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阐述《文明》之父Sid Meier的游戏人生

发布时间:2014-02-01 09:00:20 Tags:,,,

作者:Jason Schreier

在Sid Meier成为如今大名鼎鼎的《Pirates!》和《文明》系列经典游戏之父之前,他还只是一名计算机黑客。

在80年代早期,这名才20出头的程序员还在一家名这General Instruments Corporation的公司就职,当时与他共事的是一名由空军飞行员转业的商人John Stealey。Meier在个人计算机普及各个家庭之前已从计算机科学专业毕业,业余时间喜欢看点黑客杂志,在自己的雅达利设备上捣鼓代码,创建自己的更改版《太空入侵者》和《吃豆人》。他曾经制作了一款太空游戏,并将其上传到自己的办公室网络,吸引了太多同事导致老板迫使他删除该游戏。

Sid Meier(from kotaku.com)

Sid Meier(from kotaku.com)

Stealey回忆道,那一年他们俩人走进一个电子产品贸易展览会。在展会的第二晚,他们在一个地下室偶然发现了一些街机游戏。Meier在每款游戏中都打败了Stealey。之后他们发现了雅达利的《Red Baron》,在这款飞行游戏中,玩家要驾驶一艘双翼飞机跃过抽象的地形轮廓和障碍。Stealey这名前空军飞行员知道这次自己肯定能赢。他坐在游戏机前一路打到了7.5万个积分,在街机游戏榜单上排名第三。

之后Meier也迎头赶上,得到了15万分。

Stealey表示“我当时太震惊了”,他居然能够超过前空军飞行员?于是他转身问这名程序员:“Sid,你是怎么做到的?”

Meier答道:“你在玩游戏的时候,我在记其中的算法。”

Side Meier常说的话就是,伟大的电子游戏是一系列有趣的决定:玩家会不断遇到有意义的选择。这种理念令Meier收获颇丰——他的许多游戏收获了舆论好评和商业成功。在2009年Develop针对9000多游戏开发者“心目中的终极开发英雄”调查结果中,Meier位列第五(游戏邦注:当时排名第一的是《马里奥》开发者宫本茂)。

Meier的游戏总是充满有趣的决定,它们也总是截然不同。例如,开放世界型的海盗冒险游戏,发生于葛底斯堡之战背景的即时战略游戏,管理铁路的模拟游戏等。Meier最近发布的游戏《Ace Patrol》是一款自上而下战略游戏,要求玩家操纵战斗机飞行员在世界第一大战的战场中击落目标。

当然还有著名的《文明》系列。

在充斥高达8位数预算以及华丽的电影艺术般的电子游戏世界中,这款已有20多年历史的《文明》所具有的视角在今天仍然令人惊叹。有些游戏让玩家控制角色、城市或军队,而《文明》则让你主导整个世界历史。你可以选择一个国家——美国、罗马、英国等等,引导他们从公元前4000年走向现代。在每个回合中,你都可以在2D世界地图上移动人民,建设定居点和城市,与竞争国家进行外交,研发新技术,灌溉农田和发动战争。

这一模式催生出5款主要游戏,数款衍生游戏(其中包括专注于北美历史的《殖民》以及科幻史诗《半人马阿尔法星》),以及无数扩展内容包。它还令“Side Meier”成为游戏界家喻户晓的名字:该游戏官方名称并非《文明》而是《Sid Meier的文明》。这个名称带出了所有权、趾高气扬的特点。我们很容易得此结论——PC战略游戏之父是一个具有自我意识的人,他是那种会将自己制作的每款游戏贴上姓名的人。

但Meier却是一个和蔼可亲,说话慢斯条理而友好的人,同事对其评价则是杰出、谦逊和低调的人。其设计师同伴和密友Jake Solomon表示,“我在Firaxis工作这13年共事的所有人中,没有人曾经与Side有过个人纷争,因为根本就不可能。他是一个很好相处的人。”

上个月,我在一个曼哈顿联合广场的一个寒冷的会议室见到了这位传奇设计师,。Meier亲切而富有活力,脸上挂着温和微笑,身着深灰色色羊毛衫。陪伴身旁的是妻子Susan,她不时插话提醒他一起重要事项,或者他忘记的事情。我们一起谈论了他的游戏,他的经历以及成功和遗憾。

Meier是一个虔诚的基督徒,他喜欢音乐,并且会在美国马里兰州巴尔的摩(Meier及其妻所居住的城市)的一所教堂演奏风琴。他在自己帮助成立的Firaxis工作室头衔是“创意开发总监”,这实际上意味着他可以随心所欲创造自己想要的游戏。有时候这甚至意味着他要开发自己的游戏,其他时候则意叶着向公司其他人提供自己的设计看法,为《XCOM》(游戏邦注:这是由Solomon主导的科幻战略游戏)这类项目提供帮助。

Solomon称“你可以随时去找他——他的门一直是敞开的。任何人都可以跟他聊天……他是个极受欢迎的人。他在工作中投入大量时间。如果你在周末找他,很可能会发现他的车停在外面,他还在办公室处理自己的最新想法。”

我问Meier这名已经年届59的元老是否想过退休的问题。他答答:“我觉得自己有点像退休了。我现在正在做自己想做的事情——我已经退休很久了。我仍然热爱制作游戏,所以从未想过这一点。”

对于电子游戏粉丝来说这无疑是个好消息:Meier具有制作极富成瘾性和令人愉快的战略游戏的娴熟技巧。他对历史很感兴趣,尤其擅长将古板或者老式的历史事件(游戏邦注:例如葛底斯堡战役或第一次世界大战)转变成一般游戏玩家所喜欢的通俗交互娱乐体验。

Solomon称“他很有才气,具有我所没有的天赋。我们很难找到像这种能够以如此方式看待世界的人,你可以抛给他一个游戏话题,我保证你在周末就会看到他拿出一个与该主题有关的原型,Sid就是这样一个对世界富有洞察力的人。他几乎可以在任何事情中找到乐趣。”

曾经合作开发《文明II》的资深元老Brian Reynolds表示,“他的想法与我们非常不同。这真是不可思议。他的睿智并不会给人带来一种‘哈哈,我比你聪明’这种得意洋洋的感觉,你可以从与他的交谈中感觉到他有多聪明。”

