A Never-Ending List
Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier
Overview
Sid Meier is certainly the most famous and well-respected Western computer game designer, and deservedly so. In his nearly twenty years of developing games, he has covered all manner of game designs and all types of subject matter. He co-founded Microprose and at first focused on flight simulators, culminating in his classic F-15
Strike Eagle and F-19 Stealth Fighter. Subsequently, he shifted to the style of game he is better known for today, developing such classics as Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon,
Covert Action, and Civilization, this last game being one of the most universally
admired game designs in the history of the form. In the late ’90s Meier founded a new company, Firaxis, where he created the truly unique RTS wargame Gettysburg! Most recently he has continued to take on new gameplay genres with the amusing course manager SimGolf. What strikes one most when looking back over his games is their consistent level of quality and the fact that he almost never repeats himself, always preferring to take on something new and different for his personal projects. If anyone has a solid grasp on what makes a game a compelling experience, it is Sid Meier.
Your first published games were flight simulators. Eventually you drifted over to doing what you are now known for — strategy games. What drove you from one genre to the other?
It was not a deliberate plan. I think I’ve always tried to write games about topics that I thought were interesting. There are just a lot of different topics, I guess. A lot of things that I’ve written games about are things that, as a kid, I got interested in, or found a neat book about the Civil War, or airplanes, or whatever. I think the other thing that drove that a little bit was the technology. That at certain times the technology is ready to do a good job with this kind of game or that kind of game. Or the market is ready for a strategy game, for example, or a game that you’ve wanted to do for a while but you didn’t think the time was right. The shift, specifically from flight simulators to strategy, came about for two reasons, I think. One, I had just finished F-19 Stealth Fighter, which included all of the ideas I had up to that point about flight simulation. Anything I did after that would be better graphics or more sounds or more scenarios or whatever, but I didn’t feel I had a lot of new ideas at that
point about flight simulation. Everything I thought was cool about a flight simulator had gone into that game. And the other thing was that I had spent some time playing SimCity and a game called Empire which got me to thinking about strategy in a grand sense, a game that really had a significant amount of scope and time and a lot of interesting decisions to be made. The combination of those two factors led me to do first Railroad Tycoon and then Civilization after that, as kind of a series of strategy games.
I find it dangerous to think in terms of genre first and then topic. Like, say, “I want to do a real-time strategy game. OK. What’s a cool topic?” I think, for me at least, it’s more
interesting to say, “I want to do a game about railroads. OK, now what’s the most
interesting way to bring that to life? Is it in real-time, or is it turn-based, or is it first-person . . . ” To first figure out what your topic is and then find interesting ways and an appropriate genre to bring it to life as opposed to coming the other way around and say, “OK, I want to do a first-person shooter; what hasn’t been done yet?” If you approach it from a genre point of view, you’re basically saying, “I’m trying to fit into a mold.” And I think most of the really great games have not started from that point of view. They first started with the idea that,
“Here’s a really cool topic. And by the way it would probably work really well as a real-time strategy game with a little bit of this in it.”
F-19 Stealth Fighter
So when you come up with your ideas for new games, you start with the setting of the game instead of with a gameplay genre.
I think a good example of that is Pirates! The idea was to do a pirate game, and then it was, “OK, there’s not really a genre out there that fits what I think is cool about pirates. The pirate movie, with the sailing, the sword fighting, the stopping in different towns and all that kind of stuff, really doesn’t fit into a genre.” So we picked and chose different pieces of different things like a sailing sequence in real-time and a menu-based adventuring system for going into town, and then a sword fight in an action sequence. So we picked different styles for the different parts of the game as we thought they were appropriate, as opposed to saying, “We’re going to do a game that’s real-time, or turn-based, or first-person, or whatever” and then make the pirates idea fit into that.
I think it’s interesting that Pirates! was designed with all those mini-games, but you haven’t really used discrete sub-games so much since. Did you not like the way the mini-games came together?
Well, I think it worked pretty well in Pirates! It doesn’t work for every situation. One of the rules of game design that I have learned over the years is that it’s better to have one great game than two good games. And, unless you’re careful, too many sub-games can lose the player. In other words, if you’ve got a good mini-game, then the player’s going to get
absorbed in that. And when they’re done with that, they may well have lost the thread of what your story was, or if any game is too engrossing it may disturb the flow of your story.
Frankly, the mini-games in Pirates! were simple enough that you didn’t lose track of where you were or what your objective was or what you were trying to do. But I wrote a game a couple of years later called Covert Action which had more intense mini-games. You’d go into a building, and you’d go from room to room, and you’d throw grenades and shoot people and open safes and all that kind of stuff and you’d spend probably ten minutes running through this building trying to find more clues and when you came out you’d say to yourself, “OK, what was the mission I was on, what was I trying to do here?” So that’s an example for me of the wrong way to have mini-games inside of an overall story.
