Sid Meier is cer tainly the most famous and well-respected West ern com puter game designer, and deservedly so. In his nearly twenty years of devel op ing games, he has cov ered all man ner of game designs and all types of sub ject mat ter. He co-founded Microprose and at first focused on flight sim u la tors, cul mi nat ing in his clas sic F-15 Strike Eagle and F-19 Stealth Fighter. Sub se quently, he shifted to the style of game he is better known for today, devel op ing such clas sics as Pirates!, Rail road Tycoon, Covert Action, and finally Civ i li za tion, this last game being one of the most uni ver sally admired game designs in the his tory of the form. Most recently, at his new com pany Firaxis, Meier cre ated the truly unique RTS wargame Get tys burg! What strikes one most look ing back over his games is their con sis tent level of qual ity and the fact that he never repeats him self, always pre fer ring to take on some thing new and dif fer -ent for his per sonal pro jects. If any one has a solid grasp on what makes a game a com pel ling expe ri ence, it is Sid Meier.
20
Your first pub lished games were flight sim u la tors. Even tually you drifted over to doing what you are now known for, strat egy games. What drove you from one genre to the other?
or air planes, or what ever. I think the other thing that drove that a lit tle bit was the tech nol ogy. That at cer tain times the tech nol ogy is ready to do a good job with this kind of game or that kind of game. Or the mar ket is ready for a strat egy game, for exam ple, or a game that you’ve wanted to do for a while but you did n’t think the time was right. The shift, spe cif i cally from flight sim u la tors to strat egy, came about for two rea sons, I think. One, I had just fin ished F-19 Stealth Fighter, which included all of the ideas I had up to that point about flight sim u la tion. Any thing I did after that would be better graph ics or more sounds or more sce nar ios or what -ever, but I did n’t feel I had a lot of new ideas at that point about flight sim u la tion.
Every thing I thought was cool about a flight sim u la tor had gone into that game. And the other thing was that I had spent some time play ing SimCity and a game called Empire which got me to think ing about strat egy in a grand sense, a game that really had a sig nif i cant amount of scope and time and a lot of inter est ing deci sions to be made. The com bi na tion of those two fac tors led me to do first Rail road Tycoon and then Civ i li za tion after that, as kind of a series of strat egy games.
I find it dan ger ous to think in terms of genre first and then topic. Like, say, “I want to do a real-time strat egy game. OK. What’s a cool topic?” I think, for me at least, it’s more inter est ing to say, “I want to do a game about rail roads. OK, now what’s the most inter est ing way to bring that to life? Is it in real-time, or is it based, or is it first-person . . . ” To first fig ure out what your topic is and then find inter est ing ways and an appro pri ate genre to bring it to life as opposed to com ing the other way around and say, “OK, I want to do a first-person shooter, what has n’t been done yet?” If you approach it from a genre point of view, you’re basi cally
F-19 Stealth Fighter
say ing, “I’m try ing to fit into a mold.” And I think most of the really great games have not started from that point of view. They first started with the idea that,
“Here’s a really cool topic. And by the way it would prob a bly work really well as a real-time strat egy game with a lit tle bit of this in it.”
So when you come up with your ideas for new games, you start with the set ting of the game instead of with a gameplay genre.
I think a good exam ple of that is Pirates! The idea was to do a pirate game, and then it was, “OK, there’s not really a genre out there that fits what I think is cool about pirates. The pirate movie, with the sail ing, the sword fight ing, the stop ping in dif fer -ent towns and all
that kind of stuff, really does n’t fit into a genre.” So we picked and chose dif fer ent pieces of dif fer ent things like a sail ing sequence in real-time and a menu-based adven tur ing sys tem for going into town, and then a sword fight in an action sequence. So we picked dif fer ent styles for the dif fer ent parts of the game as we thought they were appro pri ate, as opposed to say ing, “We’re going to do a game that’s real-time, or turn-based, or first-person, or what ever” and then make the pirates idea fit into that.
I think it’s inter est ing that Pirates! was designed with all those mini-games, but you have n’t really used dis crete sub-games so much since. Did you not like the way the mini-games came together?
