In the last several years, I think we’ve finally crested that hill, which is great news—but I also know that one day, my future grandchildren will sneer at whatever new thing is captivating the attention of their youth. They, too, will call it addictive, and grumble about how kids these days ought to go play a good videogame instead of wasting their time on those newfangled psychogels, or whatever.
No form of media is perfect, and no form has a monopoly on addiction, either. The important distinction is what you choose to convey with your vehicle. Imagination is good, compelling narratives are good, and empathy is good, in whatever form we express them. Addiction is a problem, but it can happen with any type of escapism—leisure, substance, behavior, food, even social approval—and it should be addressed through individual circumstances, not the banning of excellence. We shouldn’t fear the things that enthrall us, but instead acknowledge our responsibility to harness them as a tool, and determine what good can be accomplished with them.
For every workplace lunch hour that stretched into three, there’s someone who learned career skills through the economic strategizing and political negotiations of Civilization. For every student who failed a class after too many late nights fighting Montezuma, I can point to one who read a book about Montezuma because the game made him curious. For every “Civilization widow” who feels neglected by her game-obsessed spouse, well . . . I have one story that trumps them all.
A couple of years after the original game came out, we received a letter at the MicroProse office from a young boy, about ten years old judging from the grammar and handwriting. Fan communication was at its peak by then, and we were used to being told on a daily basis that the game was a life-changing experience. But in this case, it turned out Civilization had actually saved lives.
The boy’s mother was an avid player, he told us, and sometimes stayed up conquering the world long after the rest of the family had gone to bed. On one particularly late night, her game was interrupted by the smell of smoke, and she ran upstairs to discover a large fire already in progress. Thanks to Civ, he said, she was there to wake up the family and get everyone out just in time.
My favorite part about that story, aside from the “hooray, nobody died” aspect, was that it was the mom, not the dad, who was playing. Gaming is for everyone—and not just on an individual level, but as a whole. It’s for everyone together. I haven’t always known what appeals to people who aren’t specifically me, but I have always been interested in finding out, and when it comes to games I think addiction is usually just another word for the intense connection we feel toward a work of art. As an artist, my job is to foster that connection in a constructive way—and if I’m lucky, to connect people to one another through our shared experiences. When escapism is done right, it creates a community of escapees that never existed before. The only alternative would be to knowingly create something less powerful, to deliberately dial back that human connection out of fear. That’s madness. We’re stronger together, and the more universal and effective our games are, the more knowledge, empathy, and ambition we can inspire.
* Achievement Unlocked: Be Excellent to Each Other—Encounter Beethoven, Lincoln, Napoleon, and Genghis Khan.
18
EXTINCTION
The Dinosaur Game (66 million BC)
IF THERE WERE SUCH A THING AS a quintessential Sid Meier topic, dinosaurs would probably be it. They have that familiar hook of childhood fascination, yet enough scientific details to keep an adult interested. Narrative conflict is easy to establish between predator and prey, but the chronological and emotional distance keeps the game from feeling violent. There’s a built-in system of advancement via evolution, and when it comes to ticking clocks, a giant meteor strike is about as exciting as you can get. It should be easy!
And yet it was so hard.
Though I mostly remember working on the dinosaur game in the early 2000s, it turns out I’d been toying with prototypes since at least 1991. I’ve held on to most of my computers over the years, and just recently, I was persuaded to drag a few of the oldest models out of storage and fire them up. Initial attempts were unfortunately literal—as soon as the first machine was turned on, sparks flew, and the whole thing went down in a blaze of short-circuiting glory. The second one we tried was mercifully free of fireworks, but only because it wouldn’t power up at all. Our Firaxis IT guys love a challenge, though, and after locating an ancient boot disk, we were finally able to exhume the fossils held within.
Sure enough, there was a dinosaur folder, along with about a dozen others. Some of them were ancestors to games we eventually made, including a spy game, a space game, and of course a Civil War game. They were more like imperfect siblings than a direct lineage, ideas trapped in amber by a turnover in technology. Virtually none of the data would have been useful on whatever computer replaced it, but it wasn’t a big loss, because I build most major revisions from scratch, anyway. The coding is the easy part; it’s like drawing a picture of something after you’ve excavated it. The sweat is in the digging, not the documentation.
Other prototypes on this museum-quality computer, like a mystery game and a Wild West game, had turned out to be evolutionary dead ends—at least so far. The truth is I never really give up on anything. The ideas just sit in stasis, sometimes for decades, until I can figure out the right way to make them work. I may have to poke and prod in a hundred different ways, but once I find that perfect angle the rest falls into place pretty quickly. In my entire career, the dinosaur game is the only one I’ve ever had to declare totally, soul-crushingly, extinct.