Stealey称“有一年我曾经给他一本关于南北战争的书作为圣诞礼物。在新年的时候他还给了我,我说‘Sid,你不喜欢这本书?’他答道,‘我已经把它记住了。’”

在《Red Baron》中打败Stealey之后,年轻的Meier告诉这名同事,雅达利的飞行模式游戏不错,但他还可以做出一款更棒的游戏。Stealey接过话茬,“如果你能,我就能把它卖出去。”

Hellcat Ace(from kotaku.com)

Hellcat Ace(from kotaku.com)

Meier没有食言,在数个月之后,他为Stealey带来一个名为《Hellcat Ace》的战斗飞行模拟游戏的模型。于是Stealey就出去把它卖了。这就是这两者合作的开端,并在之后十年一直保持这种合作关系。Meier负责设计和编程,Stealey就去游说当地的商店推销游戏。在一年之后,他们的销售额达到20万美元。Stealey辞掉了他在General Instruments的工作,在他们现在称之为MicroProse的公司中做全职工作。一年半之后,Meier也这么干了。

在之后数年中,MicroPeose制作和推广了一系列针对雅达利主机的飞行模拟游戏和街机动作游戏,例如关于二战的飞行游戏《Spitfire Ace》,基本的平台游戏《Floyd of the Jungle》以及直升机横向卷轴游戏《Chopper Rescue》。与许多最早的电子游戏公司一样,MicroProse更是一种暴发户而非专业运营的公司。

Meier称“我们将游戏装在袋子中,Bill会开车到商店出售。这是一个非常粗放的工作流程。”

Stealey回忆道,“我会打电话给电脑店要求购买《Hellcat Ace》。如果他们还没有这款游戏,我就会高声喊道‘你们到底是什么电脑店啊,这款游戏都没有?’然后就挂断电话。这种事情我每三周都会做三次,每次都假装是不同的人在问。在第四周我就会打电话说,‘你好,我是John Stealey。我是MicroProse的代表,我们有款游戏叫《Hellcat Ace》。然后他们就会喊,‘喂,喂,喂,大家都要这款游戏,你能不能帮我们弄到这款游戏?”

1983年,由于市场饱和,导致雅达利和Magnavox等公司受到重创,电子游戏行业也走向崩溃,但MicroProse仍可通过持续发布由Mieier设计的高质量游戏而获得成功——其中多为飞行模拟游戏,因为这正是二人最感兴趣的游戏类型。

数年之后,由于公司持续发展——据Stealey称“我们成立三年创收300万美元”,有人建议他们制作海盗游戏。Meier很喜欢这一理念,并且回忆起他与Stealey某次非常重要的谈话:

“Bill说‘我下一款飞行模拟游戏什么时候问世?’我回答,‘我并不是在做飞行模拟游戏。我在做海盗游戏。’他说,‘那太疯狂了,因为大家期待你下一款飞行模拟游戏……等等,把你的名字放上去。如果他们喜欢你的飞行模拟游戏,他们就会认这个名字,然后购买这款海盗游戏。’”

Stealey有个非常不同的看法:“我们在软件发行商协会的晚餐上见面,当时Robin Williams(喜剧巨星)也在场。他让我们连续两小时忍俊不禁。他走向我并说道,‘Bill,你应该将Sid的名字印在这些盒子上,然后将他捧成巨星。’这就是为何Sid的名字出现在《海盗》和《文明》上的原因。”

在1987年,MicroProse发布了《Sid Meier’s Pirates!》这款开放世界探索游戏,玩家在其中可扮演海盗,在世界中寻宝,制服暴动的船员,并赢取更多金钱。

Meier说道,“我们创造了这个可以让我们快速成像的图像工具。内存很有限,一切资源都有限,所以你得很有效率,但我们发现了一个生成这些图像的有效方式。我们能够在故事中图解每个场景。其质量有点像冒险书故事,我认为效果不错。”

结果游戏很成功,《Pirates!》赢得了诸多行业和杂志的大奖,并影响了之后一批游戏,其中包括Will Wright的《模拟城市》,而这款游戏后来又启发了Meier的《文明》系列。

Meier回忆起早期加州圣何塞的游戏开发者大会(GDC),当时他与Wright、《M.U.L.E.》设计师Danielle Bunten、大会成立者Chris Crawford以及其他50-100名游戏开发者齐聚一堂的情形。

Meier称“我们当时很高兴,基本上都谈论自己如何喜欢对方的游戏。大家彼此并没有任何合作关系,因为我们只想制作自己的游戏。”

这就是第一代电子游戏设计师,Meier说“我们试图开发一个产业。”

如果你玩过多款Meier的游戏,就会注意到它们有些共性:没有任何血腥元素。虽然Meier喜欢涉猎暴力历史事件,但却并不喜欢展示暴力,例如《文明》中的战争就以抽象方式来呈现,只能看到两军交战时的冲撞,直至一方消失为止。

Meier的游戏也因给予玩家多种选项而得名,不会只是线性地讲述故事。Meier喜欢提供让玩家创造自己的故事的情形。玩家可以自己创造美国消灭他国,建立一个全球帝国的故事,也可以选择成为加勒比海盗。总之,一切取决于玩家的选择。Meier称“我喜欢那种可以令玩家主导游戏方向的游戏,他们一般都会创造自己才懂的独特游戏。”

没有哪款游戏能够比《Civilization》更淋漓尽致地体验这一理念,这是Meier及其团队在《Pirates!》以及商业模拟游戏《Railroad Tycoon》(支持玩家建设和管理自己的铁路公司)之后开发的一款游戏。

Meier称“《模拟城市》为我们提供了这类建设模式的灵感,启发了我们游戏并不一定是搞破坏——-它们也可以是创造。所以我们就分别从《Railroad Tycoon》以及《模拟城市》撷取了一些想法,就衍生出了《文明》的游戏理念。”

今天,一个至少100人的团队也需要两三年时间才能完成一般影响的电子游戏。而Meier却告诉我,他们8-10人团队在一年内就开发出了《文明》。

他称“最后我们电脑里有640KB的内存,如果全满了,我们就完了。我们无法再加入任何代码,所以那时候的开发时间比较短。”

