makesCivilizationinteresting. You’ve got these fairly simple individual systems; the
military system, the economic system, the production system are all pretty easy to
understand on their own. But once you start trading them off against each other, it
becomes more complex: “I’ve got an opportunity to build something here. My military
really needs another chariot, but the people are demanding a temple...” Sothese
things are always in play and I think that makes the game really interesting.
InRailroad Tycoonyou’ve got a very interesting economic simulation going, but
at the same time the player has the fun of constructing a railroad, much as a
child would. Do you think that contributed to the game’s success?
It actually started there.
And it was really the first
game that I had done
where you had this dra-
matic, dramatic change
from the state at the
beginning of the game to
the state at the end of the
game. Where, at the
beginning of the game
you had essentially noth-
ing, or two stations and a
little piece of track, and
by the end of the game
you could look at this
massive spiderweb of
trains and say, “I did
that.” And, again, that
was a concept that we carried forward toCivilization, the idea that you would start with
this single settler and a little bit of land that you knew about and by the end of the game
you had created this massive story about the evolution of civilization and you could look
back and say, “That was me, I did that.” The state of the game changed so dramatically
from the beginning to the end, there was such a sense of having gotten somewhere. As
opposed to a game likePirates!or all the games before that where you had gotten a
score or had done something, but there was not this real sense that the world was com-
pletely different. I think that owes a lot toSimCity, probably, as the first game that really
did a good job of creating that feeling.
Were you at all inspired by the Avalon Hill board gameCivilizationwhen you
made your computer version?
We did play it, I was familiar with it, but it was really less of an inspiration than, for
example,EmpireorSimCity. Primarily, I think, because of the limitations of board
games. There were some neat ideas in there, but a lot of the cool things inCiv., the
exploration, the simultaneous operation of these different systems, are very difficult to
do in a board game. So there were some neat ideas in the game, and we liked the name.
Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier 25
Railroad Tycoon