Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier's Civilization

[Music] and thank you for coming to our session um I'm Sid Meyer this is Bruce Shelly [Applause] uh and we're going to take you back in time to 1990 a time when there was no civilization a time before civiliz ation and kind of talk about the uh the process that Bruce and I went through to create this game called civilization and we will get to our next slide here somehow or not what is that one there we go so the approach we want to take is kind of talk about the thought process that we went through

um to to create the game uh with the hindsight of 25 years uh a lot of things that we did seemed to be the right thing to do some of the things we did turned out to be the wrong thing to do uh but we would like to justify even the wrong things uh explain why we did them that way and what we were thinking at the time it was a um it was kind of a audacious game for us to make and and uh the idea that we were going to kind of compress the the entire history of civilization into a computer game uh not only the actual history but every possible history that could have happened of civilization uh we were trying to put into this game uh it was a time when uh we were young and audacious and we had just finished uh railroad Tycoon which is kind of the first God game that that we worked on uh we were working on Covert action which was an attempt to

write a computer generated mystery novel didn't quite turn out that way but that was kind of our goal at the beginning uh we had just finished Pirates which is one of the very first open world kind of games so it was a time when uh we were uh we thought we could do anything and sure let's take on the history of civilization and make a game out of that uh both Bruce and I are kind of uh interested in history and uh have a background in in wargaming and other things which kind of ended up showing up in in the game of civilization but um the way that I remember the uh for those of you that are not familiar with civilization it's the game of M world history okay uh so it starts in a stone age and you end up by going to Alpha santor taking human Humanity into into space 6,000 years of of human history in 640k um so the the as I remember the story Bruce and I were uh I remember us writing on a train up to New York I

think and we had recently completed railroad to Tycoon and really enjoyed that experience that kind of God gamish uh start with something small build it uh use your own creativity to uh basically tell a different story every time you play uh the idea of different systems kind of working together the operation of the railroads the building of the railroads the financing of the railroad uh maintaining your locomotives or routing your trains um lots of little pieces that kind of came together to make uh a lot a lot of interesting decisions and uh we were we were looking for another topic that would have those kind of qualities to it and somehow we we T we we thought well you know history has a lot of that going on and um it's kind of the ultimate God game starting starting with one little village back in 4,000 BC and and and seeing how far we could go with it um that's how I remembered I'm not sure Bruce how you

how you remember I just remembered you we talked a lot about that kind of stuff and then Sid always had like a half a dozen prototypes on his computer he was always noodling a new I game idea you know and we look at it he i' we talk about it maybe some he wouldn't tell me about it then I remember these conversations went on we played a lot of uh Empire Deluxe we talked about you gave me a task of come up with 10 things I would change about Empire Deluxe if I could change anything and trying to be a prog a person I I came up with 12 and gave him the list and uh uh and and then one day uh a disc pops into my desk and there's a I have it at home it's a 5 and a/4 inch floppy disc from May of 1990 and it was the first playable version of civilization anybody had ever seen other than his computer I saved this as a historic artifact I hadn't saved the first version of railroad de I've determined to save whatever is coming down the pipe next I'd say the first version so that's my memory we we had played all these other games and then the came together enough for you to feel

that it was good enough for somebody else to look at yeah I think we need to give credit to Empire as part of the inspiration for for Civ also Sim City also rro Tycoon there's also a board game actually called civilization that was out there at the time and we played that we played that Francis tresum designed it in England and Avalon Hill had published an American version of it we stirred all those ingredients together uh we're going to claim that the topic was one of the things we did right in Civilization that it was a good topic it uh really lent itself to the kind of games we wanted to make and the place we were with the with the technology in those game in also also it had a a huge potential audience I mean one of my talking points over the years has been when you start a project your potential customer is everybody who has the platform that game is going to be on but as soon as you make decisions about what that game is about you start to shrink your potential audience well the history of civilization is a pretty big topic so we had a huge potential audience remember later on when Sid gave the the first presentation I ever heard

about game design he one of his topic points was choose a big topic and I said I think we'd already made Civilization by that I'm not sure but I said well there can't be a bigger one than the history of civilization yeah we talk about trying to make games Epic uh the fact that it really doesn't cost anymore to make a game epic than to make it non-epic so the next thing that we kind of um had to figure out was how are we going to approach this topic obviously there could be many many different games written on the on the topic of civilization so how are we going to uh approach this uh one of the ideas that really uh I think paid off for us was the idea of starting uh very small with that that first settler that first city um the topic could be intimidating so I think uh allowing you to to start with a with a a very simple uh uh problem very simple situation uh founding that first city that led to something else uh the first settler the first uh the first unit exploring uh so so that was one of

the ideas that we had uh in terms of the tone and the approach um another one was to to uh there's this there's a strange mixture to me in looking back at Civ one of humor and incredible seriousness like some parts of it you know here's the lions defeat Gladiators seven seven to nothing um you know that was our attempt at at humor uh our little friend Elvis here in our city screen so there are ways that we wanted to make the history of civilization kind of non-intimidating and and friendly um but then again there's the uh the civilopedia where we have an entry here you know trying to make this game feel uh deep and important and something that you should have your kids and your parents play and uh so we were uh we were really trying to figure this out as we went along and and there were no Civilization games before us to gu as to what we should do

