How Sid Meier Almost Made Civilization a Real-Time Strategy Game | War Stories | Ars Technica

so allegedly there's a bug in my code where Gandhi is kind of set up to have a very low aggressiveness rating so something happens in the game to kind of reduce that a little bit it wraps around to become like the largest integer number where he becomes very aggressive and kind of leads to this nuclear confrontation it's possible that I've put a bug in there but it was not intentional hi I'm Sid Meier the Creator of civilization this is how we built a game that makes you want to take just one more turn Microprose actually kind of started as a flight simulator company and after a while I kind of felt we had exhausted that genre and wanted to try new things so we did we made pirates we made covert action railroad tycoon and then eventually civilization civilization actually evolved out of a couple of projects that we had done previously railroad tycoon and I think is probably the primary one that kind of was our first so-called god game a game which was more about building than it was about blowing things up and I remember Bruce Shelley and I were on a train ride to New York for some event and we said you know well that was fun that was a fun game what should we do next and it was like well what's bigger what's more epic what's cooler than and railroads how about the story of all of civilization civilization is a game that allows you to experience 6,000 years of history starting very small with a with the first city you control a civilization you explore the world do you interact with other leaders you develop technology to expand the things that you can do you engage in military operations it sounds very complicated but everything is done in a very understandable way and it starts small and kind of layers on these these additional elements as the game progresses so you feel kind of in control the idea for for a tech tree which I think was a unique and original to civilization came from a book that I was looking at this one had kind of a timeline of history in it where it would lay out different political advancements or social policies or military things and I would guess I went kind of with my my yellow marker went through that book and thought okay bronze working as here iron working you know gunpowder that almost became the template for the tech tree and it just felt like a very easy to understand mechanism for showing the player how things are connected giving them kind of an insight into the future giving them goals and things to to look forward to you know to two steps down the tech tree I can get to this and it felt like just something to very much hang the structure of the game on that's something that would start simple and again bro and grow and grow as you got further and further into the game every game is different every game is your unique story about how you guided your civilization from antiquity into the Space Age so we have this phrase which which is the valley of despair that every project seems to go through this this valley of despair like halfway through you know this game is not fun nobody likes it I can't figure out how to make this work it's not working nobody likes me and I don't know but nobody will talk to me this is terrible the sieve went through that in the kind of transition between the real-time version and the turn-based version so our first approach to this grand topic of civilization was inspired a lot by by Sim City the idea of zoning and part of your map to build a new city maybe creating a zone over here for farmers and having everything happen in a kind of a real-time process where you watch to gradually grow and now you're ready to zone this maybe you want to zone this area for mining and you kind of do these things in the first prototypes that we created you do these things and kind of sit back and watch it kind of and that was I was kind of okay but it really didn't it didn't engage you as much as we really felt the game the game needed to so we actually put that prototype away for a while and we completed another game which was covert action which I'd started and also put away but I think I think actually Bill's daily our president was part of they said said you need to finish that covert action game which was probably a good thing because that that kind of took us away from the real time zone based version of civilization the conceit behind that game was creating an interactive story the idea of creating a story but that was gonna turn out differently each time and it was kind of controlled by the player you know Interactive literature an interactive spy story and what we derived from covert action was what we call the covert action a rule which was a failing we thought of the game was that these action sequences were were kind of intense and an immersive enough that by the time you finished them you had kind of forgotten you'd lost the thread of the plot you know what was what was gonna happen and what was I trying to prevent or when is that gonna so it was almost like you know to to good games in one package actually kind of conflict with each other so it's interesting to think what would have happened if ifs ahead never become a turn-based game if it had stayed a real-time game I think a good example of that is Age of Empires at the time we could have never had that many units running around on the screen and you know they had we didn't have the technology to make an age of empires had we had that technology maybe we would have gone in that direction but it's interesting to compare Age of Empires with civilization I mean Age of Empires focuses on a smaller area the individual decisions are more minut and so in order to keep the complexity under control it focuses on a shorter period of time and a smaller area of the world of the map I think those are those are smart decisions I think there's a certain amount of complexity that the player can can kind of enjoy and there's a large that becomes work so I think that trying to do a real-time version of SIV that tried to cover the expanse of what the the turn-based game does would would just be completely overwhelming I think that the turning point