Well, I think it worked pretty well in Pirates! It does n’t work for every sit u a -tion. One of the rules of game design that I have learned over the years is that it’s better to have one great game than two good games. And, unless you’re care ful, too many sub-games can lose the player. In other words, if you’ve got a good game, then the player’s going to get absorbed in that. And when they’re done with that, they may well have lost the thread of what your story was or if any game is too engross ing it may dis turb the flow of your story. Frankly, the mini-games in Pirates!
were sim ple enough that you did n’t lose track of where you were or what your
Pirates!
objec tive was or what you were try ing to do. But I wrote a game a cou ple of years later called Covert Action which had more intense mini-games. You’d go into a build ing, and you’d go from room to room, and you’d throw gre nades and shoot peo ple and open safes and all that kind of stuff and you’d spend prob a bly ten min -utes run ning through this build ing try ing to find more clues and when you came out you’d say to your self, “OK, what was the mis sion I was on, what was I try ing to do here?” So that’s an exam ple for me of the wrong way to have mini-games inside of an over all story.
I’ve read that Covert Action was one of your per sonal favor ites among the games you designed.
I enjoyed it but it had that par tic u lar prob lem where the indi vid ual sequences were a lit -tle too involv ing and they took you away from the over all case. The idea was that there was this plot brew ing and you had to go from city to city and from place to place find ing these clues that
would tell you piece by piece what the over all plot was and find the peo ple that were involved. I thought it was a neat idea, it was dif fer ent. If I had it to do over again, I’d prob a bly make a few changes. There was a code-breaking sequence, and cir cuit unscram bling, and there were some cool puz zles in it. I thought that over all there were a lot of neat ideas in it but the whole was prob a bly not quite as good as the indi vid ual parts. I would prob a bly do a cou ple of things dif fer ently now.
So Covert Action seems to have had sim i lar ori gins as Pirates! You started with, “I want to do a covert espi o nage game . . . ”
Right, what are the cool things about that. And unfor tu nately, the tech nol ogy had got ten to the point where I could do each indi vid ual part in more detail and that for me detracted from the over all com pre hen si bil ity of the game.
In Pirates! and Covert Action, the player can see their char ac ter in the game, and the player is really role-playing a char ac ter. By con trast, in Rail road Tycoon,
Covert Action
Civ i li za tion, or Get tys burg!, the player does not really have a char ac ter to
role-play. I’m curi ous about that shift in your game design, where the player used to be a spe cific char ac ter and now is more of a god-like fig ure.
It’s good to be God. I think that’s really a scale issue more than a spe cific game design choice. It’s fun to see your self, and even in a game like Civ i li za tion you see your pal ace, you do tend to see things about your self. But the other thing is that a pirate looks cool, while a rail road baron does n’t look espe cially cool. Why go to the trou ble to put him on the screen? I’ve never really thought too much about that, but I think it’s prob a bly more of a scale thing. If you’re going through hun dreds and thou sands of years of time, and you’re a semigodlike char ac ter doing lots of dif fer -ent things, it’s less inter est ing what you actu ally look like than if you’re more of a really cool indi vid ual char ac ter.
So how did you first start work ing on Rail road Tycoon?
Well, it actu ally started as a model rail road game with none of the eco nomic aspects and even more of the low-level run ning the trains.
You would actu ally switch the switches and manip u late the sig nals in the orig i nal pro to type. It kind of grew from that with a fair amount of inspi -ra tion from 1830, an Avalon Hill board game designed by Bruce Shel ley, who I
worked with on Rail road Tycoon. So, that inspired a lot of the eco nomic side, the stock mar ket aspects of the game. As we added that, we felt that we had too much range, too much in the game, that going all the way from flip ping the switches to run ning the stock mar ket was too much. We also wanted to have the march of tech -nol ogy with the newer engines over time, all the way up to the die sels. So there was just too much micro-management involved when you had to do all the low-level rail road ing things. So we bumped it up one level where all of the stuff that had to hap pen on a rou tine basis was done for you auto mat i cally in terms of switch ing and sig nal ing. But if you wanted to, and you had an express or a spe cial cargo or
Rail road Tycoon
some thing, you could go in there and manip u late those if you really wanted to make sure that train got through on time, or a bridge was out and you had to stop the trains. But the ori gin of that was as a model rail road ing game and we added some of the more stra te gic ele ments over time.