《文明》在今天被认为是早期的回合制战略游戏之一,但有趣的是,游戏早期的一次迭代却是在即时状态下进行,就像《星际争霸》和《帝国时代》一样。那些未发布的原型并没有达到Meier的要求。

Meier认为这款游戏“更像是《模拟城市》,你可以说我想在这里建一个村子,在这里开一个农场,这里还要做一些什么事情,之后就可以看着自己的人民在此逐渐忙碌起来。但它是一个更为被动的过程。更多时候是在看而不是做。”

所以他们就更改了工具,给予玩家更多控制权,也变更了游戏节奏:现在玩家不仅仅是等待游戏世界改变,而是改变世界。如果玩家不做决定,时间就不会前进。

Brian Reynolds当时才刚在MicroProse就职,他记得《文明》早期的模型曾经令他和同事们通宵加班。

Reynold称“这有点像是在公司中‘病毒扩散’——当时并非人人都了解这个词。突然间大家都开始玩起这款游戏,每隔几天都会出现一个新版本。我这个看起来像闲杂人等的22岁小伙子经过办公室的时候会说‘我有些新想法’。Sid非常耐心地倾听我对于《文明》的所有想法。”

Meier当时即将奔四,他表示“这是一个非常有趣的开发过程”。他将游戏规模缩小了许多——游戏地图原先比现在大两倍,游戏中有两种不同的科技树,他回忆起与副总监Bruce Shelley一起进行多次玩法测试的经历。

“测试颇具挑战性,因为你需要花很长的时间玩游戏。我们当时并没有太多测试员,所以我就成了主要测试员之一——我花了大量时间玩游戏,之后进行修复和更改。”

《文明》在1991年末面世。它历时数月才得名——当时还没有互联网,但人们一开始发现这款游戏,就像星火燎原一般扩散开来。Meier的这一杰作赢得了不少奖项,当时被《电脑游戏世界》杂志评选为“史上最佳的150款游戏”中的第一名。据Reynolds所称,其销量达80万份。

当Meier完成这款成就其事业的游戏之后,他迫切希望制作更大更好更具雄心的游戏。但他也知道这将极为困难——“我说如果我一直深陷这种想要超越以往的游戏,或者做出更大更棒的东西,我肯定会把自己逼疯。”所以他决定收手了,将以美国为主的《殖民地》和《文明》系列的掌舵权交给Reynolds,之后又去做自己的事情——音乐应用《CPU Bach》,支持玩家创造自己的乐曲(但这款游戏并不成功)。

与此同时,由于Stealey打算平衡公司预算,MicroProse面临企业结构调整。在1993年,Stealey将MicroProse出售给名为Spectrum Holybyte的公司。一年之后他离开了公司。Stealey回忆称“公司经营得很好,我们应该做得更好,我们有优秀的人才。我认为我们所有员工仍然为自己在MicroProse的日子而自豪。我们有大家庭的氛围。我们人人都有现金分红。我认为它在很长一段时间运营都很顺利。”

由于厌恶裁员和办公室政治,Meier以及Reynolds、还有设计师Jeff Briggs决定离开MicroProse并组建新公司Firaxis Games。

Sid Meier并不喜欢商务运营方面的事项,当我提及MicroProse新所有权的问题时,他对此保持缄默。Stealey之后告诉我,“Sid并不喜欢卷入这种事情,他根本不碰商务方面的东西。”

Solomon也表示,“Sid最开心的是在办公室写代码。”

也许这正是成立Firaxis工作室令Meier如此兴奋的原因——这样他们就是独立的,可以在无需担心上司干预的情况下自由制定创意决策。当时,Meier在电子游戏行业中已经建立知名度,该公司也因此迅速与EA达成合作,发布了《半人马阿尔法星》(发生在外星的《文明》衍生游戏)以及《葛底斯堡》(以南北战争为题材的即时战略游戏)。

Meier表示,“在Firaxis中的工作真是太有趣了。”

该公司有相当一段时间保持小型和敏捷性,以10-15人的团队制作游戏,但在过去15年中,其人员增长,规模将近120人。在2005年末,Firaxis被Take-Two Interactive(《侠盗猎车手》开发商Rockstar以及2K工作室母公司)所收购。

Solomon于2000年加入Firaxis,他称“这里所有人都很好。我们很重视好人。我们并不会因为性格不同起冲突,这一优良传统来自Sid。因为我们工作室100%起源于Sid Meier,他的性格对工作室的运营方式,以及人们的互动方式产生了极大影响。他的愿景就是我们公司的愿景。”

在过去10多年中,Firaxis继续推出了一系列《文明》续作和衍生游戏,其中包括瞄准主机的《文明革命》和重制的《殖民地》。去年改版的科幻战略游戏《XOM》(由Solomon主导)赢得广泛赞誉,获评Kotaku的2012年度最佳游戏。现在该公司则以《Ace Patrol》和iOS移植版《XCOM》进一步推动业务多样化。

过去15年中,Meier一直希望制作一款关于侏罗纪和白垩纪的游戏——“Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs”,但却没找到令其有趣的方法。这个主题可行,但他从未找到合适的玩法基础:恐龙会怎么做呢?只是相互斗争?游戏进程如何?

Meier表示,“我做了三个不同的原型。一个是即时的,一个是回合制的,另一个是纸牌游戏。它们都有点意思,但却并不那么有趣。”

他以非常类似于另一名传奇开发者宫本茂的语气说道,“玩游戏,然后调整和更改游戏,这就是我的开发方法。如果其他人也玩过游戏,然后说‘这很不错’,我就会问‘但你不再玩游戏了吗?’他们若回答‘不玩了,收起来了。’就知道这里面存在问题。如果他们仍然没有玩游戏,那就说明游戏还不够有趣。”

Meier的妻子Susan此时插话了。她一开始就一直伴随着Firaxis,最初是担任公司HR,现在则是她自称的“勤杂工”。她说,“看到在工作的人经常玩这款游戏,你就会知道自己走对路了。”

Meier笑着补充,“即使是他们并不需要玩游戏的时候。这就是一个很好的兆头。”