for SIV was when we switched from real-time to turn base and that really only happened because I finished another game in in the Ihram I put the real-time version on the shelf finished covert action and kind of came back to it with a with kind of fresh eyes and had this idea about about you know making a turn base making it giving a lot of different things to do control individual units etc and that was what really made the difference in the game probably what would trigger that in my mind was having played a game called Empire which had the the characteristics of unveiling exploring a map and had individual units moving around and I kind of Ryan remember that those aha moments of you know another unit enemy units shown he go up but he said oh they're over there now I see how that's this is gonna work or the kind of immersion that moving individual units gave you I realized that that was something was missing from our original prototype and we we slammed it in there and all of a sudden magic started to happen civilization is is now known for the one more turn phenomenon and I would love to say that we you know on day one we said this has got to have one more turn we actually didn't realize there was such a thing as one more turn until really the game was out there and we started getting feedback from from players and we would get these letters like you know I couldn't stop playing I looked up at the clock and it was 3 o'clock in the morning so we said well we we got to figure out what's going on here because this is this is unique this is this is cool how do we how do we make sure that we keep this and so we we kind of analyzed what was happening and it was this idea of the game giving you short-term and medium-term and long-term goals that were all kind of in your mind at one time and you might ink you might complete a short-term goal but bang another short-term goal popped up and you're still working on this medium term goal and there was never a time in the game where you were kind of had had completed everything that you wanted to do you're always looking forward to you know when I get that new technology I can do this what I explore that new continent this is gonna happen so there's always these things that you're looking forward to the game is actually playing playing out in your mind anticipating what's happening you're not you're almost not playing at the moment you're playing into the future and then that future is just one more turn ahead so it we've created this phenomenon that we really didn't anticipate but we're now proud to claim so my advice if you find yourself in the in the valley of the spare is to try something new and different we have another rule which is the double it or cut it in half rule which is if you're gonna make a change make it dramatic if the numbers wrong you know don't add 10% or take away 3% you know double it or cut it in half you know so that if you try a lot of kind of dramatic changes something is going to stick something's going to work it's going to show you a new direction and you can climb out of the of the valley of despair [Music] when the 25th anniversary of civilization rolled around I realized we had in our basement some of the original computers that were used to create the game I thought it'd be fun to try to resurrect those there were actually two of these compact death Pro 386 computers that I'd saved for all those years and we brought him in here and tried to fire them up one of them actually exploded when we plugged it in there was a bunch of dust around the power supply that caught fire and the fan blew flames out the back of it so we shut that one now but we were able to fire this computer up the only problem was the battery had died and we couldn't boot it because the there was no power we finally managed to do that by finding his floppy disk but now we can't turn the Machine off because we won't be able to turn it back on again so it's been running care for for over a year but this is the computer that the majority of Savelle upon twas was done on and it's running the the fabulous DOS operating system here so I'm going to go into the directory which is called civilized and run this early version of the game here are the option here's this is where it starts start a new game earth play on the earth this is the beginning of civilization here so we'll start a new game an early version of our intro sequence this is really something we did to make this game feel epic these are all kind of temporary graphics that I did with with deep paint and finally hired a real artist to eventually replace these and to me this is the classic civilization visual that that first settler the tiny little bit of the world revealed and then the rest of the world to explore basically anything can happen from this point on where do you place your city what's going to happen next it's all ready to unfold in the epic saga of civilization [Music]

Channel: Ars Technica

Views: 877,294

Keywords: sid meier, civilization, civ, civ 1, sid meier's civilization, sid meier interview, sid meiers, sid meier civilization, sid meier on civilization, civ gameplay, civ 1 gameplay, civ 1 sid meier, sid meier civilization history, history of civilization, civilization video game, civ video game, sid meier civ, sid meier civilization game, first civilization, sid meier civ 1, civilization video games, ars war stories, war stories, ars, ars technica, technology

Id: XwUM33VJRbY

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/chaotic_goody]

Civ was almost real time. Diablo was almost turn-based.

Close calls.

[u/CaTessaDor]

Would love to play a Civ-like RTS! Northgard scratches this itch to a degree.

[u/skeletalvolcano]

"Allegedly, this bug exists."

Bruh have you even played your own games?

[u/Adan714]

Thanks. I spend weeks playing in Civ 1. I was a real fan.

[u/DaddyBurton]

The reason why it didn't become a RTS game is because of the 2K launcher. /s

I didn't watch the video, I just wanted to make a real joke about the 2K launcher being the cause of so many issues with the current Civ VI game.

[u/68024]

Really cool. The episode on Prince of Persia is a good one too...

[u/mohtma_gandy]

Tldr anyone?