so we kind of dipped our toe in a lot of different areas um uh but the the bottom line to me I think and you Bruce maybe you have a a thought about this is that the game was fun to play when we started and and as long as that was true I think we felt we were on the right track whether our our jokes were lame or not uh the game was fun and I think that kind of would kept us going at the I think we learned the idea that uh I come up with this term called the inverted pyramid of decision-making where the game starts with one little settler unit on the board and that you have a decision what direction do that person that unit moves and quickly you've got cities and more units and the the number of decisions you have up your choices go up like this I called it the inverted pyramid decision-making now years later we came out I came with the idea that you had 15 minutes at that time to engage someone in your game otherwise you might lose them and they'd be gone I think today we fa a situation where you have two or three minutes to get somebody interested in a game today but then we had more time and I thought we did I think we borrowed from other guys

or like like uh Empire Deluxe he started with just something simpler and it grew we had we captured that same sense I think I think that was a good we we did that well or you did that well at said yeah I think our gift was to know what to steal from other games yeah how much to borrow and how much to invent yourself so um was this a good did we do this right or wrong I think I think the jury is still out when you look at uh how the civilization Series has evolved uh humor has not necessarily been a big part of the succeeding Civ games but uh it was really an indication of kind of how unsure we were about uh was was this game going to be taken seriously by players or was it something we needed to really uh kind of lighten up and make more accessible in that way I think we found a good balance I mean I felt good about I one other point I made a note of is that I think we did a good job of telling the players that he or she was doing a good job you know they had to we

love the King Day parades and there was like other notices the newspaper reports and uh there was other ways that we were telling the player you're doing great keep going you're super you know you're really you're doing a great job as king of this country I think uh we I think we did that well yeah I think that's always a question in games as you're playing you know am I doing the right thing am I on the right track have I spent the last hour or two you know kind of wasting my time giving the player those those kind of constant indications that this is progress this is a this is uh you know this is the right thing to do or or we appre we're watching we we're appreciating what you're doing is kind of encouraging to the player to to allow them to keep going um one thing that just I guess in hindsight seems so obvious but um we really could not call this game civilization as it was in development that was kind of our code name that was our internal name but our assumption was this game would not be called civilization because there was a board game out there called a civilization it was owned by Avalon Hill which was another computer game public ing company

at the time and there was a the game had originally been designed in um England so uh we trying to come up with alternative names and uh I don't remember call to power Rise of Nations um age Age of Empires you know Nam like that but um we said um you know the only appropriate name for this game is civilization so uh our um Intrepid marketing team went to talk to Avalon Hill and um amazingly enough they were able to work out an arrangement with there I think Avalon Hill was maybe withdrawing somewhat from the computer side of things at the time and uh we were able to to get the uh the name to civilization which I think is actually a pretty significant part of the uh of the uh success of the game you know when you look back at the games that we've done Pirates exclamation point railroad

Tycoon I mean it's those those names that kind of create a picture in your mind almost immediately of what the game might be that that helped them to be uh successful and I also actually credit this uh image that uh one of our marketing people was able to find uh this was not created for the game it was actually uh found and it but it captures again what what the uh the potential the possibilities of of what your game experience is is is going to be um the other point that I'll make is that our game did not really duplicate the the board game I I get that question uh fairly often uh the board game kind of was limited to a specific geographic area and and a specific geograph uh era of time uh there were some some cool ideas in there but I think we added a few of our own as we as we went along but this this I think was a huge win for us to be able to use the name uh civilization for the the game that we are

making okay here we here we go uh this is the uh kind of the classic perception of Civ is that it is uh the turn-based game the you know that the turn-based turn-based disness is at the heart of civilization and uh interestingly enough the the uh the first version of the game probably the one that that Bruce has the disc of uh was not turn-based it was a more of a Sim City Zone this area for Farms Zone this area for kind of watch things evolve over time and um it was really when we switched over to a turn-based uh mode that the game came together uh at that point the player became to engaged in

what was happening uh but was given enough time to really consider the implications of of what they were doing um they had uh could project into the future they what I like to think about civilization is it's a game where you are always your mind is always ahead of the game you're always anticipating uh what's going to happen next you have a couple of things uh a Wonder being built over here you're exploring this continent over here you've always got a couple things going on that you're looking towards and that um you know that kind of feeds into that one more turn or that one more technology or one more uh you know you're always kind of leaning forward into the future uh very interesting uh of course Bruce went on to Ensemble to uh to create Age of Empires there uh which was turnbas I mean it was real time and um in my mind the reason those games are are so different is almost solely based on the fact that one is turned turn-based and one is is

real time um Bruce do you have anything to say about that Well I this was uh Age of Empires was like five or six years later and the world had changed a little bit strategy games you know there had been command and conqueror been published and uh Worldcraft been published and these were realtime strategy games and they were extremely successful and so my my colleagues and I were we wanted we needed to do something different we but we love civilization but we wanted to do something different we said can we civilization in real time what would that be like would that be it be different enough it wouldn't be you know be borrowing but we wouldn't be borrowing everything it would be different enough to be a new a new product and it turned out it was I it was more than just real time but at real time also was our games were played in like an hour Age of Empires is an hour half hour experience where civilization was a different longer experience usually so it was we're trying to adjust to the marketplace and take advantage of things that had changed uh lot I I think it's nice that both games existed and