但他还是不能敲定恐龙的问题。Solomon在Firaxis的招聘面试时首次见到Meier,他回忆起当时与这名设计师一起玩恐龙原型时的情形。

Solomon称“他让我玩原型,我想认只是想以此收集反馈。我玩了游戏,并进行了一番讨论,而他关心的似乎只是我对这款游戏的看法,我是否觉得有趣,我会做什么更改。这听起来一点也不像是面试,我认为他可能是在以此试探我的性格——但这实际上又确实是一场面试,我体验了一个很棒的Sid Meier游戏小原型。”

但Solomon也无法提供令游戏更棒的点子。Meier将这种遭遇失败的理念和被抛弃的原型的情形称为“失望深渊”,这就像是放弃的感觉。(Solomon事后告诉我,Sid曾将游戏称为一系列有趣的选择,但制作游戏却是一系列心碎的失望。)

有时候他们可以摆脱这种状态,有时候却是令人窒息。

在Solomon加入公司后不久,Meier就告诉大家他放手了。他无法做出这款恐龙游戏。

Solomon说道,“所以他就回家了,我们连续两周没见到他。之后他将大家召集到一个小屋子里说,‘好,我现在要做下一款游戏了’。他将游戏名称打在屏幕上,它就是《SimGolf》”。

SimGolf(from kotaku.com)

SimGolf(from kotaku.com)

这并不是关于《SimGolf》的视频或介绍文字,而是一个Meier刚刚做完的可行模型,已经支持玩家设计和创建基本的高尔夫球场。

“当时,Bing Gordon(之后成了EA高管)走进Sid办公室,坐下玩了一两个小时的游戏,出来后说道,‘没错,这款游戏会大卖!’每个看到这款游戏的人都说它非常棒。”

这种以原型为中心的理念一直是Meier制作游戏的方式,也是解释其成功的一个重要因素:他并不信任游戏设计文件,或者冗长的游戏运行方式描述。许多游戏开发者在开工之前习惯将想法和理念写在纸上,但Meier的方法却是亲身实践型的。

“Sid从来不需要撰写游戏设计文件,他不会跟你争辩自己想植入的新功能到底可不可行,他会直接回家连夜进行实践。第二天来公司就会说,‘现在可以试试这个新功能了’。你玩了之后,就可以不用看设计文件,直接展开与游戏有关的交流。”

Meier还因常与其他游戏设计师分享这些规则和格言而得名。

Reynolds表示,“‘找到乐趣’——这是Sid的口头禅。实际上是说,为了找到乐趣你得做些事情。乐趣并不会体现在纸上,至少电子游戏的乐趣是如此。”

Reynolds所描述的Meier令人不禁想起一个古老的笑话:“你如何雕刻大象?找一堆石头,削掉其中不像大象的部分。”你该如何制作一款好游戏?做一款游戏,移除所有不好玩的部分。

Solomon指出,“他曾告诉我一个令我至今受益的谚语。反馈才是事实,你应该这样看待反馈,因为它就是事实。你得开发这个庞大的系统或者这款游戏,他们会走进你的办公室,出来后说‘我玩了游戏,但感觉很无聊。’作为设计师最糟糕的事情是开始捍卫自己的设计或者与他人争辩。你应该接受他人所告诉你的事实。他们说自己觉得很无聊,那你就知道是什么情况了——你的游戏让他们觉得无聊。所以你就需要想想为何如此。”

这里也有其他规则。Reynolds想起自己一直无法忘怀的事情:如果你在制作电子游戏,并在某个数据上遇到麻烦——例如某个单位的损害值,要不然就让数据翻倍,要不然就将其减半。

Reynolds回忆称,“他并没有耐心试试增加10%这种做法。对于游戏设计师来说,那是一个很好的切入方法,因为常规的做法是谨慎地将数据调整一点点,然后更改了七八次才能令其生效。而如果你是将其翻倍,你很快就会知道扩大数据究竟是不是个更好的主意。”

这种方法很奏效。Meier的游戏如此杰出,以至于游戏玩家经常如此描述这些游戏:“我晚上8点开始玩《文明》,不知不觉就到凌晨4点了。”“成瘾”一词甚为流行,它通常带有对游戏的肯定意味,但上瘾也可能是件危险的事情。

所以我对此很好奇,在与Meier的聊天中提到他是否担心自己的游戏会对人们的生活带来有害影响?他的回答是:

“我们从论坛、与玩家的互动,以及同人们的聊天等各个渠道所得到的反馈是,这些游戏提供的是积极体验。这是玩家将原来看电视或干其他闲暇时间转移到玩游戏中的一种方法。这是一种空闲时间选择。所以我们关于玩家投入时间,在游戏中的收获,玩游戏锻炼脑力以及学习世界知识等方面所得到的基本上是积极的玩家反馈。

我认为下一个问题是,‘你会如何让游戏更不有趣?’这真好玩——在早期有些PC游戏设计中,我们曾经使用‘boss key’这种功能,玩家只要点击特定键,电脑屏幕就会弹出一个电子表格,你就可以假装自己正在埋头工作。所以我认为这是一个20几年前就已经出现的考虑问题。游戏就是要有趣。

对于任何娱乐形式来说,什么做法是合理或不合理的,这要由玩家或家长来决定。我们的目标是尽量制作出好游戏。我想这正是多数人所需要的。”

《文明》中没有奴隶,有些人批评该游戏忽略了这段历史。但这正是Meier作品的一个共性:虽然它们涉及历史,但却会忽略其中肮脏的部分。这正是Sid Meier制作游戏的原则,从《文明》到《SimGolf》再到他过去20多年所制作的游戏均是如此。

“关于是否应该给予玩家自由选择以及情感话题方面总是存在不少争议,我们的游戏极力避免的一个情况是让玩家处于道德困境(‘这个选择是对的,但这个选择才会让我获胜’)。这不是我们制作游戏的原则。我们希望让玩家在完成游戏时自我感觉良好。”

感觉良好,带有大量有趣选择的成瘾体验,这就是Sid Meier游戏的定义。也许这正是他们将其名字印在包装盒上的原因。当然也有不少人喜欢讲述关于道德挑战故事的游戏——去年由2K发行的《Spec Ops:The Line》就因为这一原因而备受赞誉,但Meier并不想制作这类游戏。他只想制作自己想玩的游戏。

