History of Civ

[VetLegion]

I think I remember an interview with Sid Meier about what inspired him for Civilization (this must be a question he was asked a million times) and he said that direct inspirations were two games:

- SimCity

- Railroad Tycoon (his own game)


He also said that he started the first prototypes for Civ in real time ( ) and basically tried to expand SimCity in scope.

Anyone else remember that interview? Where could I find it?


I also seem to remember that while board games such as Advanced Civilization by Avalon Hill and maybe some other similar titles existed before Civ, they were not an influence on the computer game.

Do you know anything else?

[Trifna]

Wasn't the game Risk the start of all this?

Also, I'm curious: what is Advanced Civilizations? Did it have the same concept?

[Peter Triggs]

Don't know if this is the one you mean but you'll want to read it anyway. It's an old 1998 article that Thunderfall posted over at CFC:

I was absolutely thrilled when I stumbled upon this long and detailed article titled "The Sid Meier Legacy" last night. It is about 20 pages in length if you print it out and was written by GameSpot in 1998, before Alpha Centauri was released. Even better, it included a big interview! It's odd that I missed this article and didn't see any civ site mention the article back in 1998.

http://www.civfanatics.com/sidlegacy/

They also have a huge collection of links to other Civ related interviews and articles:

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3articles.shtml

[VetLegion]

That's it Peter!

SimCity inspired Civilization in a way. The first prototype of Civilization that I did was a real-time game like SimCity, in that you placed cities and moved things around, but cities grew without you. You basically seeded the world in a kind of SimCity-esque way. Instead of zoning, you seeded things, and you said I want a city over there, and why don't you do some farming over here. What I didn't like in that version of Civilization is that you did a lot more watching than you did playing. So SimCity, Empire, Railroad Tycoon, and the Civilization board game were the different ingredients that we stirred together to get to Civilization.

Civilization was a fantastic experience. Some games are a struggle to get together, and once we turned the corner and got away from the real-time SimCity-style game and made it turn-based, it really came together. It was fun from the beginning, and it just got more and more fun. I think in hindsight, it really drew on probably more of me than any other game. I played a lot of board games when I was a kid; I'd read a lot of history - I just found out I could put more and more stuff in that game. It was a big vessel that could hold the Romans, and it could hold riflemen, and it could hold airplanes, but the problem was I didn't know where to stop. It was great that all the stuff I thought was cool when I was a kid - in going back in history to World War II and the Roman Empire and then Napoleon and the Civil War - could be put it in this game. The original game actually went further into the future. It had paratroopers and aegis cruisers, but the problem was there was never a good stopping point. You could always invent some new technology, and I finally said all right, we're going to cut it off at World War II.

The original game was twice as big. Another rule I call the "Civilization Rule": Don't make the map too big. The concept of Civilization was the history of the world, so you have to have a big map. The original map was twice the size, and the game just bogged down. Part of the pacing of a game is this relentless progress. We finally turned it around to where the map was smaller, time progressed more quickly, and the game felt epic, even though it moved pretty quickly. So that was another rule: More is not necessarily better.

That's the paragraph I remember. But it seems I was wrong - Civilization board game did have an impact. Thanks for the links.


Trifna, I haven't played Avalon Hill's game, so I can't tell you anything more about it. People who played it liked it, but it is not all that similar to today's Civ. The new official Civlization boardgame is promably more like the computer game.

[Ecthy]

I think some of those are overrated.