did really well I mean uh uh I'm and we also did other things too we we telescoped our time period we age one was just ancients and then Age Two was was uh uh you know um Knights and castles which was a sweet spot really turned out but um you know I mean it was certainly influenced the the vision for age was let's take civilization move it into realtime strategy and historical framework and that was the vision yeah and it just strikes me that a lot of the differences are are based on that that you can't play a real time game for 20 hours I mean you that it would be it would be you know too intense and by the same token a turn-based game that lasted you know 30 minutes or so again would not would not really be satisfying so it's it's um I think this this issue of turn base versus real time has so many implications in terms of where where the games go you know again given the some the similar subject matter so um it was not uh we did not realize at the time

that we had made this pretty significant uh uh switch and the whole one more turn phenomenon had not really occurred to us it's it's something that just arose out of uh the development of the game and you know looking back it seems to be so characteristic of of Civ but uh it was a way of just getting you closer to the action and getting you more involved in what was happen happening at the same time giving you enough time to consider your decision uh really allowing us to do things like the tech tree and diplomacy all the all the different things that that kind of you you take some time to uh to do in the game uh we're really based on this fact that we that we uh switched over to a a turnbas mode um probably it was fairly uncommon in games um of that time I'd have to say uh a lot of our background was in in war gaming you know which is clearly turn-based or movement based or player player time Scale based

and that probably influenced a lot of what we did there but um at the time it was um it was fairly different from what was going on there um as well as the fact that the whole idea of doing a strategy game was kind of unique at that time and there were a few games out there but strategy games were generally considered uh slow moving boring you know nerd nerd oriented and uh setting up a bunch of counters on a map uh and and uh it was not something that computers were were supposed to be uh supposed to be fun for computer game players and the irony for us was that within a couple years everything was a strategy game it was a realtime strategy game it was a space Bas strategy game so we claim to have made the world safe for strategy gaming uh by by making a civil we had to fight battles inside the company too I mean the company wasn't too excited about they wanted more flight Sims and things like that they doing a turn-based strategy game was not enthusiastically embraced by the

management of the company it was a it was a revolutionary concept at the time until started the sale and the critical reviews started coming in then they were real happy they want another one of those please take two take two of those um great leaders uh another you know um another thing that amazed and surprised us was uh the Gandhi the Gandhi phenomenon the Gandhi meme uh making the world safe for Gandhi um this is um a phenomenon steeped in in mystery and Legend but uh our theory is that uh Gandhi was not really programmed to be more war of a warmonger than anybody else but it was so out of character for him and kind of really Illustrated that the game is not about reproducing history but creating your own historical story so uh whenever

Gandhi came up uh with some with a bad attitude it was something that that people uh really noticed and and and remarked upon but the idea of uh meeting the great leaders I think uh kind of goes along with one of the fundamental things that we wanted to do with Civ and and Bruce and I have talked about this side that we we did our research in the children's section of the library that we we were not trying to create a game that was about all the Obscure historical facts that we happen to know because we read the right book it was about things that everybody would be familiar with and um that allowed uh players to feel at home to feel uh uh comfortable to feel smart about the the concepts that were in the game because they had were were familiar with them or had heard about them um and also they they were kind of interacting on a on a peer-to-peer level with great figures like uh genas Khan or Caesar or um great leaders so this was the role we wanted to put you in uh you know this this idea

of building a civilization and being a great leader and being able to interact with these other other leaders I think really strengthen that uh that that role playing aspect of the game I'm going to say something can't remember what it was sorry so the um the the kind of the by line that we used it's it's good to be king I think I think that might be my M BRS but it was interesting cuz like the idea was that I'm a God in this game I'm a player and I'm running the whole show here but then you added this layer in where you put these leaders in and so he gave you a dual personality like I am now Stalin or I am now gangas Khan I I didn't I didn't give that much thought but you put it in there and I and I think it worked yeah I think there's always a a question in a game of of what do you ask the player to do and what do you what does the computer kind of do automatically and by keeping this idea in mind that you're the great leader uh that really clarified a lot of the the the decisions in terms of what the player would do and what would kind of

be done uh automatically I also want to say like I I think that uh we borrowed from like let's say the children's section of library but I think there was two things about that one is that they have lots of pictures in those books and when you're dealing with artists you need to have images that they can work with to make the pro now you were making most of the art but uh this is a tall small team a long time ago and S did the programming the design and the artwork so uh um so the pictures were helpful going forward in the years ahead when you had to come up with the images to help you the other thing was that uh what was the other thing it's already gone again well Bruce I'm glad you mentioned our team because um get the small violin out there were only about 10 of us on the team uh at the end and just the two of us Bruce and I worked on the project for most of the uh for most of the time uh we had 640k in our IBM PC uh we had 16 colors in our EGA palette that we could not change and uh eventually we got VGA with 256

glorious colors uh it was a very different uh time obviously technically but I think what it allowed us to do was Focus most of our energy on the game design and um players were willing to use their imagination to add a lot of the elements that we couldn't create at the time and that actually was a a pretty good trade-off I think for us the uh as we mentioned we started the game in early uh 1990 uh actually stopped working on it finished another game called cover action and came back to this game and eventually shipped it in late 1991 I think it was early 91 yeah sometime in ' 91 it was early I think so overall I think we spent less than a year uh in in developing the the the original version of the game I one thing about the artwork is that uh as the time goes by I'm I come from the school I mean the first personal computer game I worked on had four colors CGA graphics and so I was came up in the school that the game has

