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 dif-
ferent topics, I guess. A
lot of things that I’ve writ-
ten 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 strat-
egy 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 finishedF-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 playingSimCityand a game calledEmpirewhich 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 firstRailroad Tycoonand thenCivilizationafter 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...”Tofirst 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.”
Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier 21
F-19 Stealth Fighter