Interview with Sid Meier | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Sid Meier

polygon.com

I think that Alpha Centaury is one of the best games and it also beats Civ with all due respect (Disclaimer: never played recent Civ games, has dislike for history and fan of Science Fiction).

It is very atmospheric. From all kinds of blurbs and cinematic linked to scientific breakthroughts, buildings, projects and factions you assemble puzzle in your mind which makes towards an awesome SF plot of dystopian future on hostile planet with distinct characters, ups and downs, secrets and revelations.

And the gameplay is awesome too, spent many months on it. Many things in this game are configurable via text configs. Graphics are available for tinkering too.

UPD: Having said all that, Master of Magic, non-Sid Meyer game, is still more potent than everything he made. A true jewel, perhaps underappreciated. It has turned 20 and I play it every few years and it never gets old. And I know nothing about people who made it.

Master of Magic was about the best and I think they used the Civ engine as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Magic

Many attempts to remake the game failed.

It is like the Bard's Tale series, hard to remake. The Bard's Tale remake was not as good as the original series for MS-DOS, Amiga, Apple //gs, Atari ST etc.

And if anyone was a fan of the Master of Orion series (as they should be), it's getting a new game: http://www.gog.com/game/master_of_orion

I'm wary of it, but looking forward to it at the same time. I'm hoping for something like the XCom revival, but...

On the other hand, I recently started playing MOO2 again and it's just as fantastic as ever. Brilliantly balanced, quick to play, lots of different strategies, etc. I haven't found a 4X game since that really quite got all of the things right.

Try MoO1, a much better game. MoO2 is way too bloated for its own good.

(Get a recent fan patch for MoO1, if you play it.)

Even though I've spent more hours in MOO2, I also agree MOO1 is better. The mechanics make it a funner game.

Have you checked out http://www.moo2mod.com/ ? It's a great community keeping the MOO2 spirit alive :)

I love Master of Magic as well! It's a shame the game has so many bugs. Fans have done a marvelous job fixing a ton of the bugs using fan made patches, though! [0]

[0] http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Mod

FYI, Alpha Centauri (with an _i_) was designed by Brian Reynolds, not Sid. Even so, it came from the same pedigree and I totally agree -- amazing game!

"People remember the big incidents. They have memories of the time they had this great big battle and finally captured that city, or Gandhi nuked them or whatever" I remember that I had to choose between curing cancer(which would have made my people happier) and some cool military technology for my next invasion ... Well, my people were allready quite happy :)

Another important note is how Sid Meier was involved with the newest XCOM games as a co-designer and mentor to Jake Solomon. The marketing and promo for the games are centered a lot around Solomon as the figurehead for the game to the point that people commonly complain about the numerous (not game-breaking normally) bugs with "Jake, fix your game." Nobody really ever had that attitude with the Alpha Centauri, Civilization, etc. games to my memory.

Is this XCOM1 or 2?

"Newest XCOM games" very likely means 1 and 2 of the reboot.

Is associating games with their designers a quirk of simulation games? I associate Sid Meier and Will Wright heavily with their games, but I don't really have this same association for other genres.

You don't associate Doom with John Carmack? Or Monkey Island and Full Throttle with Tim Schafer? Or Leisure Suit Larry with Al Lowe?

No, I do. Maybe it's just one genre I can think of more than one name in.

Sure, but it's one thing for people to associate Carmack with Doom and another thing for Id to market the game as John Carmack's Doom.

How soon they forget: http://kotaku.com/5541406/john-romero-is-so-sorry-about-tryi...

In fact, i associate Monkey Island to Ron Gilbert.

I don't think so:

Metal Gear and Hideo Kojima

Final Fantasy and Hironobu Sakaguchi

Mega Man and Keiji Inafune

The Unreal and Gears of War series and Cliff Bleszinski

John Carmack and Doom

Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, etc. and Shigeru Miyamoto

Assassin's Creed and Jade Raymond

What is this list and what does it prove?

But I can't recall any of those being released as Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear etc in the same way it's been Sid Meier's Civilization. Same with reviews, it does seem this genre that that was first, and most consistent, mentioning the designer behind the game.

https://vgboxart.com/boxes/PS2/15821-metal-gear-solid-2-sons...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b3/Mgs3box...

http://img.gamefaqs.net/box/9/0/5/65905_front.jpg

And, notably, regarding the latest iteration: "Latest Metal Gear Solid 5 box art drops Hideo Kojima's name" - http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/metal_gear_solid_5_the_phantom...

I remember American McGee from the release of "American McGee's Alice"... fitting, really, that someone with such a surreal name should leave their stamp on Alice in Wonderland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero for Doom

Smash Bros and Masahiro Sakurai.

On a somewhat related note: http://chrishecker.com/images/f/fc/Wspector2-small.png

Pretty efficient one.

    > Concerned that this style of game was a significant 
    > departure for the brand, Stealey suggested adding 
    > Meier's name to the game's title, in order to get 
    > his fans on board.

While I get it was a marketing ploy, I still don't get the logic. Was Meyer famous at the time? If so, why was his name needed when they departed from their normal style, and not for the normal flight simulators?

He came to be famous for making military sims/flight sims. When they ventured into a new genre with "Pirates" they wanted to get the people who only knew their military sims on board, so they added "Sid Meiers" to the name and this seems to have helped in getting people to consider a game in a completely different genre, because they thought of him as someone who built good games (and rightfully so, I may add).

Quite. I remember someone saying not long after this that they could come out with "Sid Meier's Huge Bag of Crap", and it'd sell like hotcakes.

Sid had a reputation. He played Red Barron against an Air Force Pilot and beat the Pilot's high score. He did so by memorizing the algorithms of the enemy air ships so he could avoid their shots and shoot them down.

http://kotaku.com/the-father-of-civilization-584568276

He made airplane simulators after that and war simulators. Before he worked on Civilization he already had a reputation in video games.

> Was Meier famous at the time?

Not, like, Kardashian-famous, but definitely well known among people who played simulation games at the time. (Source: I was one.)

> Why was his name needed when they departed from their normal style, and not for the normal flight simulators?

By that point MicroProse didn't need any help marketing itself as a maker of flight simulators, because it was a company that had built its brand making excellent flight simulators. "MicroProse" and "flight simulation" were joined at the hip. (And their marketing reinforced this -- when it focused on any of the behind-the-scenes personnel it focused on Stealey, whose background as a USAF pilot reinforced the connection.)

When they decided to branch out into different types of games all that flight sim street cred wasn't going to do them much good, though; and Stealey's military background wouldn't help sell a pirate game the way it helped sell F-15 Strike Eagle. They needed a new angle to market their games around, and bringing Meier forward as a public personality provided that.

The greatest thing I learned working with Sid was "Games are a series of interesting choices" (not verbatim). So is life, and that's what makes his games so great; they mirror the kinds of choices we make every day. His games have gravity and it's this that makes you want to keep playing.

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