got to be really interesting and fun to play cuz you're not going to get wow anybody the W it looks and then uh you know with the 256 colors in us and we could do really interesting things but I'm still pushing back about let's don't put a lot of money in art Art's not important and then you know I had partners by then they said no no no we're going to make this incredibly beautiful and I said well okay go ahead and it made a big difference when Age of Empires was really really nice looking the sun was always shining it was pretty it was outs outd doors it was nice I think it made a difference and I was not prepared for that cuz I come from the stone ages of game design when we didn't care about colors there was no colors to work with speaking of the time we took to make the game Bruce I think you have a fascinating anecdote about the cost involved in making these games oh well I I don't remember I don't remember civilization per se but I was asked to do a budget analysis for railroad Tycoon we got done with it one of the management guys asked me to do it so I calculated the people that worked on it what they got paid essentially and the time and it came out that railroad Tycoon had cost the company $160 $7,000 to make and this was in 1989 or 1990 or

something like I was like wow I mean I we can't hire a great programmer for that kind of money it seems like today for one year and Civ was was similar I think yeah so uh here's one of the uh great controversies of of civilization perhaps one of the things we didn't do quite as well as we we could have done I don't know if you were around in the Civ one days you were probably deeply involved on one side or the other of this controversy uh just to refresh your memory uh the question was can a Spearman defeat a battleship uh some people believed it could some people believed it could not um in the game it could and not all the time but the Gandhi phenomenon where where something weird happens once you assume it's uh a standard uh part of the game uh this became one of the early controversies of the game whether it was okay for a Spearman to once in a while

uh defeat a battleship and uh my claim was mathematically speaking the Spearman had a defense of two and the battleship had an attack of 16 so you know it could happen that the math could work out in that fashion uh other people with kind of a visual me visual who looked at the world visually and saw a battleship and a Spearman were not were not convinced um and um interestingly enough uh combat if we look back at the history of civilization and the various iterations of the game is probably the one area that has changed the most that we are we're kind of constantly looking at a new way to uh to handle handle combat because uh it's there's a tension between the The View that we give you of the world as the great leader that you're planning City cities and you're exploring continents

and you're deciding which wonders to build and on the other hand we're kind of getting you down in the into the nitty-gritty of the combat system you're moving your units you're stacking them you're deciding where so there's kind of a a tension between the role that you play as the king over most of your civilization and and your um your your role as far as combat is concerned so at various times we've actually considered going to a separate map to resolve combat because combat can be significant uh in in the outcome of the game uh We've we've um kind of dealt with this Spearman versus Battleship controversy by adding hit points in multiple rounds of combat and things like that to make it uh somewhat less likely that the Spearman will defeat the battleship uh with more recent iterations of Civ there's um one unit per tile there's there's different stacking rules and things like that uh the original Civ game had a concept called zones of control which came from uh from war gaming which was probably the worst idea that we put in the game

but it reflected my vision kind of how combat was going to work in this game I I was imagining you'd create lines of units at your borders and you'd be trying to hold the the uh the other CES back and it would be a very kind of look like a a World War II type of uh strategy game it turned out to be not at all how the game was played uh the the the stacks of Doom was kind of the the the uh the typical mechanism putting together a b a bunch of units and and moving them around and and and the cities became really very much the focus of where combat took place which actually worked well because it it kind it it was a lot easier smoother and allowed you to um uh Focus energy on other parts of the game as well as just the the combat but something we had no uh that I certainly had no idea of it that when we when we first put things together uh the rules that we're creating for combat we're focused around this more kind of spread

out War gamey type of of combat um but certainly with Civ one and then with the succeeding cves we kind of understood uh what was happening and some of the changes that have been made in the more recent cves are Al actually trying to get back to that more spread out combat and less less about the the uh the stacks of Doom uh one of the other things we did with uh Civ was was try to make very clear um what the charact what the considerations were that went into combat you know we gave each Unit A attack factor a defense factor and a movement factor and those were printed right on the unit right in your face and so that that with all the systems in the game we tried to make it uh very clear how they worked so you weren't spending your your mental energy trying to decipher the systems you were you spending your mental energy imagining how you would use those systems that you understood uh how they interacted and how they how you would use them to kind of accomplish your your purposes in the game but um with with combat it was a it

was definitely a uh a work in progress and we're and we're I think we're still constantly uh adjusting how it works uh in and and relates to the other parts of the game because there's that tension between how important it is and and and what role you have but um I'll admit that we may have dropped that I may have dropped a ball here as far as combat is concerned but uh hey I made peace with it I mean I think I probably raised the issue I was the first gu ever deal with it so I probably raised it first I mean how is this crumby ancient unit defeating This Modern warship it doesn't make any sense to me you know this ship is on the coast and here's this guy in the land I attack him I should have just blown this guy to smithin no no I lost my battleship I don't get it and so so uh this is the kind of conversation we have and he' say well he explained it to me and I said okay okay it's fine I I'll live with that and I could think you know I can play chess and the pawn can kill the queen on the right circumstance right I mean so I mean it's like a it's a game it's not we're not trying to model model reality here it's a game and

so I made that I made that decision myself and then I had to explain it to the next 50 guys and marched into my room complaining cuz this is so it's your fault you did not convince me one of my jobs was to Shield you from everybody else in the company was upset about something so they they' March down to my office and say what is going on with this and I'm going you know I have to explain it again I should have put a board on my door this is the problem with spearm with the battleships you know don't bother me about it this is the answer right here thank you Bruce so uh another thing that we introduced with uh with S1 was the idea of the tech tree and again in hindsight this seems uh so classic so characteristic of the Civ game uh and I wish I remembered the moment when we said hey a tech tree would be cool wouldn't that be cool wouldn't that be an idea that could last for 25 years in not only in our games but in many other games uh I don't remember that moment but I do remember um having a book where

kind of the the timeline of History was kind of laid out horizontally and all these different uh unique events were were kind of pegged to their specific eras and times and I I'm going to guess that that was kind of the uh the Genesis of this idea that uh one thing would lead to another and it fell so wonderfully into our idea of starting very small and then gradually kind of um unpeeling the onion and and giving you more and more interesting things to do and I think it um it also kind of felt very civish this idea of um where on the one hand we had a war game we we also had a game where science was important um was kind of a fairly new idea at the time but but really um science was going to be an important part of this uh game and and how well you did how while you managed it was going to be significant in terms of your your outcom so um the

tech tree seemed to uh kind of encapsulate what we were trying to do with with with the c game I love the tech tree I was like how do I get the railroads I mean what do I got to do to get the railroads cuz go the railroads I can move my units all over my Empire with one click you know they can go anywhere I was like what a great thing this is so I thought it was cool it was fun to come up with the names for civil you know was part of our research again maybe the children's section but like what were the important Technologies and thinking about like the sturup I remember thinking about the sturup cuz I'd read histories of warfare and uh the horsemen in battle had been like an A Part a side show for most of ancient times until they had a stirrup and now now the entire power of the horse can be point right at the end of your Lance couching your arm now the horse is just is hitting somebody not just you with your stupid little spear and it changed Warfare for a couple hundred years I don't think the sturup is in our come on it's got to be in there I don't know it should have been the stup's not in our game it's in their game cuz I maybe maybe was an Age of Empires then I don't

know but I it's the same line of thinking the same thinking that here's something that changed the world at least temporarily you know let's move on let's move on wait I'm looking for so one of the things that's fun um stup was very stup was very important U one of the things that's fun is to kind of look back and in contrast how we saw things back in that time and how how things have evolved over over the you know over the course of many many s games and um you know Bruce mentioned uh the railroads and the what we certainly discovered over time that that people would would minmax and analyze the tech tree and have these specific technologies that they were you know targeting and they would have uh tracked back you know seven iterations as to what technologies they would need to to research to get to you know gunpowder I think was often a favorite and um that was that was very contrary to how I saw the tech tree initially in fact in Civ

1 um you might have earned the prerequisites for gunpowder let's say um but there was a a small chance that it wouldn't show up in in your your list of uh choices because my thinking was well they didn't know that they were going to be able to you know invent gunpowder at this time it was like they were finding their way through this uh this mysterious uh cloud of of science possibilities and uh boy did we get some complaints about that um so it was what we uh what we did not anticipate was how intensely and how seriously and how analytically people would play this this game and uh that was definitely something that that changed in in Civ uh in Civ 2 and in some of the later cves it would actually say if you want gunpowder which is like eight leaves down the tree you might want to go this direction and I was like oh that's that is so long but so is this like the first appearance of the optimizer in playing

games I don't know the min max player one of the things that we certainly have identified are lots of different personality Styles in in terms of playing Civ and kind of the uh the tech Tre Optimizer uh is is is such a person and you know I'm always amazed by Starcraft players that have again that same idea the very specific uh actions that you take to play the game and uh that's one way to play but to me that kind of takes a lot of the fun out of it so I'm I guess I'm more uh drawn to games that are going to surprise me or give me a different challenge every time I think that's that's a that's a question of taste I mean because uh you know like I like the fact that our maps are randomly generated you know we the game was different every time you played now the like the Starcraft Maxim Optimizer wants to he loves the maps being exact I mean a guy told me once that he got a guy at blizzard told me once he got a letter from a guy he said if you move this item one pixel to the north I will never lose Starcraft again because that that causes me so much problem if you just move it one pixel

I'll will never lose and he had optimize the game to that extent so that's a different style of play people who like Civilization probably were not that guy and that's certain something that's been a part of all the way through is the the idea of random Maps scenarios difficulty levels many different ways of allowing you to replay the game and have a have a a different experience or a new experience or a fresh experience yeah I going forward I definitely wanted random maps in the games that I we we we made going forward the wonders of the world uh history is so rich in stuff for us to steal uh this was just uh cool low hanging fruit that wouldn't it be cool to build these awesome wonders um in the in the successive iterations of if we were able to actually give you wonder movies and and kind of uh give you pretty some pretty uh dramatic payoffs for doing these things but um the idea of something that only one uh Civ in the

