hopefully you hadn’t even thought of, in terms of cool art or cool sounds or neat ideas.
In a way you don’t want it to be so complete that it feels done, because you want people
to feel that they can make their own contributions above and beyond what you’ve
already thought of.
So if someone else comes up with some cool ideas to add to your game design,
you’re happy to incorporate those even though you didn’t come up with them.
I’m happy to steal those and claim they were my ideas years later. [laughter]
With your prototyping system, do you ever try out a game and then it just
doesn’t work out as you had hoped?
Yup, I have a whole group of directories on my hard drive that fall into that category. And
many of the games that turned out to be products started in a very different direction.
Civilization, for example, was originally much more likeSimCity, much more zone this
territory for farms, and place a city here and watch it grow. Initially it was much more of
a stand-back-and-watch-it-evolve approach; it only became turn-based after a couple of
months. I mentioned thatRailroad Tycoonstarted out as a model railroading game. A lot
of times the prototypes will have to be radically modified to work. That’s the whole idea
of the prototype: to pretty quickly give you an idea of does the idea work, does it not
work, and what are the major problems. It lets you focus on the big issues first, and
hopefully straighten those out.
Your games seem very easy to pick up and learn to play. But at the same time
they have very deep, interesting gameplay. How do you manage to accomplish
both?
The easy-to-play part is
pretty well understood. I
think interface conven-
tions, and again getting
back to the idea of a famil-
iar topic helps people to
get right into it because
they know a little bit of
what they should be
doing. You want to give
the players a lot of posi-
tive feedback early in the
game to give them the
idea they’re on the right
track. In Civilization,
pretty quickly the people
add something to your
palace, and you get a population milestone, and your first city is formed. You want to
give the players, especially in the early stages, the idea that they’re on the right track,
that everything they do, the computer acknowledges it, recognizes it, and thinks it’s
Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier 33
Civilization