In 2012, James went public with his now ten-year-old game, which he nicknamed The Eternal War, and asked the community for help.
“The military stalemate is air tight,” he warned them. “You want a granary so you can eat? Sorry; I have to build another tank instead. Maybe next time.” Winning was still on his mind, but he’d also grown weary of the virtual suffering. “I want to rebuild the world,” he said. “But I’m not sure how.”
James posted a copy of his current save file so that others could experiment, and to his surprise, the message went viral. Thousands of players wrote back, some to offer advice, but many just to marvel at this supposed insight into human nature. The parallels to George Orwell’s† 1984, they said, could not be ignored. Humanity was doomed, and Civilization had proven it.
The whole thing garnered enough attention that a journalist contacted me for a quote, and I quickly dispelled the notion of any hidden social commentary.
“There’s no way we could have tested for this,” I assured them. The vast majority of games didn’t play out this way, and such a perfectly balanced state of war was about as likely as a flipped coin landing on its edge—remarkable, but not completely impossible, and certainly not evidence of any deeper meaning. The only insight on display here was how much fun James must have been having, since he could have ended the war himself at any time if only he’d been willing to lose. In the real world, James would have been assassinated or died of old age long before the polar ice caps figured out how to melt for a second time.
Though he’d developed it organically, the scenario functioned like a mod once James posted the data. He had created a very unpleasant, but nonetheless fascinating story, and was able to share that experience with thousands of people as they all struggled to find a way out of the mess he’d offered up to them. One player did eventually work out a strategy to defeat the Vikings in “only” fifty-eight turns, but most were not interested in following his instructions to the letter. They wanted to win it in their own way, and create their own dramatic, back-from-the-brink story.
In this, and all the other mods they crafted and shared with one another, the Civ community revealed more about human nature than the chance outcome of a few algorithms ever could. When faced with the opportunity to dismantle all challenges, most players chose instead to devise endlessly clever new ones for themselves, and banded together to support one another in their efforts. They were stronger than I initially gave them credit for—and I’ve never been so lucky to be wrong. Because while we didn’t know it yet, the strength and loyalty of our fanbase was about to be tested like it never had been before.
* Achievement Unlocked: Too Long for a Tweet—Read 240,000 characters.
† Achievement Unlocked: Dystopian Dinner Party—Hang out with Orson Scott Card, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, and George Orwell.
15
THE DISPERSING
Sid Meier’s CivNet (1995)
*
Magic: The Gathering (1997)
MAGIC: THE GATHERING WAS more than just a game. It was a phenomenon that owned a generation, as surely as Minecraft owns this one. Designer Richard Garfield published his original deck of cards in 1993, long before Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, or any of the hundreds that followed. It was the very first trading-card game, purchased in collectible packs like baseball cards, but played head-to-head like gin rummy or war.
By the time MicroProse was in talks with Wizards of the Coast to create a digital version, Magic had replaced nearly all of the other board games in the company break room. I never played it much myself, because I spent most of my time testing the games I was already designing, but I had seen it demonstrated enough to know that the rules were complicated, and winning strategies were not always obvious. Developing an AI routine that could challenge the serious player would be intriguing, and it might make a nice stepping-stone back to more game-like games, now that C.P.U. Bach was out of my system. The break from pure strategy had been a worthwhile indulgence, and one I was still enjoying. But I agreed, hypothetically, to take on the project, and several of the more ardent fans in the office convinced management that a Magic: The Gathering computer game was a great idea.
It was a mostly good idea.
I hadn’t done a licensed property since Red Storm Rising nine years earlier, but we seemed to be taking on a lot of them these days, thanks to some new corporate overlords. The arcade market had been a flop, as I’d feared, and Bill had been forced to sell MicroProse to a larger developer named Spectrum HoloByte in 1993. Shortly after that, around the time Colonization and C.P.U. Bach were shipping, Bill had stepped down as head of the studio. MicroProse really wasn’t ours, anymore.
Spectrum HoloByte was based in California, and didn’t seem to care much what was going on in our little office. Their darling at the time was a license for the movie Top Gun, which already had six published games from four different companies. Meanwhile, Civilization II was given low priority despite the record-breaking success of its predecessor, and official corporate estimates anticipated sales of just 38,000 copies. Even after Brian’s game surpassed a million, we were hard pressed to get any support from the bigwigs on the West Coast. “Mainstream and marketable” was their thing, not “interesting and nuanced.” The pressure to acquire licenses might have been explicit, or else the remaining MicroProse executives might have been currying favor on their own—but either way, it probably seemed prudent for us to choose the kind of license we liked, before they assigned one to us.
These days, Magic would be a multiplayer game by default, with the AI opponent tacked on for those rare times when, heaven forbid, you couldn’t get Wi-Fi. But this was still the mid-90s, when the word “Wi-Fi” hadn’t even been invented yet. Hardcore nerds sometimes connected directly to one another over a local area network, but the average user was not willing to load up their computer and drive to a central location with a bunch of cables. Major universities had broadband connectivity, but everyone else was still stuck on dial-up.
