CIVILIZATION III

Developer Firaxis Games Publisher Infogrames Format PC Release 2001

Firaxis was the only game studio I interviewed at. I had already accepted a job – I was going to be a business consultant. They’d already given me a signing bonus. Sid [Meier] was working on a game called Dinosaurs, which never actually came out. He had me look at it

and tell him what I thought. Back then, game developers were rockstars. At the end of the day they offered me the position, and they were gonna pay me way less than I was going to make as a business consultant. But I didn’t care, obviously. I had spent some of the signing bonus and I was so naive, I figured they’d be like, “We get it”. Instead they were like, “No, you have to pay back the fucking signing bonus”.

The company was very small at that time, maybe 20 or 25 people, because half had left with Brian Reynolds to go start Big Huge Games. It was a pure stroke of luck that they would hire a guy out of college. Soren Johnson and I started the same day, with another guy named Mike Breitkreutz. We were their programming department because everybody else had left, and we didn’t even know enough to know that was insane. I was technically a graphics programmer, but back in those days I was woefully underqualified to do that. I worked on Civilization III for a year and a half. It was a crazy, crazy time, and a lot of fun. I’m thankful that I was so naive, because I think if I’d known how little I knew, I would have been a lot more intimidated.

Critics largely agreed that Civ III at least matched up to its predecessors. Jeff Briggs, who oversaw design, also composed the musical piece that lent Firaxis its name