world could build and you wanted your race to be the first to do that uh gave you another way of being aware of the other cves that were in the world and and what else was was going on there and I think it uh also gave you this connection to things that you'd heard about you know whether was stonehinge or pyramid I think it was aspirational I mean I I'm going to build a great wall a Great Pyramid of Giza you know that's that's pretty cool I get to do that I want to do that I thought that was that was interesting the way we did that the way you did that let's say I think the wers very popular another thing we did right high five there Bruce all [Applause] right thank you you're very kind uh so something we did horribly wrong we we missed out on the opportunity for moding and scenarios which uh became such a wonderful important part of civil ation as it proceeded through the years but um

c 2 really introduced modding as a as a as an option as a strength and and something that really engaged our community uh we we just didn't have the uh the vision in those days to imagine that anyone could design anything better than we could I guess that I think that was the that was probably our thinking at the time it wasn't my thinking um but uh the idea that um this has really opened up the game to a to a whole different kind of player I'd like to think that a lot of designers perhaps got their first design experience making a mod for civilization or or a similar game uh again what we found in terms of the feedback that we were receiving for our game was that um a lot of the the feedback was uh suggestions for improvement of the game you know things that that the players liked are things that they thought should be should be changed or fixed and the the Civ seemed to bring out the inner designer in a lot

of our players and and modding uh gave those people the opportunity to express that and I think it was it's probably the reason Civ has been around for so long is is that moding was introduced in Civ to and uh gave uh players things to do and kind of a freshness between the five or so years that it took to to bring out a new civilization so um this was an opportunity I think that we we that we missed um now in those days there was no internet and so you know we we'll kind of justified by probably would have been pretty complicated I wouldn't beat yourself up over this one come on we we're we're you know we had a small team we had a they limited time to make this game the management props in down the hall what are you working on today you know where's my new flight simulator what what is this stupid game and uh so we were under a pressure I I believe I felt I was under pressure you weren't you were never Under Pressure but um we had to get this game you know you

did a great job of putting it in a box and saying this is what's going out the door and like that you because after you let everybody else in the company play there was a lot of ideas were coming in your office and I think you did a great job of saying you know I had this idea that when you're when you're designing a game your your first half of the project you're playing forward on the soccer team you're trying to score goals Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea and then the game flips over to the second half now you're the goalkeeper you've got a game that's essentially done you got enough Stu in here is good to go now you're defending the goal it's going to get this game done and we're not going to try and score any more goals just trying to finish this project I think you did a good job boxing it off and taking it to the Finish thank you Bruce thank you you're welcome kudos to Brian Reynolds for uh for adding the modding feature to to to H so who is this young handsome young man here that picture was taken three years [Laughter] ago um I think another significant part of uh of what civilization was was the

manual that that Bruce created um it was it was again it made the game I think seem important seemed like a game that you needed to play seemed that you needed to tell other people that you were playing because it meant you were cool because you could handle um creating a civilization um and it was really a uh it was wasn't just about how to play but there was a lot of background information there was there was a some great historical information and I think it suggested reading suggested you want know the real story if you right so uh I think it it really complemented the game in in a way that that we just don't you know that doesn't happen anymore but it it it it gave the the game kind of a weight and an importance that probie toss is a word I would that that yeah it's a shame they don't do that anymore but you know people don't want they have time to read not not even the manual let alone the suggested reading I don't read manual I don't I don't read a manual of

anything time it's not intuitive I mean we're trained now to do it all you know like this is you take them through the first time of user experience when they don't they know how to play and it's all seamless and you got 3 minutes to make it happen now this was actually not unique to civilization though railroad Tycoon Bruce wrote again a very comprehensive Manu it was uh even with our F-15 products you know we were uh trying to take this very limited technology and make it feel awesome and epic and important and uh the maniel had a had a a significant part to to play in that uh back in back also this G an opportunity to tell some of the real story because like again another Point I've made over the past is that we borrowed from the historical record stuff we thought would make a great game we left stuff back there that we didn't think would help like there's no slavery there's no black plague or something like that or there's no religious wars you know so those are all certainly part of the historic record the history of Western Civilization per se but we didn't see how they're going to add to the game so you know the idea is to

entertain people not teach history I think you can learn things and we can introduce you to maybe go down the road to go to the library and read more but we we're focusing on making entertainment software yeah that reminds me one of one of the first Concepts that I had for the game was the rise and fall of civilization that you would you you build a civilization but then you'd have this kind of setback and then you'd kind of come back from that even stronger and it wouldn't be so satisfying to you know overcome this adversity you know whether it's the plague or or something and uh come back even stronger and awesomer and then they would just be awesome and totally awesome but um what we found happen is as soon as this plague hit or this this setback happened people would reload their game from five turns ago and and kind of try to try to avoid it so um it became the rise and rise and Rise of civilization and not not the fall was was uh I think we sort of learned that lesson making railroad Tycoon cuz you had these floods will wipe out your railroad if you you built the really expensive Bridge you gave people and there was no help for that

you couldn't stop this from happening and it was so dispiriting to have your railroad crushed by this random event computer was having the fun player wasn't having the fun computer was having the fun so that was one of your points too the player should have the fun not the computer not the researcher not the writer not the computer so uh I think we had floods in Civilization that could wreck your city and then you you gave them uh a wall or something that they could build and it stopped the flooding so and you built that wall you didn't worry about floods anymore that's you had player had a solution to that kind of problem yeah I think railroads is where the phrase what were we thinking was was first first but uh I will claim that uh civ1 introduced the idea of global warming back in 1990 because that was actually a that was actually a thing in Civ one that if you had too much pollution the the Seas would rise and you'd lose your coastal cities so way ahead of our time way um too much information um again kind of