Not that dial-up made online games impossible. Multiplayer text adventures had been garnering small audiences for a decade, and some bulletin boards offered simple rounds of chess or low-resolution shooters. MicroProse had recently published a (slow and buggy) multiplayer version of Civilization called CivNet, and while we were developing Magic: The Gathering, a young man named Richard Garriott was writing his code for the massively multiplayer revolution known as Ultima Online. His game would eventually be released in the same year as ours, so clearly the technology was out there.
The difference in our situation was twofold. First, Garriott’s company had invested in the infrastructure to handle thousands of active Ultima Online users, with racks of servers running twenty-four hours a day, and full-time employees to maintain them. MicroProse, perhaps remembering the sting of all that unsold arcade hardware, was not willing to host dedicated servers. CivNet users had to forge their own connections through a LAN or other service provider, and even then, the game routinely performed worse than open-source copycat versions written by fans. What’s more, some CivNet customers hadn’t realized that Civilization II was due for release just a few months later, and felt they’d been tricked into buying two products back-to-back. Needless to say, CivNet was not a success, and did nothing to inspire executives’ confidence in the value of online play.
But more importantly, the design of Ultima Online was tailored for multiplayer from the start. They could dump anywhere from five to five thousand users into one world, while Magic would have required a matchmaking service to pair off available players. Plus, Ultima was in real time, so there was no need to wait on anyone else to take their turn. Magic was not only turn-based, but the rules frequently gave the option to play a card or not, and an online version would have been constantly popping up dialogue boxes asking whether each player intended to pass.
To counteract the letdown of a multiplayer game that would offer no multiplayer, we fabricated an adventure game framework, which would
also substitute for the physical pack purchasing in the real world. Collecting rare cards and building your deck was a significant part of the fun, and we quantified it with a mystical realm where you could hunt for such items. The whole thing turned out to be pretty engaging, and soon we started to hear the strongest praise of all: the sound of the game being played up and down the hallway after hours.
That’s when things started to go awry, in the same way that all licensed products eventually do. Wizards of the Coast had been incredibly supportive in general, but at the end of the day, they were beholden to the success of the card game above all else. They determined that some of the rarer cards we were using in our game were over-powered, and too easily available compared to their frequency in the real world. In order to preserve the integrity of the card game experience, they told us, we had to remove these special items from our version.
While it was genuinely the right move from their perspective, it hamstrung the player’s motivation in our game. It just wasn’t as fun to go traipsing through dungeons for mediocre rewards. In a social setting, it was fine to know only one friend who had found an incredibly rare card—you had proof the item was out there, and were excited to imagine that you might find one someday, too. But in a computer game, you were supposed to be the star, and isolation had to change the scale of what rarity meant. If only one in five strangers on their own computer found a particular card, it might as well not exist for the other four.
I was frustrated. Magic was a good computer game, but not as good as it could be. I didn’t like doing licenses, and I didn’t like the corporate structure that had been slowly but surely building up around me for years. Oddly enough, Spectrum HoloByte had determined that MicroProse had better name recognition than they did, despite our reversed market positions, so they’d recently adopted our name for their business as a whole. “MicroProse” would be releasing even more licenses, now.
I just wanted to make interesting games. Bill and I may have had different definitions of interesting, but at least we’d always agreed on making products that were special, and valuing the creative process. I had a suspicion that he’d gone to bat for the design team more than once behind closed doors, and now that he was gone, we were getting even less support from the executive side than we were used to. Meanwhile, Bruce Shelley had left for Chicago after his wife got a unique job opportunity there, Andy Hollis had gone to work on a series of flight simulators for Electronic Arts, Arnold Hendrick had joined Bill in his new business venture called Interactive Magic, and many other early folks had moved on as well.
It was time for me to do the same.
Fortunately, there were others who shared my vision of small-town game design. Brian Reynolds didn’t want to find out what they’d do to Civilization now that it had a two-game track record, and Jeff Briggs wanted to compose original music, not rehash popular movie soundtracks. The three of us decided that we would form our own studio, and run it the way we wanted.
It was not an easy extraction, but we tried to make it as painless as possible. Each of us had different contracts to fulfill, so while Jeff could start establishing our new enterprise in May 1996, Brian couldn’t join him until June, and I was the last to make it over in July. Even then, I consulted part-time at MicroProse for many months after, in order to help them get Magic: The Gathering out the door. I had no desire to leave the game in an unfinishable state, and both sides were nervous enough as it was. On the one hand, active recruitment of our former coworkers could have put us in deep legal trouble; on the other, the executives knew we could probably obliterate their workforce if we tried. They could sue us, of course, but by the time they were done both companies would be out of business. If it got ugly, it would be ugly for everyone.
