BALTIMORE—Ask most game designers what in their childhood inspired them to get into the business, and they'll give you a list of their favorite early video game experiences. For Firaxis co-founder andcreator Sid Meier, those youthful inspirations don't include any video games, because video games didn't actually exist when he was a child.

"I remember covering the living room floor with toy soldiers and bricks and whatever it was," Meier told a crowd of nearly 200 at last weekend's first ever Firaxicon fan gathering outside Baltimore, which Ars attended. "As I got a little older, [I was] getting into Avalon Hill, strategy games... [Designing games] is really reliving my youth in a lot of ways, the fantasy of pirates or trains or airplanes, things like that... the fun of the way a kid approaches a topic, exploring it. I think there's a sense of uncovering and exploration in a game, the same thing I'd experience as a kid..."

Meier wasn't fated to continue that childlike fun into his adult career, though. He started out studying physics and math in college, installing cash registers as his first job. "But computers were so empowering," he recalled. "The idea that you could write a program that would calculate pi to 10,000 digits, or just do cool things with just a few instructions was very exciting to me... I think game designers like to do new things, explore new frontiers, and it was really a new frontier at that time."

Meier was just "fiddling" with this new frontier, as he put it, until a 1982 meeting in Las Vegas where he met Bill Stealey, a former fighter pilot with a huge personality and a self-imposed nickname of "Wild Bill." Meier remembered how the pair wandered into an arcade in the basement of the MGM Grand hotel on their first night together and encountered a Red Baron cabinet. Former pilot Stealey was amazed when Meier doubled his score on the flight simulator, as Meier remembers it.

"So he says 'How did you do that, I'm a fighter pilot, you're just a nerd, how could you beat me at this game?'" Meier recalled. "So I said, 'Well I was watching you play, and I kind of figured out the algorithm, what was going on there.' And he goes 'Wow, you're pretty smart, we should start a company.' So we did." Microprose was born.

With Stealey handling marketing and sales, Meier could focus on simply making games, which were all done "in about two months in those days, three if it was really in-depth." Projects couldn't turn into years-long bloatware partly because of the state of computer tech at the time. "We had 24K or 48K [of memory] to fill, so when we filled up the memory, we were done," Meier said matter-of-factly.

Game design in those days was mainly driven by technological advancement as well. "When we discovered a new technology trick, we'd build a game around it. Hellcat Ace was the first flight simulator [because] we figured out a way to make the horizon tilt left and right," Meier recalled. "That doesn't sound that exciting these days, but in those days it was a big deal..." Later on Sid Meier's Pirates grew out of "a Commodore 64 programming trick to compress a graphical image into a font and bring it up really quickly," Meier said.

The lack of a well-defined game industry was freeing for a designer at the time, Meier said. "We didn't know what genres were in those days. We didn't have to be a first-person shooter or what-not. [With Pirates] it was like, 'Well, there should be some sword fighting, and some romance, and some sailing.' Sure, what the heck."

Civilization and beyond

The game design thread that would eventually grow into the massive, decades-long Civilization franchise initially grew out of a desire to simplify model railroad building. "When I was a kid I tried to make a model railroad, but it took so long I gave up," Meier said. "So I figured a computer would be a perfect place to make a model railroad." After solving that problem in Sid Meier's Railroads, the team at Microprose looked for "a topic that was bigger than railroads that would be cool to do as a god game." The topic they decided on: "Everything."

Easy on the violence While Meier's games sometimes include violence, like the skirmishes in Civilization, he said he's proud that he's never had to lean on gratuitous action or gore in his titles. The anti-violence ethos went so far that Meier insisted that Railroad Tycoon include a scene where the engineer and brakeman jump safely out of the train before it goes over a cliff. While Meier's games sometimes include violence, like the skirmishes in, he said he's proud that he's never had to lean on gratuitous action or gore in his titles. The anti-violence ethos went so far that Meier insisted thatinclude a scene where the engineer and brakeman jump safely out of the train before it goes over a cliff. Meier said he doesn't buy into the alarmism over the real-world effects of violent games, but he feels responsible for engendering a positive culture with his games. "It's hard to say on the one hand our games are immersive and grab people and allow them to participate and make them the stars, and then say there's no impact, that it doesn't affect them. So we have to walk that line. I think people know the difference between fantasy and reality; gamers are very mature and intelligent people. However, it's part of the climate, and whatever we can do to create a positive climate we should do."



