Sid Meier’s Civilization

Sid Meier has a definition of a game that gets quoted a lot: a series of interesting decisions. Civilization is what happens when that idea is applied to the whole of human history.

It started with boredom. By 1989, Meier had built MicroProse’s reputation on flight simulators and military titles. He was good at them and done with them. SimCity and Populous had just demonstrated that you could hold a player’s attention without a cockpit or a war room, and Meier paid attention. He wanted scope – not a battle, not a campaign, but the entire arc of a civilisation from a single settler in 4000 BC to a rocket bound for Alpha Centauri.

He started coding in early 1990 and handed the first playable prototype to his collaborator Bruce Shelley that May, on a 5¼” floppy disk. What followed was two years of iterative design – Meier building, Shelley playing, both of them refining. The technology tree, the fog of war, the Wonders of the World, the diplomatic relationships between rival leaders: all of it came out of that back-and-forth. MicroProse’s management thought so little of the project that they made it difficult to secure art and playtesting resources. They were wrong about most things, as it turned out.

Civilization shipped in September 1991 with almost no promotion. Word of mouth did what the marketing budget didn’t. Players found it and told other players, and those players lost weeks to it. The experience was unlike anything else available at the time – not because of technical spectacle but because of what it asked of you. Every decision connected to every other. Research choices made in 3000 BC determined what your army could field in a war you hadn’t anticipated. A city placement that made sense in the ancient era became a liability by the Renaissance. The game had a longer memory than you did.

The press noticed quickly. Computer Gaming World gave it an award for best strategy game of 1991 within months of release, and reviews consistently struggled to convey the scale of what Meier had built – most settled for calling it the most ambitious strategy game ever made and leaving it at that. It sold over a million copies without a marketing campaign behind it. MicroProse’s management, who had made the project difficult at every stage, were now sitting on one of the best-selling PC games of the era. Meier described the period that followed as a golden time for the studio, though the goodwill didn’t last – the company’s disastrous push into arcade hardware would eventually sink it.

Meier described the “one more turn” effect as being about projection. “What fuelled this phenomenon,” he said, “was that you were always projecting what was going to happen next, and what was going to happen eight turns from now.” That forward-looking tension was the engine. You’d tell yourself you were done, and then a barbarian would threaten a border city, or a rival would edge ahead in the tech race, or you were three turns from completing the Great Wall and stopping now was simply not an option. Computer Gaming World named it the best game ever made in 1996. Five years of perspective and the verdict hadn’t shifted.

The cultural impact was substantial and strange. Civilization made history feel like a system that could be understood and manipulated – progress as a linear tree of technologies, each one unlocking the next, leading to space travel. Historians took issue with it. Nobody stopped playing. The Gandhi nuclear weapons bug became one of gaming’s most enduring pieces of mythology, which tells you something about how deeply the game lodged itself in the popular imagination.

The direct lineage from that floppy disk is enormous. Bruce Shelley left MicroProse in 1992 and went to Ensemble Studios, where his experience on Civilization fed directly into Age of Empires. Master of Orion, released the following year, took the core framework into space and in doing so gave the genre its name – 4X, coined by Alan Emrich in his preview of that game, though the template Civilization established was already there. Brian Reynolds took Civilization II further than Meier had gone. Firaxis, the studio Meier co-founded after MicroProse collapsed, has since built seven mainline entries on the same foundation. The series has shipped over 70 million copies.

Load the original today and it is rough around the edges – the interface is functional in the way that a screwdriver is functional, the AI has a fixed ceiling, and every subsequent entry in the series has improved on the mechanical bones. What it is not is irrelevant. The thing that made it work in 1991 is still there: the sense that your choices matter, that the world is responding to you, that something worth seeing might happen on the next turn. Thirty-three years of sequels, imitators and genre successors, and that core problem remains unsolved. People are still trying to build it again.