So we backed away slowly with our hands in the air, and they didn’t make too much of a fuss. I continued to have a presence in the MicroProse office several days a week, handing over the last of my code and explaining how it should be implemented. I even have a vague memory that we were supposed to pretend I was taking some kind of sabbatical, instead of starting a new company. In return, I was allowed to take with me all of the code libraries and programming tools I’d written over the years. Technically they were property of MicroProse, but again, a legal fight would have halted everyone’s use of them until we sorted it all out. Both sides got what they needed to stay in business, with the understanding that we’d each keep to our own corner of the market—they didn’t want to be making detailed strategy titles any more than we wanted to be making Top Gun flight simulators. Fortunately, the question of whether they could put my name on Magic: The Gathering was moot, since it was already someone else’s property. Sid Meier’s Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering would have sounded ridiculous.
We named our new company Firaxis, after a piece of music that Jeff had once written combining the words “fiery” and “axis.” It was only meant to be a placeholder, but we liked it and it stuck. Our office was situated in the middle of several factories owned by the McCormick spice company, and it was fun to come into work each day and find out by smell what they were dry roasting that morning. Once, we had some guests from China visiting the offices, and no one ever explained our proximity to the spice plant. I’m sure they figured it out on their own, but I like to imagine they went home believing that Americans were so decadent, we perfumed the outside air with cinnamon for no reason at all.
Meanwhile, my personal life was starting a new chapter, as well. Gigi and I had separated amicably a few years earlier, and I had recently begun dating a friend of my sister’s named Susan. Vicky and Susan had originally met in a choir group near Washington, DC, but hadn’t been able to see each other much after my sister changed jobs and moved back to Michigan. My house in Baltimore was only about an hour north of DC, so when Vicky and my mother happened to come visit me, Vicky took the opportunity to invite her friend up to have dinner with us. I’m not sure whether my sister intended to play matchmaker, or to what degree my mother was colluding with her, but I found out later that Susan had apparently earned my mother’s approval that evening, most notably by her eagerness to help with the dishes. I was enchanted by her sweet sense of humor and unshakeable kindness, myself.
Though we had many things in common, Susan wasn’t especially into computer games. During one of our early dinners together—we discovered a lot of restaurants halfway between Baltimore and DC, that first year—I mentioned something a fan had written in a letter, and she frowned curiously.
“How do they know who to write to?” she asked.
“Well, my name is on the box,” I said.
She looked me up and down. Apparently, I did not match her mental image of some famous celebrity who gets his name on things. “Oh yeah?” she said.
“I can show you,” I promised.
As soon as we finished eating, I took her to the nearest videogame store. As expected, there on the shelf was Sid Meier’s Civilization, still selling strong after three years. Colonization was there too, and possibly Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, though I don’t think poor C.P.U. Bach made the cut, at least not for eye-level display.
Okay, she admitted with a smile. She was impressed.
After we founded Firaxis, Susan agreed to handle the company’s administrative tasks, since she was one of the very few people we knew who had no connection to MicroProse. Some people might have raised an eyebrow at working all day with their significant other, but we had our own domains, and everyone was kept very busy. It wasn’t so much that we worked well together, but that we worked well separately. By now, we’ve been going on more than twenty years in the same office—spoiler alert, we eventually got married, in full Baroque costume with Bach playing in the background—so I think it’s safe to say the experiment was a success.
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon screenshot.
© 1990 MICROPROSE, WWW.MICROPROSE.COM.
Separately is probably how I work best with everyone, to be honest. I’m an introvert who l
ikes people: I want to collaborate on the whole, but do my part individually. There are so many things in the world to be good at, and I get a thrill every time I come across someone who excels in their field. The dichotomy between someone else’s talent and your own is a cause for celebration, because the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other. But the opposite is also true. I know where my own talents are, and I find that sharing those duties usually falls somewhere between inefficient and frustrating. I want to combine other people’s unique expertise with mine, and create something that none of us could have made alone—not compromise on the same task until it’s less than the sum of its parts. It had been a long time since I’d had that flexibility at MicroProse, but Firaxis promised both the freedom to do my best work, as well as the community of talent to make it even better.
In some ways it felt like starting over, but we grew quickly that first year, and dedicated more people to fewer games in order to make the best products we could. The original team for Railroad Tycoon was so small that we turned the credit screen into a portrait, with Bruce Shelley in engineer’s overalls, Max Remington carrying a railroad spike hammer, and myself as an industry magnate with white gloves and a top hat. By comparison, my first game at Firaxis, Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!, pictured five of us in stoic, sepia-toned Civil War garb, and named quite a few more in the traditional credits list. Of course gamers’ expectations have continued to grow along with the industry, especially when it comes to animation and art, so these days at Firaxis it’s more like eighty to a hundred people per team. But the creative spirit has remained strong, and for the most part, I can still go off and make what I want, when I want, with the assurance that people I trust will be ready to do their part when the time comes.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 17