但时至今日,Meier还没有创造出一款知名度堪比《文明》的经典游戏。在《SimGolf》之后,他重制了《Pirates!》,而后设计了第四款《Railroad Tycoon》——《Railroads!》。之后就是主机平台的《文明革命》,以及Facebook游戏《CivWorld》(已经停止运营),还有《Ace Patrol》。这些游戏虽然都很好,但并不像其杰作《文明》那样令人难忘。Meier告诉我他并没有什么遗憾——“除了没有先想到《俄罗斯方块》之外”。

“当我们制作《文明》的时候,并没有想到它会成为被我们所记忆的最出色的游戏。它是我们当时制作的最棒的游戏,我们认为它趣味十足。我们制作每款游戏时多少都有点这种想法:这将成为我们制作的最棒的游戏。有些游戏在玩家中引起了更大的反响,有些游戏则不然。我的原则并非制作超级经典的游戏,而是做出我们最好的游戏。”

原文发表于2013年6月26日,所涉事件及数据以当时为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.

In the early 80s, the then-20-something programmer had a job at a company called General Instruments Corporation, where he worked alongside a gruff Air Force pilot-turned-businessman named John “Wild Bill” Stealey. Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.

One year, as Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari’s Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you’d steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade’s leaderboard. Not bad.

Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points.

“I was really torqued,” Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. “Sid, how did you do that?”

“Well,” Meier said. “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.”

A great video game, Sid Meier likes to say, is a series of interesting decisions: a set of situations in which the player is constantly confronted with meaningful choices. It’s an ethos that has served him well: the majority of Meier’s games are critically and commercially acclaimed. A 2009 Develop survey asked some 9,000 game makers their “ultimate development hero”—Meier came in fifth. (First was Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.)

Meier’s games are all full of interesting decisions, and they’re always totally different. There’s the open-world pirate adventure game; the real-time strategy game set during the Battle of Gettysburg; the simulation game about railroad management. Meier’s most recent release, Ace Patrol, is a top-down strategy game in which you maneuver fighter pilots to take down targets across the battlefields of World War I.

And then there’s Civilization.

In a world full of eight-figure budgets and ambitious video game cinematics, the 20-year-old Civilization’s scope is impressive even today. Some games put players in charge of people, cities, or armies; Civilization put them in charge of world history. You’d pick a nation—Americans, Romans, English, and so forth—and guide them from 4000 BC to the modern age, year by year. Every turn, you could move your people across a 2D map of the world, build settlements and cities, engage in diplomacy with rival countries, research new technology, irrigate land, and wage war.

Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

This formula has spawned five main games, several spinoffs (including the North America-focused Colonization and the sci-fi epic Alpha Centauri), and tons of expansion packs. It’s also made “Sid Meier” a gaming household name: the official title for Civilization is not Civilization; it is Sid Meier’s Civilization. The title implies ownership, arrogance, cockiness. It would be easy to conclude, then, that the father of PC strategy games is a man with an ego—the type of man who would put his name on every game he makes.

But Meier is amiable and soft-spoken, a friendly man who colleagues call brilliant, unassuming, and humble. “In the [13] years and all the people I’ve worked with at Firaxis,” said fellow designer and close confidant Jake Solomon, “there has never been anyone who’s had a personality issue with Sid, ’cause it’s not possible. He’s such a wonderful person.”

Last month, I met the legendary designer in a chilly meeting room in Manhattan’s Union Square. Meier was genial and energetic, with a warm smile and a dark grey cardigan. He was accompanied, as always, by his wife, Susan, who occasionally chimed in to help him remember important facts, or moments he’s forgotten. We talked about his games, his history, his triumphs and regrets.

A devout Christian, Meier loves music and plays organ for his church in Baltimore, Maryland, where he and Susan live. His job title at Firaxis, the studio he helped found, is “Director of Creative Development,” which essentially means he can do whatever he wants. Sometimes that means working on his own games; other times it means offering his considerable design acumen to other people at the company and helping out on projects like XCOM, the sci-fi strategy game helmed by Solomon.

“You can always drop in—his door’s always wide open,” said Solomon. “Anybody can stop in and talk to him about anything… he’s incredibly welcoming. He spends a lot of his time working. If you come in on the weekend, there’s a fair chance that Sid’s car’s in the parking lot, and he’s in the office working on his latest idea.”

Solomon: “If you come in on the weekend, there’s a fair chance that Sid’s car’s in the parking lot, and he’s in the office working on his latest idea.”

I asked Meier, who is 59, if he ever thinks about retirement. “I kinda feel like I am retired,” he said, laughing. “I’m doing what I wanna do—I’ve been retired for a long time. I still love making games, so I’ve really never thought of that.”

That’s good news for video game fans: Meier has a knack for making strategy games that are fiendishly addictive and consistently delightful. He’s fascinated by history, and he is particularly good at turning events that would seem quaint, dull, or old-fashioned to your average game player—like the battle of Gettysburg or a World War I air skirmish—into accessible interactive entertainment.

When I’m in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, the last thing I want to do is slow down — I certainly don’t want to wait my turn. I need… Read…

“He just is brilliant,” said Solomon. “He has a gift that I certainly don’t have. It’s very rare to find someone who is able to look at the world in such a way that you could give him a topic for a game and I guarantee you in a weekend he could come up with a prototype centered around that theme that would make you go, ‘Oh man, that’s pretty fun.’ Sid just has a very insightful way of looking at the world. He can find the fun in almost anything.”

“He just thinks differently from us,” said Brian Reynolds, a longtime collaborator who designed Civilization II. “It’s an ineffable thing. His smartness doesn’t come off as, ‘I’m smarter than you, haha.’ You just have this really interesting conversation and it starts to dawn on you how much smarter he is.”

“I gave him a [Civil War] book for Christmas one year,” said Stealey. “And at New Years he gave it back to me. I said ‘Sid, didn’t you like the book?’ He said, ‘I’ve memorized it already.’”

After whupping Stealey at Red Baron, the young Meier told his co-worker that Atari’s flight sim was okay, but he could make an even better one. Stealey took the bait: “if you could, I could sell it.”

Meier lived up to his end of the bargain, and a few months later, he brought Stealey a build for a combat flight sim called Hellcat Ace. So Stealey went out and sold it. This was the beginning of a partnership that would last for the next decade: As Meier designed and programmed, Stealey would go out and pitch his games to local hobby stores. After a year of sales—$200,000 worth, Stealey claims—Stealey quit his job at General Instruments to work full-time at the company they were now calling MicroProse. A year and a half later, Meier did too.

Over the next few years, MicroProse made and marketed a number of flight simulators and arcade action games for Atari consoles: games like the World War II flyer Spitfire Ace, the rudimentary platformer Floyd of the Jungle, and the helicopter sidescroller Chopper Rescue. Like many of the earliest video game companies, MicroProse felt like an upstart gang of rebels more than a professional operation.

“We put [the games] in baggies,” Meier said. “Bill would drive around to stores and sell them. It was very bootstrap round-up work process. That’s the way things were.”

“I would call computer stores and ask to buy Hellcat Ace,” Stealey told me. “And when they didn’t have it, I would yell and scream at them, ‘What kind of computer store are you?’ and hang up.

I would do that three times in three weeks, each time pretending to be a different person. And the fourth week I’d call and say, ‘Hello, this is John Stealey. I’m a representative with MicroProse, with this game called Hellcat Ace.’ They’d say, ‘Hey, hey, hey, everyone’s been calling about that, can you help us get that game?’”

Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

In 1983, a video game crash caused by market saturation crippled companies like Atari and Magnavox, but MicroProse still found success releasing a steady trickle of high-quality games designed by Meier: mostly flight sims, because that’s what the two were interested in making.

A few years later, as the company continued to grow—”It took three years to get to $3 million,” said Stealey—someone suggested that they make a game about pirates. Meier liked the idea, and he recalls one particularly important conversation with Stealey:

“Bill said, ‘When’s my next flight simulator coming out?’ And I said, ‘I’m not doing a flight simulator; I’m doing a pirates game.’ He said, ‘Well that’s crazy, ‘cause people want your next flight simulator… Wait a minute. Put your name on it. Maybe if they liked your flight simulator games, they’ll recognize the name and buy this crazy pirates thing.’”

Stealey has a different take: “We were at dinner at a Software Publishers Association meeting, and [actor] Robin Williams was there. And he kept us in stitches for two hours. And he turns to me and says ‘Bill, you should put Sid’s name on a couple of these boxes, and promote him as the star.’ And that’s how Sid’s name got on Pirates, and Civilization.”

Wherever it came from, the idea stuck. In 1987, MicroProse released Sid Meier’s Pirates!, an open-world exploration game in which players took on the role of glamorous swashbucklers who scour the world for treasure, stave off mutinous crews, and try to earn as much money as possible.

“We had created this graphic tool that allowed us to bring up pictures quickly,” Meier said. “Memory was limited. Everything was limited, so you had to be very efficient, but we found an efficient way to kind of pop up these pictures. We were able to kind of illustrate each scene in the story. That gave it a little bit of this adventure book story kind of quality that I think worked well.”

It worked extremely well: Pirates! won a number of awards from industry shows and magazines, and influenced a great deal of future games, including Will Wright’s SimCity, which would then go on to influence Meier’s Civilization.

Meier recalls early Game Developers Conferences in San Jose, California, where he’d get together with Wright, M.U.L.E. designer Danielle Bunten, conference founder Chris Crawford, and about 50-100 other early game creators.

“We would have fun and basically tell each other how much we like each other’s games,” Meier told me. “There wasn’t really any collaboration, because we just all wanted to make our own games. It was too much fun to let anybody else.”

It was the first generation of video game designers. And it felt like they were at the precipice of something big.

“We were trying to develop an industry,” Meier said.

If you play more than one of Meier’s games, you will notice certain common characteristics: there is never any blood, for one. Although Meier likes to cover violent historical periods, he does not like to show violence: battles in Civilization, for example, are represented abstractly, with two army tiles colliding until one disappears.

Meier’s games are also known for giving their players all sorts of options: instead of telling a focused, linear story, Meier prefers to create situations in which the player can create his or her own narrative. It could be the story of America wiping out every other nation and creating a global empire, or it could be the story of the most friendly pirate in the Caribbean. It’s totally up to the player. “I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want,” Meier said. “And then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know.”

Meier: “I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want, and then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know.”

No game epitomized this principle more than Civilization, which Meier and his team started developing after Pirates! and their next game, a business sim called Railroad Tycoon in which players could built and manage their own railroad companies.

“[SimCity] planted the seed in our mind about this kind of building, and that games don’t have to be about blowing things up—they can be about creating,” Meier said. “And so we kind of took some of the ideas from Railroad Tycoon, and some of the ideas from SimCity, and said you know what’s a bigger topic that we can tackle? And we ended up with the idea of Civilization.”

Today, it takes two or three years and a team of at least 100 to make your average blockbuster video game. Civilization, Meier told me, was made by a team of 8-10 people in under a year.

“Ultimately we had 640 kilobytes [of memory] in the computer,” Meier said. “When that was full, we were done. We couldn’t put any more code in there. So development time was a little less in those days.”

Today, Civilization is known as one of the premier turn-based strategy series, but funny enough, one of the game’s first iterations was actually set in real-time, like StarCraft or Age of Empires.

The unreleased prototype just didn’t pass muster with Meier.

“It was more like SimCity, where you’d kind of say, I wanna have a village over here and a farm over here and maybe I want to have some things happening over here, and then you could kind of stand back and watch your people gradually do things,” Meier said. “But it was a much more passive kind of process. There was more watching than doing. It was just not happening.”

So they switched gears. They gave more control to the player and changed up the pacing: now, instead of waiting for the world to change, players could change the world. Time wouldn’t progress until players made their decisions.

Brian Reynolds, who at the time had just started working at MicroProse, remembers early builds of Civilization keeping him and his co-workers up all night.

“It started to kind of go ‘viral’ within the company—not that anybody knew that term back then,” Reynolds said. “It was one of those things that suddenly everybody was kind of playing it.

There’d be a new version every few days. I would go in and just be this random 22-year-old guy stopping by and saying, ‘Here’s some ideas!’ [Sid] was very tolerant, patient of all my ideas for Civilization.”

