![]() ![]() Sid Meier’s Starships follows on from the last Civilization game. Once you’ve played a game, you’re a little smarter, a little more skilled than when you started.” ![]() “Learning is going to be part of any good video game: it gives you interesting challenges, and you learn by doing, not by being passively taught something. There’s a lot of satisfaction in learning something, and watching your skill increase and coming to understand the map of the Caribbean or how one discovery led to another.” ![]() “Young people enjoy learning, even if they don’t necessarily enjoy being educated. “That was the dirty little secret about our games: you actually do learn something,” he says. Thankfully, Meier’s in my corner on this one. “You can’t learn history from a computer game, Stuart,” he told me. As a 14-year-old, I once printed out the technology tree from Civilization – the branching diagram showing how discoveries led to new technologies and industrial trends – and proudly took it to school to show my history teacher. I certainly learned new things from playing Meier’s games, though. We wanted to tap into that with our games.” “That allowed you to bring in all the stuff from the movies, whatever you had read, whatever was in your imagination. “Pirates! was designed more around your fantasy of pirates than the actual reality,” he admits. Meier says his philosophy when creating games has always been to ask “who’s having the most fun in this world?”, whether it’s a pirate captain or a civilisation’s leader. We’re happy to see it surviving: the kind of games we enjoy playing and making.” But the world has since become a little more accepting of strategy. We were afraid to use hexes! We used squares in the first Civilization because it was too scary to put hexes in there. “Up to that time there had been very few strategy games: there was SimCity and a couple of others. “When we introduced Civilization, it was a risk,” he says. It is the thread running through his career.īack then, however, there was trepidation around using the complexities of classic board-based war games in a computer title. The groundbreaking strategy sim, which tasks players with leading their own tribe from prehistoric obscurity to modern day world domination is a compulsive, fascinating classic, spawning four sequels and a range of add-ons and spin-off. Whatever the case, it’s been a permanent fixture of his titles ever since, making him a bona-fide gaming brand, and one of the first true video game stars.īut there is one title with which he is most readily synonymous: Civilization. Concerned that Microprose fans wouldn’t recognise this diversion from the designer’s usual titles, the duo decided to put Sid’s name on the box, although Stealey has an excellent anecdote that it was actually the late Robin Williams, a keen gamer, who told Meier to add his name to Microprose titles. In 1987, though, Meier designed a new type of game, Pirates!, an intriguing simulation of life as a 17th century privateer, exploring the oceans, trading and fighting. The company was famous for its compelling battle simulations games like Spitfire Ace, F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service and Gunship brought unparalleled accuracy, aided by the experiences of Meier’s business partner Bill Stealey, an ex-airforce pilot. And of course, in the early days of making computer games, we had to rely on players’ imagination: we only had four colours and one channel of sound!”Īfter graduating with a computer science degree, Meier’s career in game development began in 1982 when he co-founded the development studio Microprose. “That was my way of experiencing those cool things. If there was something I was interested in – pirates, the civil war, airplanes – I would go libraries and get books on it. Reading was my growing-up equivalent to playing video games. “We maybe used our imaginations a little bit more in those days than we have to today. “Instead of Lego or soldiers on the screen I had real Lego and real toy soldiers.” “I grew up with some board games, and there were also a few war games, then the hex games that I got into a little later,” he says.
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