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The Story Behind Sid Meier's Civilization

Because of the animosity that MicroProse's management had towards Meier's games, there was very little promotion of the title, though interest in the game through word-of-mouth helped to boost sales. He said that by contrast, minefields and minesweepers caused the computer to do "stupid things ... This put stress on the company's direction and culture.

During this period, Stealey and the other managers became concerned that this game did not fit MicroProse's general catalog as strategy computer games had not yet proven successful. Most of the game was originally developed with art crafted by Meier, and MicroProse's art department helped to create most of the final assets, though some of Meier's original art was used. Meier and Shelley neared the end of their development and started presenting the game to the rest of MicroProse for feedback towards publication.

How Sid Meier's Civilization Plays

The game can be won by conquering all other civilizations or by winning the space race by reaching the star system of Alpha Centauri. In contrast to later games in the Civilization series, this is largely a cosmetic choice, affecting titles, city names, musical heralds, and color. Wonders provide unique benefits to the controlling civilization.

The choice does affect their starting position on the "Play on Earth" map, and thus different resources in one's initial cities, but has no effect on starting position when starting a random world game or a customized world game. The following civilizations appear in the game: Americans, Aztecs, Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians, English, French, Germans, Greeks, Indians, Mongols, Romans, Russians and Zulus. Each wonder can only be built once in the world, and requires a lot of resources to build, far more than most other city buildings or units.

Why Players Still Load It Up

It was theorized that the game started Gandhi's "aggression value" at 1 out of a maximum 255 possible for an 8-bit unsigned integer, making a computer-controlled Gandhi tend to avoid armed conflict. The reviewers gave the game 5 out of 5 stars and commented that: "Civilization is one of the highest dollar-to-play-ratio entertainments we've enjoyed. He noted that all leaders in the game become "pretty ornery" after their acquisition of nuclear weapons, and suggested that this behaviour simply seemed more surprising and memorable when it happened to Gandhi.

This high level of interest has led to the creation of a number of free and open source versions and inspired similar games by other commercial developers. The misinformation around this bug led to the meme known as "Nuclear Gandhi". That year MicroProse published Master of Magic, a similar game but embedded in a medieval-fantasy setting where instead of technologies the player (a powerful wizard) develops spells, among other things.

Sid Meier's Civilization — Frequently Asked Questions