This game blew. my. mind. when I was a kid. The first summer we had it, I played it eight hours a day on our IBM PS/2. When school was back in session, I wrote about it and drew maps for school projects. I dreamed about it.
I remember spending hours on it, not knowing what I was doing.
I had an english version of the game, and being 9 or 10 at the time, I didn't speak a word of english.
It took me ages to understand that you could switch from despotism to another form of government (monarchy, republic, etc). I was always wondering why my cities were so small, even with irrigation and railroads everywhere.
Also, I didn't have the manual, so with time, I started to learn the tech tree by heart (the "license" verification was based on knowing the parents of a given tech IIRC).
I've also read the civilopedia countless times.
I'm still proud to have beaten the game in Emperor ^^.
I've also spent a lot of time on other Sid Meier's games like Railroad Tycoon or Colonization.
Thank you for these lost hours.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimLife
Think my parents may have overreached a little on the educational software, there.
Thank goodness for Civilization on SNES, too. ;)
Civ.exe was also the first game I customized. I was entertained to no end when I found out you could use a hex editor to change the strings. I rewrote the introductory text, and gave all the leaders new dialogue. That was also probably around when I started getting more interested in how games worked, rather than just playing them...
I've commented on HN before about the power I think "hackable" games had teaching us how to create on the computer. I have a similar fond memory of heavily tampering with Halo PC via the fan-made Halo Editing Kit, which gave hex access to do all kinds of fun things. Those summer weekends spent changing which side I played on Silent Cartographer were key to me becoming more than "just" a computer user.
One was this Galaga clone for the TRS-80 Color Computer. The CoCo had a couple analog joysticks [1] which were ergonomically horrible. The player would move the joystick left and right to position the on-screen spaceship. The x-position of the joystick would correspond to where the spaceship would be. However, you couldn't just let the player move the joystick quickly from one side of the screen to the other, that would be "unrealistic" video game physics, and from a gameplay perspective, would make it too easy to dodge incoming bullets.
So the ship would move slowly on the screen until it reached the position which corresponded to the joystick position. This was rather annoying and hard to control.
Since I had seen an article to convert a digital joystick (from an Atari 2600) to be used on the CoCo, I also modified the game code to use a more normal control scheme. That involved searching through the disassembled code to find the joystick polling routine, and patch it out with my on version instead. Which, unfortunately, didn't fit, so I had to jump out to a bit of code past the normal end of the program, and then jump back when finished.
Fun times!
I remember eventually seeing "my" intro texts on the computers of people who had absolutely no chance of understanding the terrible in-jokes I put in there years earlier. Fortunately they did not know who ruined the experience for them.
We had absolutely no concept of "legitimate copy" at the time, I had one industrially labeled disk (Genius mouse driver) and its existence confused me to no end.
Fixed that for you :).
So I wrote something very close to this:
In the beginning the earth was without form, and void. But the sun shone upon the sleeping earth, And deep inside the brittle crust, massive forces waited to be unleashed. The seas parted, and great continents were formed. Mountains arose, earthquakes spawned massive tidal waves. Volcanoes erupted and spewed forth fiery lava, And charged the atmosphere with strange gasses. Into this swirling maelstrom of fire and air and water, The first stirrings of life appeared. Tiny organisms, cells and amoeba, clinging to tiny sheltered habitats. But the seeds of life grew, and strengthened, and spread, and diversified, and prospered. And soon every continent and climate teemed with life. And with life came instinct, and specialization, natural selection, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals. And finally there evolved a species known as man. And there appeared the first faint glimmers of intelligence. The fruits of intelligence were many: Fire, tools, and weapons, The hunt, farming, and the sharing of food, The family, the village, and the tribe. Now it required but one more ingredient: A great leader to unite the quarrelling tribes, To harness the power of the land, To build a legacy that would stand the test of time: A CIVILIZATION!
It was just so deep, and so far beyond anything else I’d ever seen. I think I can honestly say that it was the first game that was at least as good as a great book.