The first few versions were turn-based, or what I affectionately thought of as “DinoCiv.” Your little herd would wander around the grid, foraging instead of farming and building nests instead of cities. Sometimes you’d run into other herds and have a fight, and if you won, they’d join you and increase your genetic diversity. This is where it got interesting, or so I thought: when it came time to breed, you’d suddenly become an embryonic specialist, able to see which genes were available from the two herd members you’d chosen for the shotgun wedding. Pick a large head from mom and a long tail from dad, and junior would hopefully come out a little smarter and better-balanced than his parents. Keep at it for enough generations, and maybe his distant progeny would one day rule the savannah.
As the game got harder, dominant and recessive gene patterns came into play, as well as gambles on random mutations. It seemed fun at first, but ultimately, it was just Dinosaur Mr. Potato Head*—the pieces got old very quickly. I added a button to automatically optimize the breeding, but if you have to offload the supposedly fun part of your game, that’s a pretty good indication that you’re confused about what fun is. Even at its best, this version broke the Covert Action rule, because players who took the time to embrace the genetic system would lose track of the main storyline. What’s more, randomizing the dinosaur traits eliminated all the celebrity actors like Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus. Their recognizability was a key part of the emotional hook, and without them, it was just a bunch of lizards.
No problem, I thought, that’s what prototyping is for—figure out what’s bad, and ditch it. So I transitioned into the second major version of the dinosaur game, which I mentally dubbed “DinoAge” in reference to several Civ competitors that focused on just one era. Now, the player was following a set path of evolution toward known dinosaurs, with just a few major choices like carnivore or herbivore, cold-blooded or warm-blooded, and so on. It was simpler, faster, and also hugely boring. There was usually a clear right answer to the choices in any given situation, and it almost seemed as if the computer were playing you instead of the other way around. Simplification helps when there’s too much going on at once, but if you’re investing the time needed for a turn-based game, you want all of the interesting decisions to be under your control.
Okay, so, what if the game weren’t turn-based? Gettysburg! had worked out great as a real-time game. Maybe what you really wanted w
as to be leading your Velociraptor hordes against a phalanx of Brontosaurus heavies, keeping an eye out for volcanic land mines and Pterodactyl air support. Once again, I rewrote the code, calling the new version “DinoCraft” after the popular real-time game StarCraft. Unlike its namesake, though, this third prototype was just as much a disaster as the first two.
The reason was simple mechanics. A major pillar of real-time strategy games is the use of ranged weapons: some fighters are slow and strong, and spend their time bullying through the front lines, while others are weak but nimble, and mostly hop around at the fringes of the battle doing damage from a distance. The latter can shoot arrows, launch cruise missiles, sling magic spells, or whatever else suits your theme—as long as they have to spread out a little to do it. Otherwise, if all units are equal, it becomes a free-for-all mashup at the center of the screen, like a bunch of five-year-olds trying to play soccer. Good strategic planning can’t happen until you spread your team out, and throwing some kind of ranged weapon into the mix forces the player to do that.
But there was no such thing as a ranged dinosaur. The best you could get were a few species who could jump surprisingly far, but that still put them at the center of the fray when their jaws clamped shut. I found myself taking more and more paleontological liberties, until finally, I gave up all pretense of realism and invented a dinosaur that could spit poison. As a friendly nod to our producer at EA, Bing Gordon, I named my new species the Bingosaur. Probably I would have had to change it by the time the game shipped, but I cleverly avoided that by never finishing the game.
If I’d only had to fabricate one dinosaur, it might have been okay. But the rock-paper-scissors axiom meant that roughly a third of the fighters had to be ranged, which meant either a lot more spitters, or a lot less diversity. Meanwhile, the distribution of real dinosaur species was heavily tipped in favor of herbivores. When the goal had been herd evolution, that worked out okay, but now all the gentle species had nothing to do but sit and watch a handful of carnivores chew on each other. The “builder-to-fighter ratio,” as we call it, was way off.
Goodbye to prototype number three.
By now, I was getting desperate. Breathless news articles had already been written about the game; fans were actively discussing on message boards what features we might include. I’d even fired up the prototype for a few interview candidates, seeking fresh feedback from anywhere I could find it. We’d had a full team of employees on the project for at least six months, and I still hadn’t even figured out what type of game it was supposed to be.
One of the big questions I couldn’t answer was, “Who is having the most fun in the dinosaur universe?” That’s who you want your player to be: the person with the most power, living the most exciting life. In the history of civilization, it’s the king; on the Spanish Main, it’s the captain of the pirate ship; in war, it’s the general; in the transportation industry, it’s the tycoon. But individual dinosaurs don’t really have a lot of power. T. rex can eat all the little guys, but he doesn’t build an army. Evolution is a useful mechanic, but it’s not something the individual gets to experience—you have to take a step back into the role of Dinosaur God to even play around with it. But then, what god would micromanage the daily feeding and fighting of specific animals? There didn’t seem to be a unified perspective that could tie in all the best parts of dinosauring.
I’d steered the game left, right, and every angle in between, all to no avail. The only remaining option was to swerve off the road completely. So the fourth and final dinosaur prototype was nicknamed “DinoMon,” because, like the pocket monsters sweeping the nation that year, it was a card game. Really it was closer to “Dinosaur: The Gathering” than Pokémon, but that didn’t roll off the tongue as easily when it came time to give presentations on why this endeavor had failed so thoroughly.
