Ages to squash a few pikemen, and I realized that there might be some level of fun behind cheating after all, at least once it becomes sufficiently gratuitous. I still wish the option had been two or three layers deep in the menu, just to make the player work a little harder for it, but I did eventually see the appeal.
The other thing I had to admit was that the cheating function directly inspired the most important part of Civilization II, which was its modification, or “modding” capability. In the very earliest days of the industry, the guts of our games were wide open, right there on the disk for anyone to play with. Programs in general were so small that magazines often published pages of code for readers to copy by hand onto their own computers. Eventually, though, compiled programming languages bundled up the individual line commands and made them inaccessible. Knowledgeable hackers might be able to slice out certain chunks of code, such as after-the-fact copy protection routines, but the content of the game was now protected—they couldn’t go in and change the map, or switch out the main character with a picture of themselves.
But modern computer languages like C and C++ allowed the program to pull active game data from text files outside the compiled code. Essentially, this meant you could set certain values to be flexible, even after the program had been finalized. Few designers had ever seen a reason to do this, but when Brian first made Colonization, he decided to leave many major parameters open to the educated player. Weaken your enemies, lower the cost of buildings, force your king to trade favorably with you—all with a few simple keystrokes inside an easy-to-understand text document.
In retrospect, Brian’s editable text files were a clear philosophical precursor to his Cheat menu, but at the time they were a small back door buried deep within the Colonization disk, not a flashing billboard inside the game itself. Now, with cheats out in the open for Civ II, Brian unlocked the back end even further. He made it possible for players to alter graphics, replace sound effects, modify rules, and basically create an entirely new game for themselves around the skeleton of our code.
I could not be convinced this was a good idea. Like I said, the actual game that we had created was great, and I was happy to put my name on it, which Brian was again in favor of. But this idea of handing everything over to the players was just baffling. They would probably be terrible at it, I thought, and blame us for their uninspired creations. And if by chance they did happen to be good at it, then all we were doing was putting ourselves out of a job. Either way, I knew that modding was a great way to ensure that Civilization never saw a third installment.
I was so wrong, on all counts. The strength of the modding community is, instead, the very reason the series survived at all. Our audience had been clamoring to modify the game since the first fan letter, but I was protective—not of it, but of them, afraid that they would damage their own experience. Their story was important, and the only way to guarantee that was for the setting to feel real and important, too.
What I didn’t see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality; it only heightens it. Just like a fantasy can awaken you to new possibilities in the real world, letting the fans play in the sandbox with us only brought them closer to the universe we had created, the one that had made their fantasy possible. Every alteration, from the smallest AI tweak to the wildest comedic parody, functioned as a kind of tribute that kept Civ fresh, rather than pushing it aside. I’d thought they were tearing the house down, when in fact they were only remodeling because they liked the neighborhood and wanted to stay. Fortunately, Brian had the wisdom to give away the construction materials.
To say the fans ran with it would be an understatement. Stunningly creative mods of Civilization II began appearing online within weeks of the game’s release. The simplest ones made only cosmetic changes—adding leaders we’d left out, perhaps, or renaming military units and buildings to their liking. More complex mods included a set of progress data, allowing the player to jump into the middle of a complex scenario as if it were a saved game. Some of these laid out real-world conflicts, like The Conquest of Britain or Persian Gulf War, including historically accurate distributions of wealth, population, and military firepower. Others took a turn for the whimsical, such as Battle of the Sexes (pitting the lush and economically prosperous “Womyn” civilization against a ruggedly hostile continent of over-weaponized “Manly Men”) and Santa Is Coming (in which players took down rival elf workshops within a toy-based economy). Some of them swapped out so much art that they were virtually unrecognizable as Civilization mods. The best of these fan-created scenarios were eventually released alongside our own in-house scenarios in the official Civ II expansion packs, and some of their creators even secured jobs in the industry on the strength of their mod portfolios.
Others in the mod community took a more experimental approach, pushing the game to its technical, rather than creative, limits. It was popular to set up oversized maps with as many civilizations as the player’s computer could keep track of—or else cram them all into the smallest possible map, and watch the chaos unfold. This eventually culminated in a Battle Royale mod containing sixty-one simultaneous civilizations, spawned in their real-life locations on an accurate world map. Unfortunately, a winner could never be determined, because the scenario kept crashing after a few hundred turns. But others in the community were so intrigued that they offered to write automated scripts and efficiency tools for a potential remake, and their team effort continues to this day.
Meanwhile, another young man made headlines by simply ignoring the clock. A typical game of Civ II was expected to last about ten hours, maybe fifteen with heavy diplomacy. Experienced players could sometimes assimilate every competing nation by the turn of the twentieth century, but as often as not, the game would reach a complex stalemate of democratic superpowers in the modern age. When that happened, accomplishments were tallied, and the tiara was awarded to whomever had the highest score when the year struck 2050 AD.
As with Pirates!, however, the game never actually forced you to quit. Numerically triumphant or not, you could keep up the struggle for as long as there were opponents left on the board. Such stubbornness usually led to a late-stage loss, because declaring war in a world dominated by peace treaties was a great way to turn everyone else against you. But for some reason, one particular game started by fourteen-year-old James Moore never escaped the era of nuclear saber-rattling. Instead, the Vikings, the Americans, and James’s own Celtic civilization somehow rose to the top in perfect aggressive equilibrium, continuously pelting one another with warheads while never losing or g
aining substantial ground.
Other games grabbed and lost his interest over the years, but James was fascinated by the odd little dystopia he had stumbled into, and continued running the simulation long after he’d been declared the nominal winner. As he graduated from high school, went to college, withdrew from college, got a job, got a better job, and eventually returned to college, James continued to transfer his saved game file from city to city, and computer to computer. Each week, he would spend a few hours nursing his post-apocalyptic world, still hoping for a resolution even as centuries of conflict killed 90 percent of the population, and nuclear fallout melted the polar ice caps more than twenty times. (We’d programmed it as an abstract consequence whenever global warming reached a certain level, never expecting it would be triggered more than once. After 1,700 years of nonstop thermonuclear bombing, the rising oceans in James’s world had covered all but the highest mountain regions with swamps.)
Perhaps he was emotionally attached to it because Civ II was the first computer game his family could afford, or perhaps the notion of dystopia holds a similar fascination for all of us. Maybe the thing that makes Civ so compelling is that it illuminates our deepest fears about ourselves—it’s hard to play out a fantasy of worldwide domination without occasionally wondering whether you’re really the best person to put in charge after all.
“Every time a ceasefire is signed,” James lamented, “the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn. . . . I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire.” Detonating a nuclear bomb on civilians was usually a sure path to defeat in the game, because every other nation would immediately declare war on you. “But this is already the case,” he pointed out, “so it’s no longer a deterrent to anyone. Myself included.”
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 16
