SAN FRANCISCO—"Let's go back in time to 1990," game developer Sid Meier said to a Thursday crowd at the annual Game Developers Conference. "Back when there was no Civilization."

Meier's silly double entendre framed a "post-mortem" look at the origins and lessons learned from the landmark PC game. With the help of producer and developing partner Bruce Shelley, the hour-long conversation was marked by equal parts history, depth, and humor—which seemed appropriate, considering the game in question juggled the same three elements so elegantly back in 1991.

A children's-history take on Genghis Khan

Development on Civilization began after the completion of Railroad Tycoon during the development of Covert Action and with the momentum of Pirates!, "one of the first open-world games." All those games put wind into the duo's PC game-making sails. "We were young and audacious," Meier says. "It was a time where we thought we could do anything, so, sure, let's take on 'civilization.'"

Meier described a train ride in early 1990 with Shelley in which the duo discussed the elements they liked about Railroad Tycoon, particularly how its disparate systems (building, operation, finances, manufacturing, etc.) added up to let players "make a lot of interesting decisions." Perhaps running an entire civilization would offer a similar mix of crisscrossing systems, Meier posited. (Plus, making a game "more epic" didn't cost any additional budget.)

Shelley recalled losing track of that particular conversation—"Sid always had half-a-dozen prototypes on his computer," he noted. But he remembered a conversation about the British PC war game Empire, which they were both fond of. Meier asked Shelley for "ten things he'd change" about that game, to which Shelley offered a list of a dozen. In May of 1990, Meier responded by dropping a single 5-1/4-inch disk on Shelley's desk: the first playable version of Civilization. "I saved it as a historical artifact," he told the crowd.

Meier said that his earliest version "stirred together" elements from SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, Empire, and a certain British board game named, well, Civilization. "Start with one village in 4,000 BC, and see how far you can go with it," Meier said. He emphasized that such a simple start eased players into a game that eventually sprawls in so many directions. Additionally, he and Shelley peppered the original game with cheeky humor whenever possible, with silly newspaper headlines, Elvis Presley sprites, and other lighthearted stuff.

One of the most interesting emphases during development was that the game should feel "deep and important" in such a way that would attract kids and non-PC gamers, not scare them off. The duo's solution was to refer, repeatedly, to children's history books. Using those guided the developers to pick specific leaders, for example, that most people would be familiar with. "We weren't trying to create a game about obscure historical facts in the right book," Meier said. "This allowed players to feel at home, feel comfortable, and feel smart about concepts in the game. Interacting on a peer-to-peer level with great leaders, like Genghis Khan and Caesar, strengthened the role-playing aspect." Children's history books also proved useful in picking out which tech-tree advancements would make it into the game, Meier said.

The same principle guided development of in-game resources like the Civilopedia, king-day parades, and newspapers. Those elements also doubled as a gentle reinforcement of good player behavior. "There's always a question of, 'have I spent the past hour or two wasting my time?'" Meier noted, and he tried to make sure players felt like developers were "watching and appreciating" their efforts in the game.

Turn-based origins, modding regrets

Meier admitted that the game's first prototype disc was missing one key Civilization component: turn-based play. His original version of the game looked more like SimCity, with real-time, "zone this area for a purpose" management mechanics. The game "came together" once Meier switched to turn-based play, which was more like the war-gaming board games he loved, anyway. (Turns also immediately offered a tangible benefit, he said: an addictive, "one more turn" quality.)

"At the time, [what we were making] was fairly different from most computer games," Meier said. "The whole idea of a strategy game was unique. There were a few games out there, but strategy games were considered slow-moving, boring, nerd-oriented, like setting up counters on a map—not something computers were supposed to be fun for."

In fact, Civilization's similarities to tabletop war games made Meier's bosses at PC game publisher MicroProse anxious about the game's prospects. Shelley says the company wanted to pressure Meier into shifting gears and making another flight-sim game, instead. (Meier apparently didn't hear much of this, due to Shelley keeping complainers at bay.) "The irony for us was, within a couple of years, everything was a strategy game," Meier said. "We claim to have made the world safe for strategy gaming."

In terms of development errors, Meier points to a lack of mod support as top on his list. "This is something we did horribly wrong," he said. "Modding and scenarios became such a wonderful important part of Civ as it proceeded through the years. We didn't have the vision that anybody could design anything better than we could!"

Shelley took the on-stage opportunity to tell Meier "not to beat yourself up over it," but Meier made no bones about the importance of adding modding to sequels: "Civilization brought out the inner designer in a lot of our players. Modding gave those people the opportunity to express that. The reason Civilization has been around for so long is that modding was introduced in Civilization 2."

Meier also said that the first game's loads of demographic data and other civilization stats fell flat, saying, "We had no idea what we were doing here." He thought pages and pages of extraneous data would fuel a role-playing feeling of being a real leader, but "nobody was fooled: this was a game," he said.

As for the series' spearman vs. battleship "debate," Meier still bangs the drum that "the math could work out" in the spearman's favor based on numbers and how the original game's combat was designed. Still, he admits that his vision of combat in Civ 1 looked more like the spread-out unit placement in tabletop games (what its "zones of control" system was inspired by), as opposed to the "stacks of doom" and city-focused combat that players favored. "I imagined that you'd create lines of units at borders, hold other civilizations back," Meier said. "It would look like a World War II-type of strategy game. Turned out to not at all be how the game was played." Meier pointed out that combat remains the most iterated element of the series—at one point, it almost got its own wholly separate map system.

Civ 1 remaster?

During the panel, Shelley occasionally compared the Civ series to Age of Empires, an RTS game he helped found after leaving the Civilization team in the '90s. "My colleagues and I needed to do something different [from other RTS games of the era] and loved Civ," he said. "Can we do Civ in real time? It'd be different enough, borrowing some elements but not everything. Different enough to be a new product. It's nice that both games existed and did really well."

Meier later joked that his list of potential names for the original game included Age of Empires, Call of Power, and Rise of Nations, but he was pretty stuck on "Civilization" as the perfect name. Without going into legal details, he confirmed that MicroProse's "intrepid marketing team" struck a deal with board-game maker Avalon Hill about using the British board game's name for an American computer game. Meier said that the game's name mattered: "Look back. Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, those names create a picture in your mind almost immediately."

The capacity crowd's loudest cheer came at the end of the panel, when a Q&A participant brought up the idea of a "remaster." "I'm hearing you say, 'bring back Civ 1,'" Meier said in response. The audience roared, but Meier only went so far as to reply, "There's definitely an audience for a streamlined game with focused gameplay."