reflecting we had no idea what we were trying to do here uh I thought it would be cool to have all this uh detailed demographic information about your Civ that uh it would again make the feel the game feel real and and and kind of you actually managing these people um these things w't did not survive to any of the later iterations of civilization uh nobody was fooled this is a game and and I think people more and more looked at it as a game and as they kind of optimized their way through the tech tree and and analyzed uh Spearman versus battleships it kind of um was not seen really as much of a role playing experience which is part of what we were trying to do uh with too much information here but part of it was also this um these kind of attaboys these you know the top five cities in the world ways of giving you some sense of um how you are progressing and the you're kind of on the on the right [Applause]

track so this is the um oh that's actually a Gip wow I didn't know that um so this is the introduction to civilization and um in the beginning the world was out without form and void and we were really trying to make this feel like an important game uh Jeff Briggs wrote this really cool piece of music reminiscent of Copeland's Fanfare and uh this is how you started to play and I I think that we succeeded in kind of giving you the idea that this experience was going to be different from what was happening in other games and in in kind of some important and significant way that this game kind of told you something about how the world worked and let you kind of take over at this very a crucial point in the history of the world and and tell your own story so um

again we were we were bold and young and audacious and really trying to convince you that this was um a game of of historic significance uh little knowing of course that 25 years later we'd be still talking about it but um I think we we had no fear in those days and this uh kind of represents our idea that we had created something special I think Bruce talks about how he felt um that in Hunt Valley Maryland I'll let you tell that story BR well I I just people asked did you know it was the game was going to be great when you're working on I said absolutely at some point I realized the whole world did not know the gaming community did not know that in this little town Hunt Valley Maryland nor Baltimore we were making a game was going to rock the world and I just felt really strongly about this game is going to be great it's going to have incredible you know success people are going to love playing game and I just felt really I walked down I told my girlfriend is now my wife I said you

know if I could find a job make a living I would do what I'm doing every day for free cuz this is so much fun this is so cool what we're making is so important I think I thought it was great it was an incredible opportunity for me I really loved it I'm not sure I had the same feeling um I enjoyed making the game but I felt it was a bit out there and um uh so I I was very gra felt very gratified when we started to get some positive response but I I definitely was up in the air as to whether we had kind of gone too far uh or or this was going to work I knew that when when I could see other people sitting down and I myself I I the time would just go flying by you know that like uh a psychologist call creating flow you get into a flow pattern psychologically and you just time you forget about the P of time and I and I knew that was happening to me I could see it happen to the other people playing the game and I knew that that's that's the stuff that's the real thing if you can do that then you've achieved something really successful speaking of time passing the

uh the game shipped on eight 5 and a/4 in floppy disc so probably spent half an hour just loading it onto your PC uh probably one of the areas that we fell down uh was in actually testing the game um looking at the credit sheet from the manual there there were I think five five testers that we had at the end of the you know at the end of this project to test the game in addition to all the playing that the Bruce and I did but the idea of of of intensive testing was not as well established back in those days and um even though the game uh was pretty solid there were two significant bugs in the game the they're not bugs but they're they're the kind of exploits I'd say we call them these days that oh that's what I say by building lots and lots of cities you could kind of uh grease your path to success and we we actually ended up adding this idea of um of corruption to balance that

out and the other thing we didn't realize uh in our testing was that the Chariot unit was amazingly overpowered for its cost it was a 412 for a attack factor and it was pretty much a cool way to to uh overrun the entire world so we ended up making a 312 which was perfect so uh the power of one number um but otherwise the game was pretty solid we had no option of course for a day one patch or any of the uh the tools that we have today to to update things so um few things we we we missed at the time but um overall was was was pretty solid I wanted to leave a little time for questions uh so um we're going to kind of um end our presentation there um and uh just uh open it up for for questions if you have questions about uh the game or the process that it

by which it was made or our personal lives anything like that uh um hello so uh I've played Civilization now for something like 14,000 hours over the past 20 years and uh thank you for taking a good chunk of My Life um I wanted to ask how did you decide upon the original assortment of civilizations well uh we were certainly looking at uh recognizable leaders um I think the um again reading through history uh we try to give each C A personality certain special abilities and things like that that would make the gameplay different each time you you actually be encouraged to play the different cives and have a slightly different experience um I think that uh looking back I'm name chairman mauo is is the leader of the Chinese we could not pull that off today that there's a lot a number of of things we we did there that actually you know the

world has changing we we we we can't do anymore but um it I think it was looking for these um leader characters that had had some really interesting personality and would be uh would be fun to interact with I mean I I I just think that I um CU I was responsible for some of the research to try Toom and so you may have asked me for what are the good choices and you might have said whether give me some leaders and give me some CS I don't remember now but I would have thought about the great civilizations you know of Western Civilization primarily but we also had India and places like I'm not sure just we thought was significant it' been big Empires or big civilizations were worth you know putting in the game thank you very much thank you okay uh hi uh my name is mat pilsky and I have an indie studio called ice Cod games and right now we are creating game called cult where you create your own cult and fight fight with Cults of of Europe and because of that I have a

