really cool. That gets the players into the game.
In terms of the depth, that’s really because we play the games. The other advan-
tage of prototyping is that if you have a game that takes two years to write, you spend
one year and eleven months playing the game. You get pretty bored with the beginning
of the game after a while. In one sense you are putting that depth in the game to keep
yourself interested in writing this game. If there’s twenty or forty hours of gameplay in
a scenario, it’s because we have played those scenarios for twenty or forty hours and
found that, after about twenty hours, it gets a little thin. We have to come in with a new
thing and make this problem a little more interesting, a little more complex at that
point. So a lot of the depth comes out of the fact that we have intensively played the
game for long periods of time.
Do you find that prototyping facilitates balancing as well?
Playing the prototype really facilitates balancing. It also really helps with writing the AI
if you’ve played the game enough so that you really understand what are good strate-
gies, bad strategies, and interesting strategies. Having played the game quite a bit
helps to write the AI, it’s good for the depth. The danger is that you lose sight of the
beginning player. That’s why we go back to playtesting at the end of the game’s devel-
opment. And we say, “Here’s what we think the game is, try and play it.” And we
invariably find that they can’t play it. There’s just too much of that cool stuff in there. So
we say, “All right, where are you getting stuck?” We’re essentially unable to see the
game in that light anymore. But you need to have both the depth and the ease of entry.
Those are both important.
Your games all are grounded in history or real-life events, as opposed to many
games which have fantasy or science fiction settings. Is this because you enjoy
creating a game-world that the player is already somewhat familiar with?
I do think that’s important. It does add a lot when you can apply your own knowledge to
a game. I think that makes you feel better about yourself, and I think that’s a positive
thing. I think it also gives me a lot more to work with in terms of a historical or realistic
situation. I probably grew up in a time also when there was less of the Middle Earth, the
fantasy, theStar Wars, et cetera. Kids these days think these things are just as real as
history. Spaceships, magicians, and wizards are as real to a lot of kids as airplanes, sub-
marines, and things like that. It’s kind of an evolutionary thing, but in my growing up it
was things like airplanes, submarines, the Civil War, and the Roman Empire that were
interesting and cool things, and I try to translate those things into games.
I am curious about how you balance historical realism with the gameplay.
Gettysburg!seems to be one case where you had to break the gameplay up into
scenarios to keep it both historically accurate and fun.
That was one of the few times that we actually gave in to historical reality. In general
our rule is if you come to a conflict between fun and history, you go with the fun. You can
justify any game decision somewhere in history. Our decisions are made almost exclu-
sively to the benefit, hopefully, of the gameplay as opposed to the historical accuracy. In
Gettysburg!we came to a situation that we could just not fudge, though we tried. We
34 Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier