If something happens in the game to kind of reduce that a little bit, it wraps around to become like the largest energy number, where he becomes very aggressive and kind of leads to this nuclear, uh, confrontation.

It's possible that I put a bug in there, but it was not intentional.

Hi, I'm sid meier, the creator of civilization.

This is how we built a game that makes you want to take just one more turn.

Microprose actually kind of started as a flight simulator company and after a while, I kind of felt we had exhausted that genre and wanted to try new things.

Uh, so we did, we made pirates, we made covert action, railroad tycoon and then eventually civilization, civilization actually evolved out of a couple of projects that we had done previously.

Railroad tycoon I think is probably the primary one that kind of was our first uh, so called God game, a game, which was more about building than it was about blowing things up.

And I remember Bruce Shelley and I were on a train ride to new york for some event?

And we said, you know, Well that was fun.

That was a fun game.

What should we do next?

And it was like, well what's bigger, what's more epic?

What's cooler than than railroads?

How about the story of all of civilization, civilization is a game that allows you to experience 6000 years of history.

Starting very small with, with the first city, you control a civilization, you explore the world, you interact with other leaders, you developed technology to expand the things that you can do.

You engage in military operations sounds very complicated but everything is done in a very understandable way.

And it and it starts small and kind of layers on these these additional elements as the game progresses.

So you feel kind of in control the idea for for a tech tree which I think was unique and original to civilization came from a book that I was looking at this one had kind of a timeline of history in it where it would lay out different political advancements or social policies or military things and I would get, I went kind of with my, my yellow marker went through that book and say, okay, bronze working is here, aren't working, you know, gunpowder uh that almost became the template for the tech tree and it just felt like a very easy to understand mechanism for showing the player how things are connected, giving them kind of an insight into the future, giving them goals and things to look forward to.

You know, to two steps down the tech tree.

I can get to this.

Uh and it felt like just something to very much hang the structure of the game on that something that would start simple and again grow and grow and grow as you got further and further into the game.

Every game is different.

Every game is your unique story about how you guided your civilization from antiquity into the space age.

So we have this phrase which which is the Valley of Despair that every project seems to go through this this this Valley of despair, like halfway through, you know, this game is not fun.

Nobody likes it.

I can't figure out how to make this work.

It's not working.

Nobody likes me, I don't know, but nobody will talk to me.

This is terrible.

Sieve went through that in the kind of transition between the real time version and the turn based version.

So our first approach to this grand topic of civilization was inspired a lot by, by Sim City, the idea of zoning and part of your map to build a new city, maybe creating a zone over here for farmers.

Um, and having everything happened in a kind of a real time process where you watched it gradually grow and now you're ready to zone this.

Maybe you want to zone this area for mining and you kind of do these things in the first prototypes that we created, You do these things and kind of sit back and watch it kind of happen.

And that was that was kind of okay, but it really didn't, it didn't engage you as much as we really felt the game the game needed to.

So we actually put that prototype away for a while and we completed another game, which was covert action, which I started and also put away.

But I think I think actually builds daily our president was part of the said said you need to finish that covert action game, which was probably a good thing because that that kind of took us away from the the real time zone based version of civilization.

The conceit behind that game was creating an interactive story, the idea of creating a story, but that was going to turn out differently each time.

And it was kind of controlled by the player, you know, interactive literature, an interactive spy story.

And what we derived from covert action was what we call the covert action rule, which was a failing.

We thought of the game was that these action sequences were kind of intense and immersive enough that by the time you finish them you had kind of forgotten you'd lost the thread of the plot.

You know, what was what was gonna happen and what was I trying to prevent or when is that gonna So it was almost like, you know, 22 good games in one package actually kind of conflict with each other.

So it's interesting to think what would have happened if if city had never become a turn based game, if it had stayed a real time game.

I think a good example of that is age of empires.

Um at the time we could have never had that many units running around on the screen.

And you know, had we didn't have the technology to make an age of empires.

Uh had we had that technology maybe would have gone in that direction.

But it's interesting to compare Age of Empires with civilization.

I mean Age of Empires focuses on a smaller area.

The individual decisions are more minute.

Uh So in order to keep the complexity under control, it focuses on a shorter period of time and a smaller area of of the world of the map.

Um I think those are those are smart decisions.

I think there's a certain amount of complexity that the player can can kind of enjoy and there's a larger amount that becomes work.

So I think that um trying to do a real time version of Civ, that tried to cover the expanse of what the turn based game does would would just be completely overwhelming.

I think the turning point for Civ was when we switched from real time to Turn Base.

And that really only happened because I finished another game in in the room, I put the real time version on the shelf, finished covert action and kind of came back to it with uh with kind of fresh eyes.

And uh I had this idea about about, you know, making a turn based, making it giving a lot of different things to do control individual units, etcetera.

And that was what really made the difference in the game probably what what triggered that in my mind was having played a game called Empire, which had the characteristics of unveiling, exploring a map and had individual units moving around.

And I kind of remember that those aha moments of uh you know, another unit, enemy units showing up and you say, oh they're over there now, I see how that this is gonna work or the kind of immersion that moving individual units gave you.

I realized that that was something was missing from our original prototype and we we slammed it in there and all of a sudden magic started to happen, civilization is is now known for the one more turn phenomenon.

And I would love to say that we uh you know, on day one we said this has got to have one more turn.

Uh we actually didn't realize there was such a thing as one more turn until really the game was out there and we started getting feedback from from players and we would get these letters like uh you know, I I couldn't stop playing.

I looked up at the clock and it was three o'clock in the morning.

So we said, well we gotta figure out what's going on here because this is, this is unique, this is this is cool, How do we, how do we make sure that we keep this?

And uh so we, we kind of analyzed what was happening and it was this idea of the game giving you short term and medium term and long term goals that were all, uh, kind of in your mind at one time and you might, you might complete a short term goal, but bang, another short term goal popped up, and you're still working on this medium term goal.

And um, there was never a time in the game where you, kind of, had, had completed everything that you wanted to do, you're always looking forward to, um, you know, when I get that new technology, I can do this when I explore that new continent, this is gonna happen.

So there's always these things that you're looking forward to the game is actually playing, playing out in your mind, anticipating what's happening.

You're not, you're almost not playing at the moment, You're playing into the future and that future is just one more turn ahead.

So, we've created this phenomenon that we really didn't uh, anticipate, but we're now proud to claim.

So, my advice, if you find yourself in the, in the Valley of despair, is to try something new and different, We have another rule which is to double it, or cut it in half rule, which is, if you're gonna make a change, make it dramatic, if the number is wrong, you know, don't add 10% or take away 3% you know, double it or cut it in half, you know, so that if you try a lot of, kind of dramatic change is something that's gonna stick, something that's gonna work.

It's gonna show you a new direction and you can climb out of the of the Valley of Despair When the 25th anniversary of civilization rolled around, I realized we had in our basement some of the original computers that were used to create the game.

I thought it would be fun to try to resurrect those.

There were actually two of these compact death pro-386 computers that I had saved for all those years and we brought them in here and tried to fire them up.

One of them actually exploded when we plugged it in, there was a bunch of dust around the power supply that caught fire and the fan blue flames out the back of it.

So we shut that one now.

But we were able to fire this computer up.

The only problem was the battery had died and we couldn't boot it because the there was no power.

We finally managed to do that by finding this floppy disk.

But now we can't turn the machine off because we won't be able to turn it back on again.

So it's been running here for for over a year.

But this is the computer that the majority of city development was was done on and it's running the fabulous dos operating system here.

So I'm gonna go into the directory which is called civilized and run this early version of the game here are the option here.

This is where it starts start a new game, uh, Earth Play on the Earth.

This is the beginning of civilization here.

So, we'll start a new game, an early version of our intro sequence.

This is really ah something we did to make this game feel epic.

These are all kind of temporary graphics that I did with the paint and finally hired a real artist to eventually replace these.

And to me, this is the classic civilization visual that that first settler, the tiny little bit of the world revealed and the rest of the world to explore.

Basically anything can happen.

From this point on where do you place your city?

What's gonna happen next?

It's all ready to unfold in the epic saga of civilization.