CIVILIZATION REVOLUTION

I was still stung that I’d done such a poor job on the XCOM prototype. It was embarrassing and humbling. But it was a real opportunity. I learned all the stuff that I didn’t know, and wanted to do a better job of it. Then I went to work with Sid again on Civilization Revolution, but this time with very wide eyes. I watched and listened and talked to him all the

time. Because I was like, ‘How the fuck does he do it in a weekend? Why is he so good at doing this thing I couldn’t do in six months?’ Here’s one of the best people to ever do it, and I had not been humble enough to take advantage of that before.

I moved into this role where I worked very closely with Sid. He would design something, and I was the go-between for him and the engineering team. He would want things to work a certain way, and the engineers wouldn’t understand why, because it would make programming the engine hard. I could mediate between the two and say, “Well, it’s really important because of this gameplay reason”. I was so interested now in how Sid worked, I was his advocate to the team.

I was playing the game constantly, just like Sid was. And really, that’s the most important thing. You’ve gotta eat your own cooking. You’ve got to play it, no matter what state it’s in, then think about what’s bad about it, and try to make it better the next day.

What was it like to streamline Civilization for consoles? I was never a huge Civ guy, and I think that helped me. There were a lot of designers who contributed to what it is today, from Brian Reynolds to Soren Johnson, but Sid made it, and Sid was then able to distill it. For me, that was definitely my favourite Civ I had played at that point, because it was so distilled, and it was really neat to see him do that.

I’m 100 per cent a designer [today] because I worked with Sid on Civilization Revolution and watched how he worked. Sid deserves to have an ego, but he doesn’t. He just wants to make the game better. He’ll listen to feedback and accept it as fact. That has always steered me right.

CivRev involved streamlining and simplification that readied Firaxis for further controller-friendly games

An urban legend holds that Gandhi would sometimes plump for nuclear holocaust in the original Civilization – though Meier denies it. Firaxis has played up to Nuclear Gandhi’s reputation: in Civ V, he became the AI leader most likely to stockpile nukes