question uh did you have uh any concerns or problems when you uh put uh in the civilization uh religions uh as a tools for uh taking dominance over over over the world religion has been a topic we've been very careful with um the original Civ had a had a very basic uh system of temples and Cathedrals and and creating happiness um after that succeeding CES have gone more into depth with with with religion systems and and kind of spreading your religion and things like that but it's always been uh not taking a kind of a any any sort of position in terms of you know one religion being better or worse or whatever than than another um and it's kind of a fundamental idea of Civ that we're not trying to um impose our vision of what's right or what's wrong or you know whenever the designer kind

of steps to the front and says this is how you should play or this is what's right or wrong it takes the agency away from the player and then that's kind of the the designer having the fun as opposed to the player having the fun so um you know in in in Civ the idea is that we let you you know kind of explore your own thoughts about whether uh you want a big army or whether you want to create world peace or whether culture is the way to go I mean you always have those options in in part of that is us not taking a stand on on specific you know religious issue or cultural issues or or or or things like that so that's kind of how we approach that okay thank you hello uh first of all thank you both this game I credit with giving me my love of History uh my favorite thing of the entire franchise is in Civ one the end of the game you got to replay uh your game and like it gave you a real good sense of this is what I did and it seems to have died in the franchise and never gotten the same amount of effort I was just curious

why you'll have to come to Ed me's talk which is coming up in half an hour um I actually don't have an answer to that I I think that um we we did put the replay in Civ one and in spite of a lot of technical limitations to give you that sense of of reliving uh what what had happened um but I think you know I I'll make a note of that thank you hi uh my name is Salman uh from Google I uh grew up with civilization I played all of them 1 2 3 4 5 six um and on that note about growing up with Civ you know I have my own four-year-old son and I'm looking to basically you know have him play that game soon but um you know I look back at soltion one and there really was very high educational value uh in those in those days of the term edutainment it really it really uh kind of like that's how I get my dad to buy c 2 cuz c 1 was

so educational um and and that was really kind of I felt lost um uh because in sa one every time you would discover something you would have to read about it um and so that's the amount of stuff I learned from that game uh is just endless you know you talk about too much op GDP I learned GDP from that too much information um you know you're talking about uh uh uh you know Chairman Mao I learn about him through civilization you know all these I I would go to school and class history class oh I already know what conscription is because you know I discovered it and it was really amazing but in C 2 uh it kind of became like you have to like click the description tab or something I can't remember exactly and uh and there were a lot of stuff in terms of this um uh you know historical sense uh and learning learning about history and technology and all these things that that I felt you know has been lost like it was it seemed like there seems have there was a bit of a conscious decision saying that

hey you know what it's more of a game uh than an educational software but but I would love especially for my son right for this for this franchise to go more towards the educational value trally and this stuff like Civil War like like I would go attack the capital just to give Civil War like all this stuff was lost um and you know I'd like to see more of that so I'm hearing we need to bring back one yeah so and by the way four years is a great age to start playing civilization I think I think that'd be wonderful I I I do think it's true that um and if you if you look on the Civ forums uh players get very intense uh about the game play so there definitely is an audience for this kind of streamlined gameplay this this very focused gaml um but but I hear what you're saying there's also an audience for kind of an uh a learn learning based uh approach to civilization uh we don't

actually talk about education as being a part of the game uh cuz that's like a dirty word but um but we think learning actually is an important part of the game that the the sense that you get at as playing that you now know a little more whether it's about playing the game or about history or about leaders or or GDP uh uh you know I think that learning is is kind of a secret uh aspect of the game that that that brings you back to to to learn more to kind of feel better about yourself but thank you for that for those comments hi thank you for this amazing game it's so fun my question is how do you think about um adding or removing complexity from one game to the next and where and how do you think about it well we um couple things that we we've gotten to the point where we feel the game has the right amount of complexity so for every new system that we add or new ID that we add we're going to pull something else out to kind of keep it at that level uh and we also have this this rule at for axis which we call the 1/3 1/3 1/3 rule which is um

kind of one/ third of the game it's core it's the way C works it's turn-based it's going to have cities it's going to have units it's going to have wonders it's going to have these pieces um another third is taking ideas that we we experimented with before and and kind of taking what we learned whether it's a religion system or annr system or a way of doing combat and and taking what we learned and and and making that better and then the another third is new things things that we haven't put in the game before uh so kind of mixing those all together those different thirds is kind of what guides the you know the next iteration of civilization there's you know enough novelty enough new to make it a different experience but enough of that core gameplay that that it's a c game thank you hi um Adrian Troy from zuk the self-driving car company um I love civilization and I also loved the old uh 1980 board game civilization and which had Tech trees and all these kinds of things and I was wondering if you guys played that and were influenced by it at all that was a licensed game I mean

there's this cycle now that there was a originally a civilization board game and then we did the the computer game and then there was a a board game based on that and uh so it's uh you know this again this Synergy and a lot of our inspiration for the original Civ was our kind of a wargaming background and things like that so um they're they're they're related um and and I think uh one of the the charms of the board game is more the multiplayer aspect you know playing together with friends and the social component which you don't always get playing a computer game so they each have each have their strengths and I think they can reinforce each other is over here okay I'm getting this symbol uh thank you very much for coming thank you for supporting [Applause] thank you for supporting Civ thanks

especially to Bruce for coming enjoy