Since you started in game development, development teams have grown from
one or two people to a standard number of twenty or more. Do you think that
has made games less personal?
I think it did, but there are still games today that have that personal touch. And I think
those are the good games. I think that a lot of the games that are not so much fun are
those that have this “designed by committee, programmed by a horde” feeling to them.
And, yeah they look good, and they are kind of reminiscent of maybe one or two other
games that were good. But they don’t have that personal spark. To me,RollerCoaster
Tycoonis a good example of a personal game. It really feels like somebody thought that
was cool. Nobody said, “That’s goofy” or “That’s stupid.” A lot of the ideas there are
very clever, but if you brought it up before a committee they would say, “Oh really,
won’t people think that’s silly?” And evenFinal Fantasy, in spite of its massive team, is
really the product of one person’s vision. And if you can keep that going in a big team,
that’s great. But I think that it becomes harder and harder the larger the team is to keep
that personal vision alive and not get watered down by the committee approach.
You still serve as both lead programmer and lead designer on your projects.
Are you happiest filling both roles?
I cannot imagine working in another way. It’s just much more efficient for me to have an
idea and just type it into the computer than to try to explain it to somebody else and see
what happens. So, again, it’s my personal style, but to me it’s the most efficient way to
get something done.
On most modern projects at other companies, you have one person who’s the
lead designer, and one person who’s the lead programmer, and they’re both
very busy. It would appear that performing both roles you would be completely
overwhelmed.
Well, I think they probably spend half their time talking to each other, which is some-
thing I don’t have to do. I would see a certain efficiency in cutting out all those
meetings. But certainly it works both ways. Either way can work, but my personal pref-
erence is for the designer/programmer approach.
Now that you are working on a larger team, how do you communicate your
game design vision to the rest of the team and get them excited about the
project?
Our primary tool is the prototype. In our development, one of the advantages of being a
programmer/designer is that within a week or two we can throw together something
that feels like a game. That gives people the idea of what the game is going to be about,
how it’s going to work, the general parameters of it. Again, if we’re working on a histor-
ical or scientific topic, most people are half-way into it already, they know something
about the topic. And then just talking, saying here’s the kind of game I want to do, and
here are the three or four really cool things that are going to happen in the game that are
going to be the payoffs. Putting those things together I think gives people a pretty good
idea of what direction we’re headed. At that point you want people not to get the whole
picture, but to figure out where they fit in and can contribute their own things that
32 Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier