Although he comes from that wild time in gaming that gave us Trip Hawkins and the concept of "rock star developers," Sid Meier is not loud and brash. Nor is he looking to make anyone his bitch. These days he's more like your friendly gaming grandpa—as we spoke, he placed his words carefully and deliberately, as if he were positioning game pieces on a hex grid. He became animated as we discussed game mechanics but otherwise answered questions almost laconically, with a slight smile—after all, he's been dealing with the press for decades.

Meier spent a few hours walking us through the birth of Civilization, one of the most famous and lauded franchises in the history of gaming. It's among those rarest of titles that effectively mainstreamed an entire genre—in this case, the "4X game" (which stands for "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate"). Although Civilization wasn't the first strategy game on the market, it was the proverbial 800-pound gorilla—and it did for turn-based strategy games what Doom would do for the FPS genre a few years later.

But as so often happens with genre-defining games, Civilization started out as a very different experience.





























No wine before its time

Meier explained how the design process for Civilization followed the release of Railroad Tycoon in 1990. The idea of simulating railroad ownership had indeed translated into a fun game, and Meier wanted to expand on the concept and give players the chance to manage an entire simulated world. Armed with some solid reference material that laid out the guideposts of how developing civilizations became civilizations, Meier and his team knocked together some early Civ prototypes.

But the concept didn't quite gel. Those early prototypes were stuck in real-time, with the player directing units and tech development without the structure and pacing imposed by turns. The team took some time away from Civ to complete another stalled project, a real-time Tom Clancy-esque spy game called Covert Action. Switching focus to Covert Action ended up providing the perspective that Meier needed—and when he eventually set his sights back on Civ, he decided to shake things up a bit and change the game's flow by making it fully turn-based.

Just one more turn...

As with so many other sea changes, the magnitude of the switch wasn't really obvious at the time. But Meier and the rest of the developers realized they had accidentally bottled lightning when early testers kept reporting that they were losing track of time while playing—they got the "I looked up and it was 3am" story from so many testers that the development team put a concerted effort into trying to figure out exactly what they'd managed to create.

The crux of the "just one more turn" phenomena, according to Meier, came down to how the game allowed players to structure their own expectations. Whether it's in real-time or chopped up in turns, a game like Civ gives players short-, medium-, and long-term goals to head toward, and there's rarely a moment where you've achieved all of those goals at once. But by quantizing gameplay into distinct turns, Civ provides the illusion that the player isn't that far away from nailing down all the loose ends standing between them and victory. Turns become distinct steps on the road to victory—and once you're into the mid-game of Civ, that victory doesn't seem that many turns away.

"You're almost not playing in the moment," Meier told us. "You're playing in the future—and that future is just one more turn ahead."

It's hard to argue with the results—Civilization still dominates the 4X genre to this day.

(Make sure to stick around until the end of the video—Meier was able to rustle up one of the original Civ dev boxes and demo a prerelease version of the game for us!)