students devised for their university’s Buick-sized PDP-1 computer. Computer Space was a clone of Spacewar!, a 1961 game that a group of M.I.T.
SID MEIERS RAILROADS RUNNING BUT NOT VISIBLE SIMULATOR
One of those games, a spaceship-fighting simulator created by a pair of electrical engineers, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was dubbed Computer Space. In 1971, the year Meier entered the University of Michigan to study computer science, the first coin-operated video games appeared in American bars, stealing attention from pinball machines and pool tables. Meier came to computers just as computers were coming to the world. In Meier’s memoir, we discover that he was a good game-maker when he fought this essential fact, but that he became great when he learned to embrace it. A growing pile of video-game histories-such as Tristan Donovan’s “ Replay” and the two-volume “ The Ultimate History of Video Games,” by Steven Kent-suggest that the medium has always had collective effort at its heart, from its academic beginnings to its ascent into everyday life. Even Meier’s memoir is the result of a collaboration with Jennifer Lee Noonan, a former sound designer for video games. The game is put together by hundreds of hands, from producers, designers, illustrators, and coders to marketers, play testers, and skin-modding fans. Like Meier, Zuckerberg signed his software: when launched, in 2004, it was “a Mark Zuckerberg production.” Facebook is now a much larger enterprise, as is Civilization. “It’s my favorite strategy game and one of the reasons I got into engineering.” “I’ve been playing Civilization since middle school,” the Facebook C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a post on his Web site. Many of the people who helped create our virtual environments cut their teeth by making and playing video games. Graphics processors designed in the nineteen-nineties for first-person shooters became useful, a decade later, to the developers of the neural nets that power our social-media platforms. Today, we swim through a digital soup made by machines that were developed, in large part, to play games. It provides a whistle-stop tour of the video-game industry as it evolved across Meier’s four-decade career. The latest rectangle to bear his name is not a game but a book: “ Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games” (W. We’re now on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. There were sequels to Civilization, which Meier had little to do with. The Sid Meier stamp exploded, popping up on Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and Sid Meier’s SimGolf. Players realized that they had found a gem. And then, in 1991, with little marketing fanfare, Civilization appeared. In 1990, Meier’s earlier collaboration with Shelley resulted in Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, a construction simulator that spawned a slew of copycats. In 1987, we got Sid Meier’s Pirates!, in which you sail your way across the Caribbean, evolving from a winsome privateer to a peg-legged Blackbeard. History rolls on.Ĭivilization didn’t mark the first time Meier’s name appeared on a box. You can dominate your neighbors or strive to outshine them. Eventually, the rest of the world is revealed-a patchwork of nations. You learn metalwork, horse riding, feudalism, democracy, and diplomatic relations. In Civilization, you start with a covered wagon on a map that is largely obscured. The pair were inspired by the illustrated history books you might find on a middle-school library shelf, and by titles like Seven Cities of Gold (1984), a video game of Spanish conquest created by the designer Danielle Berry. Meier released Civilization thirty years ago this month, after developing it with Bruce Shelley, a veteran board-game designer. He’s also known for having his name on the box. Sid Meier is famous for creating the video game Civilization.
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