Pirates!
I’ve read that Covert Action was one of your personal favorites among the games you designed.
I enjoyed it but it had that particular problem where the individual minisequences were a little too involving and they took you away from the overall case. The idea was that there was this plot brewing and you had to go from city to city and from place to place finding these clues that would tell you piece by piece what the overall plot was and find the people that were involved. I thought it was a neat idea, it was different. If I had it to do over again, I’d probably make a few changes. There was a code-breaking sequence, and circuit
unscrambling, and there were some cool puzzles in it. I thought that overall there were a lot of neat ideas in it but the whole was probably not quite as good as the individual parts. I would probably do a couple of things differently now.
So Covert Action seems to have had origins similar to Pirates! You started with, “I
want to do a covert espionage game . . . ”
Right, what are the cool things about that. And unfortunately, the technology had gotten to the point where I could do each individual part in more detail and that for me detracted from the overall comprehensibility of the game.
In Pirates! and Covert Action, the player can see their character in the game, and the player is really role-playing a character. By contrast, in Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, or Gettysburg!, the player does not really have a character to role-play. I’m curious about that shift in your game design, where the player used to be a specific
character and now is more of a godlike figure.
It’s good to be God. I think that’s really a scale issue more than a specific game design choice. It’s fun to see yourself, and even in a game like Civilization you see your palace, you do tend to see things about yourself. But the other thing is that a pirate looks cool, while a railroad baron doesn’t look especially cool. Why go to the trouble to put him on the screen? I’ve never really thought too much about that, but I think it’s probably more of a scale thing. If you’re going through hundreds and thousands of years of time, and you’re a semi-godlike character doing lots of different things, it’s less interesting what you actually look like than if you’re more of a really cool individual character.
Covert Action
So how did you first start working on Railroad Tycoon?
Well, it actually started as a model railroad game with none of the economic aspects and even more of the low-level running the trains. You would actually switch the switches and manipulate the signals in the original prototype. It kind of grew from that with a fair amount of inspiration from 1830, an Avalon Hill board game designed by Bruce Shelley, who I worked with on Railroad Tycoon. So, that inspired a lot of the economic side, the stock market aspects of the game. As we added that, we felt that we had too much range, too much in the game, that going all the way from flipping the switches to running the stock market was too much. We also wanted to have the march of technology with the newer engines over time, all the way up to the diesels. So there was just too much micro-
management involved when you had to do all the low-level railroading things. So we
bumped it up one level where all of the stuff that had to happen on a routine basis was done for you automatically in terms of switching and signaling. But if you wanted to, and you had an express or a special cargo or something, you could go in there and manipulate those if you really wanted to make sure that train got through on time, or a bridge was out and you had to stop the trains. But the origin of that was as a model railroading game and we added some of the more strategic elements over time.
It really was the inspiration for Civilization in a lot of ways, in terms of combining a couple of different, interesting systems that interacted continuously. The economic, the operational, the stock market, all interesting in their own right, but when they started to interact with each other was when the real magic started to happen. As opposed to Pirates! and Covert Action, where you had individual sub-games that monopolized the computer. When you were sword fighting, nothing else was going on. Here you had sub-games that were going on simultaneously and interacting with each other and we really thought that worked well both in Railroad Tycoon and later in Civilization, where we had military, political, and economic considerations all happening at the same time.
Railroad Tycoon
So in a way, you are still using sub-games; they just happen to all be in play all the time.
It’s not episodic in the way that Pirates! was. Whenever you’re making a decision you’re really considering all of those aspects at the same time. That’s part of what makes Civilization interesting. You’ve got these fairly simple individual systems; the military
system, the economic system, the production system are all pretty easy to understand on their own. But once you start trading them off against each other, it becomes more
complex: “I’ve got an opportunity to build something here. My military really needs another chariot, but the people are demanding a temple . . . ” So these things are always in play and I think that makes the game really interesting.
In Railroad Tycoon you’ve got a very interesting economic simulation going, but at the same time the player has the fun of constructing a railroad, much as a child would. Do you think that contributed to the game’s success?
It actually started there. And it was really the first game that I had done where you had this dramatic, dramatic change from the state at the beginning of the game to the state at the end of the game. Where, at the beginning of the game you had essentially nothing, or two stations and a little piece of track, and by the end of the game you could look at this
massive spiderweb of trains and say, “I did that.” And, again, that was a concept that we carried forward to Civilization, the idea that you would start with this single settler and a little bit of land that you knew about and by the end of the game you had created this
massive story about the evolution of civilization and you could look back and say, “That was me, I did that.” The state of the game changed so dramatically from the beginning to the end, there was such a sense of having gotten somewhere. As opposed to a game like Pirates! or all the games before that where you had gotten a score or had done something, but there was not this real sense that the world was completely different. I think that owes a lot to SimCity, probably, as the first game that really did a good job of creating that feeling.