To be fair, the card game version wasn’t bad. It neatly solved the recognizable-versus-evolving debate by dividing those duties between dinosaur cards and mutation cards. You could start with a scientifically accurate Coelophysis card, for example, but then play a horns or feathers card on top of it to make him more powerful in a particular duel. It felt like seeing your favorite celebrity playing different characters. Returning the cards to your deck after each battle also meant that the “I’ll do it differently next time” itch could get scratched even faster than usual. Meanwhile, the card format took advantage of the players’ imagination, letting them animate the swirling dust storm or splattering mud bath in their own mind instead of using up on-screen resources. Even the sense of collectability seemed to resonate with the theme. The more dinosaur names a kid can rattle off, the cooler he is, as if the fundamental childhood instinct is to mentally collect all of the different species in the first place.
In the end, though, the innovation just wasn’t there. First, the way the cards interacted was simply too close to Magic. Stealing ideas is fine if you’ve put your own twist on it, but I was never convinced that the dinosaur game had enough new material to justify its obvious origins. Second, I could sense a general sort of malaise in both the team and myself. To have spent so much time and energy on the supposedly quintessential Sid Meier game, and ultimately settle on a run-of-the-mill card format . . . it just felt like a letdown.
Then again, so did quitting. It’s easy to reject my own efforts when they don’t measure up, but much harder to do it to other people. Would Electronic Arts even let us walk away from this game after all the money we’d sunk into it? How many of my team members would be disappointed, and how many would be secretly relieved? Which was worse? I didn’t even want to think about all the “Sid Cancels Game!” news articles, which would surely be even more numerous than the ones eagerly anticipating the game in the first place.
In the midst of this growing dread, I took a trip to Los Angeles for the sixth annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3. It was a strange time for the industry—videogame sales were now topping $35 billion a year, and Americans had preordered half a million PlayStation 2 consoles before a single one had left the factory. Clearly there was enthusiasm for our work. Yet families of the Columbine shooting victims had just sued twenty-five different game manufacturers for their alleged role in the attackers’ behavior, and the US Senate was holding official hearings on “The Impact of Interactive Violence on Children.” Later that year, presidential hopeful Al Gore would select Joe Lieberman as his running mate, due in part to Lieberman’s long-standing bipartisan efforts to regulate the gaming industry.
The atmosphere at E3 that year was very Tale of Two Cities. At the same time that Nintendo was bringing fans to tears with their stunning trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the city of Indianapolis was considering a law requiring arcade games to be hidden from public view. Inside the Sega booth, attendees were delightedly shaking electronic maracas to the rhythms of Samba de Amigo, while out on the street, protestors were shaking their fists at the convention hall in angry condemnation. The denouncements didn’t do us any real harm, as demonstrated by the fact that nine years later EA would be caught hiring fake protesters for publicity. But at the time, we didn’t know how the politics would play out, not to mention the lawsuits, and everyone was just a little on edge.
The vibe wasn’t helping my already discouraged mood over the dinosaur game, and near the end of the weekend, Susan and I took a break to visit the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in downtown Hollywood. Strangely enough, Baltimore was going through a heat wave that year, and the Los Angeles weather was considerably nicer than it was back home. Just as I was starting to relax, we were stopped short by a large crowd of people on the sidewalk, all craning to see past a police line. Up ahead I could make out limousines, floodlights, and what looked like a massive Carnotaurus rearing up over the sidewalk. I thought for a moment I had finally cracked.
No one seemed disturbed by the cold-blooded (but possibly warm-blooded!) killer among them, however, nor was there any sense of urgency among the po
lice, who had their backs to the spectacle and their crowd-control frowns turned toward us. Whatever weird celebration was going on, we would not be getting through. So we ducked into the Disney Store, thinking we could pass through and exit on the south side of the building, one street away from the quagmire.
“I’m sorry sir,” said a friendly young man in a monogrammed polo. “You can’t go this way right now.”
“Great,” I muttered, somewhat more tersely than he deserved. “What’s going on here?”
He smiled, obviously glad I’d asked. “We’re having a movie premiere today for Dinosaur, a new major motion picture from Disney Studios.”
“Wonderful,” I replied, almost sincerely. That explained the life-size model of the Carnotaurus, at least. “We’re just trying to get down Hollywood Boulevard.”
“Where are you folks from?”
As someone who has to engage in convention small talk a lot, I know when someone’s really interested, and when they’re just asking because it’s their job. “Baltimore,” I said politely, before getting back to the issue at hand. “So, how are we going to get past here?”
“Baltimore, eh? How’s the weather there this time of year?”
“It’s fine. Do we have to go around, or what?”
“How about those Baltimore Orioles?”
“Yeah, right,” I agreed, trailing off as noncommittally as possible. I had no idea about those Baltimore Orioles, and didn’t want to be chatting about them regardless.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 20