But even Civilization wasn't always Civilization as we know it. "We actually made it a SimCity-type game initially, where you'd zone different areas for villages and stuff like that, and then you'd kind of sit back and watch it happen. We realized that wasn't fun, so we actually went away and did Covert Action and came back and said 'Wait a minute, how about a turn-based game where you actually do everything yourself?'"

Meier and his team thought they had something special when they all couldn't stop playing the early builds of Civilization in the office. But in the days before preview events and instant-response e-mails and tweets, it was common to wait quite a while for public reaction. "It's hard to imagine the days before the Internet, but you'd send a game out there, a bunch of copies, and maybe a letter would come back two or three weeks later, 'Hey I bought this game, it's pretty cool. Here's what I would change, but...'"

It actually took a full two or three months after the 1991 release that Meier says he knew the original Civilization was a success: "I got a call from [Stealey] at some game convention, he was drunk I think, 'Everybody's talking about this Civilization game!'" Meier's response "Great, Bill, I'll talk to you in the morning."

The continued success of Civilization has ended up buoying Firaxis (which split off from Microprose in 1996) through a volatile industry, which doesn't allow many companies to last as long as those Meier has been with. "Without Civ, I don't really know where I'd be today, so I have to thank Civ for getting me where I am today," Meier said. "I think every studio that's lasted a long time has had a strong title, but not every studio that's had a strong title has lasted a long time. We've focused on listening to Civ players and trying to think about, with the next iteration, what are we going to do to keep it fresh and new but also have those core qualities that appeal to Civ players."

That kind of expansion isn't so simple at this point. Meier said Firaxis has adopted a "rule of thirds" for new Civilization entries: "one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new." But the team also has to be careful with everything they add. "We're now at the point where for every new feature we put in we have to take something out, because it's very easy to overwhelm the player with complexity or detail or things like that."

"I have the world's best job."

One of the keys to being a good game designer, according to Meier, is the ability to throw out ideas you thought were good. "You can't have a lot of ego," he said. "If you have an idea you thought was great, you put it in, [and] it's no fun, you've got to be willing to take it out."

"If someone isn't having fun, you can't argue with that," he continued. "You might argue with their solution, you might say, 'OK, that's interesting, but here's another way maybe to solve your problem.' But the problem is real. It's really my job, the designer's job, to solve that problem. So I'm very receptive to what is it that's not working for you in this game, we're going to go fix that. The more people you're bringing into that circle of ideas, the more good ideas you're going to get. Listening is just good game design practice."

Meier urged aspiring designers to make plenty of prototypes, even if most of them end up abject failures. Among Meier's disc full of unmade projects is a "Civilization-style world of dinosaurs" that started as an action game and evolved into a sort of real-time strategy. The problem: "There are no ranged dinosaurs. I was inventing venom-spitting dinosaurs, and I was just missing that ranged combat, so the dinosaurs would just cluster together and chew on each other." A similar dinosaur-themed card game ended up too derivative of Magic: The Gathering, Meier said.

While the game design grind can be stressful for some, Meier said he doesn't let the difficulties get to him too much. "I have the world's best job. It's hard to feel upset or angry when you have the best job in the world. I also have some amount of confidence that, whatever the problem is, it's going to get solved. We've run into these kinds of things before, we have this wealth of experience, and if we just apply that to the problem, it's going to get resolved."

While Meier said he wasn't really ready to think about his legacy while he still has so many game ideas he wants to make, an event like Firaxicon made him proud of what he's already accomplished. "It really comes home at an event like this, where you see a father and a son or a mother and a daughter where the parent has passed on their love of gaming and strategy to their child. There's a bonding there that I've experienced with my son when we play a game together. The opportunity to create those situations, those opportunities is really exciting. To have people talk about the amount of time and enjoyment they've spent with games is great."