Were you at all inspired by the Avalon Hill board game Civilization when you made your computer version?
We did play it, I was familiar with it, but it was really less of an inspiration than, for
example, Empire or SimCity. Primarily, I think, because of the limitations of board games.
There were some neat ideas in there, but a lot of the cool things in Civ., the exploration, the simultaneous operation of these different systems, are very difficult to do in a board game.
So there were some neat ideas in the game, and we liked the name. [laughter] But in terms of actual ideas they were probably more from other sources than the Civilization board game.
Railroad Tycoon
A lot of your games seem to be inspired in part from board games. But, as you just said, Civilization would never really work as a board game. How do you take an idea that you liked in a board game and transfer it into something that really is a
computer game instead of just a straight translation?
Before there were computers, I played a lot of board games and I was into Avalon Hill games, et cetera. I think they provided a lot of seed ideas for games. Often they are a good model of what’s important, what’s interesting, and what’s not about a topic. But once you get into mechanics and interface and those kind of things, really there starts to be a pretty significant difference between board games and computer games. There’s a lot of interesting research material sometimes in board games. Often they’re interesting for “we need some technologies” or “we need to think about which units,” et cetera. There’s that kind of overlap in terms of the basic playing pieces sometimes. But how they are used and so forth, those things are pretty different between board games and computer games. I would say board games provide an interesting review of topics that are available and topics that are interesting. But once it gets into the actual game itself there is a wide difference between computer games and board games, in my mind.
One of the most remarkable things about Civilization is its addictive quality. I was wondering if that came about by luck or if you planned it from the start.
We didn’t really envision that. We intend for all of our games to be fun to play and hope that they are addictive to some degree. But Civilization had a magic addictiveness that we
really didn’t design, that we really didn’t anticipate. I think any game where everything falls together in a really neat way is going to have that quality. I think that it’s really a result of how well the pieces fit together and how I think we picked a good scale, a good complexity level, a good number of things to do. I think we made some wise decisions in designing that game. And the sum of all those decisions is addictiveness. And I think that it was a good topic. A lot of things were right about that game, and that all came together to create this addictive quality. It was not something that we designed in, but it was something that we were kind of aware of.
Civilization
About halfway through the process we realized that, wow, this game really is a lot of fun to play. It was a pleasant discovery for us.
So you don’t have any advice for how other designers can try to achieve that addictiveness in their own games?
I think in hindsight we know, or we think we know, why the game is addictive, or have our theories. One thing is what we call “interesting decisions.” To us that means you are
presented with a stream of decision points where the decisions are not so complex that you are basically randomly choosing from a list of options. A too-complex decision is one where you say, “Oh, I’ve got these three options. Yeah, I could spend five minutes analyzing the situation, but I really want to get on with the game so I’m going to pick B because it looks good.” And on the other extreme there’s the too-simple decisions: “It’s obvious that I must choose A, because it is clearly better than all of the other options.” In Civ. we try to present you choices where they are easy enough to understand, but in a certain situation you might choose A, in a slightly different situation B is a good choice, in another situation C is a good choice. So you’re really saying, “Here are the three technologies that I can go for next.” And you say to yourself, “Well, right now I’m about to get into a conflict with those no-good
Romans. So I really need that technology that gives me the next cool military unit. But, well, that map-making looks kind of interesting. Next time I might take that because I want to do some exploring.” So if you can create decisions where the player is always saying, “Next time, I’m going to try that one, because that looks interesting too,” that creates this whole idea that there’s this richness there that you’re only scratching the surface of this time.
The addictive quality, I think, also falls out of the fact that you’ve got multiple things
happening or in process at the same time. On the one hand you’ve got your next technology churning away over there. Your scientists are working on that. And this city is making that first tank that you’re looking forward to. Over here is a unit wandering around to the next continent, and pretty soon he’ll find something interesting. You’ve got different things that you are looking forward to in the game, and there’s never a time when those are all done.
There’s never a reset state. There’s always two or three things happening in the game that you are looking forward to when they finish. So there’s never actually a good time to stop playing. I think that really helps the “you can never stop playing the game” phenomenon.
I know Gettysburg! was not your first real-time game, but it seems to have been in part inspired by the big hit RTS games like Command & Conquer and WarCraft.
I think the technology had gotten to the point where you could have a whole bunch of little guys running around doing stuff on the screen in real-time. And what you call “real-time,” it’s kind of a weird term because we’ve done real-time games forever, but we didn’t think of them as real-time because it just seemed a natural thing. But I guess when turn-based got to be its own genre, we had to make a distinction. I think Gettysburg! is a game that I