“It was a very fun development,” said Meier, who was in his late 30s at the time. He remembers scaling down a lot—the game’s map was originally going to be twice the size, and there were two different types of tech trees—and he recalls lots and lots of play-testing alongside assistant director Bruce Shelley.

“Testing was a bit of a challenge because it took so long to play the game,” Meier said. “And we didn’t really have much in the way of testers, so I was one of the main—a lot of my time was spent playing and then fixing and changing.”

Civilization came out in late 1991. It took a few months for buzz to build—there was no Internet just yet—but as people started to discover the game, it spread like the Romans. Meier’s masterpiece won various awards, ranking #1 on a list of “150 Best Games Of All Time” compiled by the magazine Computer Gaming World. And it sold 800,000 copies, according to Reynolds.

Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

When Meier finished the game that would make his career, he was eager to make something bigger. Better. More ambitious. But he also knew that would be ridiculously difficult—“I said if I continually get in this mode of trying to top the last game or do something bigger or more epic, I’m gonna drive myself crazy,” Meier said. So he decided to scale back. He gave Reynolds the steering wheel for the U.S.-focused Colonization and the Civ sequel, then went off to do his own thing: a music application called CPU Bach that allowed players to create their own music compositions. (It never really took off.)

Meanwhile, MicroProse was facing corporate restructuring as Stealey attempted to balance the company’s budget. In 1993, Stealey sold MicroProse to a company called Spectrum Holobyte. A year later, he left. “It was a great run. We should’ve done better. We had great people,” Stealey said. “I think all our people are still very proud of their MicroProse days. We had a family atmosphere. We had cash bonuses for everybody. I think it went very well for a long time.”

Sick of the layoffs and corporate politics, Meier—along with Reynolds and fellow designer Jeff Briggs—decided to leave MicroProse and start a new company. They called it Firaxis Games.

Sid Meier doesn’t like thinking about business, and he clammed up a bit when I asked him about MicroProse’s new ownership. “Sid didn’t want to be involved in that at all,” Stealey told me later. “No business—not at all.”

“Sid is happiest in his office writing code,” Solomon said.

Perhaps that was what made the idea of Firaxis so exciting for Meier: there they were independent, totally free to make creative decisions without worrying about meddling corporate parents. By then, Meier already had a reputation in the booming video game industry, and the company was quickly able to strike a deal with Electronic Arts for their next couple of games: Alpha Centauri, a Civilization spinoff set on an alien planet, and Gettysburg, a real-time strategy game set during the eponymous Civil War battle.

“Ah, Firaxis,” Meier said. “The convicts are running the asylum. It was great fun.”

For a while the company stayed small and nimble, making games with a team of 10-15 people, but over the past decade and a half, it’s grown closer to 120. In late 2005, Firaxis was acquired by Take-Two Interactive—the publishing company behind Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto) and 2K (NBA 2K).

Meier: “Ah, Firaxis. The convicts are running the asylum. It was great fun.”

“Everyone here is really nice,” said Solomon, who joined Firaxis in 2000. “We really value nice guys and gals. We don’t really put up with personality conflicts here, and that comes from Sid.

That is 100% because our studio grew out of Sid Meier, and his personality has a huge impact on how the studio is run, how people interact with each other. His vision is sort of our company vision.”

Over the past decade or so, Firaxis has gone on to make a whole bunch of Civilization sequels and spinoffs, including the console-driven Civilization Revolution and a remake of Colonization. Last year’s reimagining of the sci-fi strategy game XCOM (directed by Solomon) earned tons of critical acclaim, winning Kotaku’s 2012 Game of the Year. And now, with Ace Patrol, the ghoulish Haunted Hollow and an iOS port of XCOM, the studio seems to be diversifying a bit more.

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There’s quite a lot of extra content available for purchase in Haunted Hollow, the spooky new iOS strategy board game from Firaxis, creators of… Read…

Ahab had Moby Dick. Sid Meier has dinosaurs.

For the past decade-and-a-half, Meier has unsuccessfully tried to spear a tyrannosaurus rex. He’s always wanted to make a game about the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods—”Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs” does have a nice ring to it—but he just couldn’t figure out how to make it fun. The theme worked, but he never found the right gameplay foundation: what would the dinosaurs do? Just fight one another? What’s the progression?

“I did three different prototypes,” Meier said. “One was real-time, one was turn-based, and one was a card game. And they were all kind of fun but just not fun fun.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

I’d heard that Shigeru Miyamoto was really proud of his new game, Pikmin 3. Like, really, really proud. Like,… Read…

“I play the game,” he said, sounding very much like one of his legendary counterparts, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. “That’s how I develop it, by playing the game, tweaking it and changing it.

If other people play it, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I ask, ‘But you’re still not playing it?’ If they say, ‘No, I put it away’ then I know it’s a problem. If they’re still not playing it, then it’s not as fun as it needs to be.”

Meier’s wife, Susan, chimed in. Susan has been with Firaxis since the beginning, first as the head of human resources, and now as “Master of Miscellaneous,” as she likes to call herself. “One of the reasons you knew you had something was that people at work were playing it long and often,” she said.

“Even when they didn’t have to,” Meier said, laughing. “That’s a good sign.”

Meier: “If other people play it, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I ask, ‘But you’re still not playing it?’ If they say, ‘No, I put it away’ then I know it’s a problem. If they’re still not playing it, then it’s not as fun as it needs to be.”

But he just couldn’t nail down the dinosaurs. Solomon, meeting with Meier for the first time while interviewing for a job at Firaxis, recalls sitting down with the designer and playing one of his dinosaur prototypes.

“He fired it up and he let me play,” Solomon said. “I think he basically just looked at this as an opportunity to get feedback from somebody. I played the game and we talked about the game… and all he was interested in was, what do I think of the game? Did I have fun? What would I change? And it wasn’t an interview in the sense of—well, I suppose he might have been using it to gauge my personality—but really, it was an interview in the sense of, I played an awesome little prototype of Sid Meier.”

Solomon couldn’t make the game great, though. Meier likes to talk about the “valley of despair”—the moment in which a game designer, crushed by the weight of failed ideas and discarded prototypes, just feels like giving up. (“Sid’s famous for saying a game is a series of interesting decisions,” Solomon told me. “On Civ Rev one time he cracked and said, ‘Playing games is a series of interesting decisions, but making games is a series of heartbreaking disappointments.’”)