It really was the inspi ra tion for Civ i li za tion in a lot of ways, in terms of com bin -ing a cou ple of dif fer ent, inter est -ing sys tems that inter acted con tin u ously. The eco nomic, the oper a tional, the stock mar ket, all inter est ing in their own right, but when they started to inter act with each other was when the real magic started to hap pen. As opposed to Pirates! and Covert Action, where you had indi vid ual sub-games that monop o lized the com puter. When you were sword fight ing, noth ing else was going on. Here you had sub-games that were going on simul ta neously and inter act ing with each other and we really thought that worked well both in Rail road Tycoon and later in Civ i li za tion, where we had mil i tary, polit i cal, and eco nomic con sid er ations all hap pen ing at the same time.
So in a way, you are still using sub-games; they just hap pen to all be in play all the time.
It’s not epi sodic in the way that Pirates! was. When ever you’re mak ing a deci -sion you’re really con sid er ing all of those aspects at the same time. That’s part of what makes Civ i li za tion inter est ing. You’ve got these fairly sim ple indi vid ual sys -tems; the mil i tary sys tem, the eco nomic sys tem, the pro duc tion sys tem are all pretty easy to under stand on their own. But once you start trad ing them off against each other, it becomes more com plex: “I’ve got an oppor tu nity to build some thing here.
My mil i tary really needs another char iot, but the peo ple are demand ing a temple . . . ” So these things are always in play and I think that makes the game really inter est ing.
In Rail road Tycoon you’ve got a very inter est ing eco nomic sim u la tion going, but at the same time the player has the fun of con struct ing a rail road, much as a child would. Do you think that con trib uted to the game’s suc cess?
It actu ally started there. And it was really the first game that I had done where you had this dra matic, dra matic change from the state at the begin ning of the game to the state at the end of the game. Where, at the begin ning of the game you had essen tially noth ing, or two sta tions and a lit tle piece of track, and by the end of the game you could look at this mas sive spiderweb of trains and say, “I did that.” And, again, that was a con cept that we car ried for ward to Civ i li za tion, the idea that you would start with this sin gle set tler and a lit tle bit of land that you knew about and by the end of the game you had cre ated this mas sive story about the evo lu tion of civ i li -za tion and you could look back and say, “That was me, I did that.” The state of the game changed so dra mat i cally from the begin ning to the end, there was such a sense of hav ing got ten some where. As opposed to a game like Pirates! or all the games
before that where you had got ten a score or had done some thing, but there was not this real sense that the world was com pletely dif fer ent. I think that owes a lot to SimCity, prob a bly, as the first game that really did a good job of cre at ing that feel ing.
Were you at all inspired by the Avalon Hill board game Civ i li za tion when you made your com puter ver sion?
We did play it, I was famil iar with it, but it was really less of an inspi ra tion than, for exam ple, Empire or SimCity. Pri marily, I think, because of the lim i ta tions of board games. There were some neat ideas in there, but a lot of the cool things in Civ., the explo ra tion, the simul ta neous oper a tion of these dif fer ent sys tems, are very dif fi cult to do in a board game. So there were some neat ideas in the game, and we liked the name. [laugh ter] But in terms of actual ideas they were prob a bly more from other sources than the Civ i li za tion board game.
A lot of your games seem to be inspired in part from board games. But, as you just said, Civ i li za tion would never really work as a board game. How do you take an idea that you liked in a board game and trans fer it into some thing that really is a com puter game instead of just a straight trans la tion?
Before there were com put ers, I played a lot of board games and I was into Avalon Hill games, et cet era. I think they pro vided a lot of seed ideas for games.
Often they are a good model of what’s impor tant, what’s inter est ing, and what’s not about a topic. But once you get into mechan ics and inter face and those kind of things, really there starts to be a pretty sig nif i cant dif fer ence between board games and com puter games. There’s a lot of inter est ing research mate rial some times in board games. Often they’re inter est ing for “we need some tech nol o gies” or “we need to think about which units,” et cet era. There’s that kind of over lap in terms of the basic play ing pieces some times. But how they are used and so forth, those things are pretty dif fer ent between board games and com puter games. I would say
Rail road Tycoon
board games pro vide an inter est ing review of top ics that are avail able and top ics
board games pro vide an inter est ing review of top ics that are avail able and top ics