Sometimes, they get out of the valley. Other times it can be smothering.

Not long after Solomon joined the company, Meier told everyone that he was finished. He couldn’t make the dinosaur game work.

“So he goes home, and we don’t see him for two weeks,” Solomon said. “Then he brings everybody into a little room and he’s like ‘Okay, I’ve got the next game.’ And so he puts it up on the screen, and it’s SimGolf.”

It wasn’t a video or a bunch of words about SimGolf: it was a working prototype that Meier had just built. Players could design and build basic golf courses, just like they eventually could in the final product.

“At that time, [then-EA exec] Bing Gordon came out and went into Sid’s office, sat down, played the game for maybe an hour or two, came out and said ‘Yep, we’ll be able to sell that!’”

Solomon told me. “Anyone who saw it saw that it was pretty awesome.”

Sid Meier: The Father of Civilization

That prototype-centric mentality is how Meier has always made games, and it may be one of the explanations for his success: he doesn’t believe in design documents, or long, written descriptions of how a video game will work. While many game makers put ideas and concepts on paper before taking them to a machine, Meier’s approach is all hands-on.

“Sid’s never had to write a design document, because instead of debating with you about some new feature he wants to implement, he’ll just go home and at night he’ll implement it,” Solomon said. “And then tomorrow when he comes in he’ll say, ‘Okay, now play this new feature.’ And you’ll play, and then you can have a real conversation about the game, instead of looking at some design document.”

Meier is known for these types of rules and mantras, which he likes to share with other game designers as often as possible.

“‘Find the fun’—that’s Sid’s phrase,” said Reynolds. “Essentially, you have to make something in order to have any chance of finding the fun. Fun wasn’t going to be found on a piece of paper, at least fun in terms of a video game.”

To hear Reynolds describe Meier’s process calls to mind the old joke: “How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Get a block of marble and remove anything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”

How do you make a good game? Get a game and remove all the parts that aren’t fun.

“He told me a phrase I use all the time,” said Solomon. “Feedback is fact. That’s the way you have to look at feedback, as if it’s a fact. You’ve worked on this massive system or this game, and they come in your office and they go, ‘I played it, and I was bored.’ The worst thing you could do as a designer is start to defend your design or argue with that person. What you do is accept what that person told you as a fact. They said they were bored, so guess what? Your game bored that person. And you need to figure out why that is.”

There are other rules, too. Reynolds recalled one that stuck with him: if you are making a video game, and you’re having trouble with a number—say, the number of damage points a unit can do—either double it or cut it in half.

“He didn’t have any patience for, ‘Let’s try increasing it by 10%. Let’s try another 10%,’” Reynolds said. “Turns out that’s a pretty good rule of thumb to start with for a game designer, because the typical thing is to be really careful and try to inch up a little bit, and then you have to change it seven times to get it right. If you double it, you’ll immediately feel whether making it stronger was even a good idea.”

Meier: “I guess the next question is, ‘What would you do to try to make the game less fun?’”

The process works. Meier’s games are undoubtedly excellent, to the point where gamers often tell stories about them: “I started playing Civilization at 8pm and then suddenly it was four in the morning” is a common one. The word “addictive” is often thrown around—always with positive connotations, yes, but addiction can be a dangerous thing.

So I was curious, during a chat with Meier. Does he ever worry that his games could have a harmful effect on peoples’ lives?

“The responses we get on the forums, and interacting with players, and talking to people… our impression is that it’s a positive experience. It’s a way of using your leisure time that might otherwise be spent watching television or whatever. It’s a leisure time choice. So our reaction from players has been positive in terms of the time they spent, what they thought they got out of it, how they exercise their brains, and learn things about the world.

“I guess the next question is, ‘What would you do to try to make the game less fun?’ It’s funny—in some of the very early PC game designs, we used to have this ‘boss key,’ which you’d—you’d kinda hit a special key, and a spreadsheet would pop up on the screen so you could pretend you were doing your job. So I guess it’s been a consideration going back even 10 or 20 years. Games are just fun.

“It’s up, with any form of entertainment, it’s up to the player or parents to decide what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. Our goal is to make the games as fun as we can make them. I think that seems to be what most people are looking for.”

Civilization doesn’t have slaves, and some have criticized the game for that glaring historical omission. It’s a common trend in Meier’s works: although they cover history, they tend to omit the nastier parts. That’s just how Sid Meier makes games. It’s been that way from Civilization to SimGolf to any of the games he’s worked on in the two decades since.

“There’s a conflict between an emotionally-charged topic and kinda giving the player this freedom of choice that really makes the game good,” he said. “One of the things we really try to avoid in our games is this kind of—’this choice would be the right thing to do, but this choice is gonna help me win the game’—put the players in those kind of moral dilemmas. That’s not what our games are about. We want you to feel good about yourself when you finish the game.”

A feel-good, addictive experience with tons of interesting choices: that has become the definition of a “Sid Meier” game. Maybe that’s why they put his name on the box. There’s certainly value to video games that tell focused, morally-challenging stories—last year’s Spec Ops: The Line (published by 2K, the label behind Firaxis’s games) was lauded for just that reason—but Meier doesn’t want to make games like that. He wants to make the type of games that he wants to play.

Yet… to this day, Meier has yet to create a game as memorable or as significant as Civilization. After SimGolf was a remake of Pirates!, and then Meier designed the fourth Railroad Tycoon game, Railroads! Next was the console-friendly Civilization Revolutions, a Facebook game called CivWorld that shut down earlier this year, and Ace Patrol. All of these games, while generally good, have not stuck with people the way his magnum opus has. And although Meier told me he has no regrets—”Except that I didn’t think of Tetris.”—I imagine he must sometimes feel like Civilization is lording over him, daring him to make something with as much of an impact.

“When we made Civilization, it was not with the idea that this was gonna be the greatest game that we’re gonna be remembered by,” Meier said. “It was the best game to make at the time and we thought it was a lot of fun. Each game we make, we kinda go into it with that idea: this is gonna be the best game we can make on that topic. Some of them resonate stronger with game players; maybe some not as much. I don’t have a formula for making a super-memorable game. It’s just that we keep making the best games that we can.”(source:kotaku


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