Sid Meiers Memoir by Sid Meier - Pirates

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Pirate's Games content in the Sid Meiers Memoir


Sid Meiers Memoir by Sid Meier
Chapter 6, Pages 68-79


Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987)

THE IDEA FOR A PIRATE GAME had actually been floated in a meeting a couple of months earlier by Arnold Hendrick, as one of several backdrops that could be used to flavor our steady stream of combat titles. I liked the idea in general, and could easily program ship battles with black flags and cannons instead of deck guns and radar. But that wasn’t enough to excite me anymore. The Sid who cofounded MicroProse four years earlier would never have believed it was possible, but I was growing bored.

Mostly I was tired of hyperrealism. If real life were that exciting, who would need videogames in the first place? The flight simulator genre, especially, was forever clamoring for more dials to watch, more flaps to control, more accurate wind speed and wheel friction calculations—and no one seemed to notice that it had turned into work. Games weren’t supposed to train you to be a real pilot; they were supposed to let you pretend for an hour that you could be one if you wanted to. It wasn’t escapism if you didn’t actually get anywhere.

Likewise, it wasn’t enough to paint a seventeenth-century veneer over an otherwise straightforward boat simulator. When I thought of pirates, I didn’t think of arduous ship maneuvers. I thought of sword fights, and swinging from ropes, and billowy white shirts with little string ties at the neckline for no reason. I thought of evil mustachioed Spaniards kidnapping damsels, and guys with peg legs singing about rum. I thought of swashbuckling, whatever that actually meant.

Pirates didn’t spend all day fighting one another, I told Bill. Pirates had adventures.

Unfortunately, the “adventure” moniker had already been co-opted by a certain type of game that was traditionally text-based, and involved approximately zero adventuring. Instead, most of the player’s time was spent arguing with the computer. The progression generally went something like this:

You are standing in a log cabin. There is a window to the north and a door to the east.

Look at the room.

I don’t understand.

Look at the cabin.

You see a bed and a desk.

Look at the desk.

It is a desk.

Open the desk.

The desk is locked.

Look at the window.

It is a window.

Open the window.

You can’t open the window.

Look at the bed.

It is a bed.

Look under the bed.

You see nothing of interest under the bed.

“Nothing of interest” was about right. These so-called adventure games weren’t a test of your wits; they were a test to see how long the designer could hide something in plain sight until you thought to ask about it directly. Around the office, we referred to them as “pick up the stick” games, and no one had any desire to make one—but I didn’t see why they should be given a monopoly, either. Adventuring didn’t have to mean blindly groping for a set path. It could mean making up your own story, being in charge of your fate just like a pirate would be. I wanted a game that only hit the high points, taking you from one exciting scene to the next and leaving out all the walking around, looking at, and picking up.

Bill tried to talk me out of it. “That’s crazy,” he said. “We’ve never made anything like that before.”

“I know,” I said. That was one of the best things about the idea.

“Nobody will buy it.”

I shrugged. I thought they would buy it, actually, but that was never my main motivation. I wanted to play a pirate game, which meant I was going to have to make a pirate game, since no one else had yet.

Bill could tell he wasn’t going to change my mind. “Well, we should at least put your name on it,” he muttered, throwing up one hand in surrender. “Sid Meier’s pirate-whatever. Then maybe the people who liked F-15 will recognize it’s you, and buy it anyway.”

I should mention that Bill has a much more glamorous version of this story, which starts long before the conversation he and I had. According to him, the idea to put my name on the box came during a dinner event for the Software Publishers Association, which had been formed only a few years earlier. They did the standard things industry groups do, like organize speakers and give awards, but their main purpose was fighting software piracy. It would be years before the SPA managed to convince lawmakers it was a serious issue, but in 1986 they would pay $100 to anyone with hard evidence that a dial-up bulletin board was distributing stolen games. They even successfully prosecuted a few cases. MicroProse was one of about 150 companies who attended their regular meetings, along with Sierra, Microsoft, Broderbund, and Robin Williams.

Yes, strange as it may seem, the comedian Robin Williams was connected to the Software Publishers Association. To my knowledge he never dabbled in game design himself, but he felt strongly that all creative jobs should be fairly compensated, and he had such a particular love for videogames that he named his daughter Zelda. According to lore, he and Bill were seated at the same table at an SPA event, and during the course of conversation, Robin pointed out that all the other entertainment industries promoted their stars by name, so why should gaming be any different?

Whether this was a passing comment or a hard sell on my name in particular, I have no idea, but Bill already had plenty of experience with fostering a cult of personality. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince the man who styled himself “Fighter Pilot Supreme” that his original instincts had been right after all—that perhaps the only problem with a photo of me and giant bags of money was that it hadn’t gone far enough. Either way, I can’t blame him for wanting to share credit on this one, since “Robin Williams told me to do it” is a pretty good defense for almost anything. All I know is Bill made the executive decision to call the game Sid Meier’s Pirate-Whatever, and I was too busy thinking about adventure game mechanics to question it.

The good news was there were very few preconceived notions back then about what a game was supposed to be. The bad news was there were no tried-and-true conventions, either. I could put in anything I wanted, but that also meant I was responsible at every turn for what to leave out, and there were exponentially more ways to fail. It was like trying to create a recipe without any knowledge of what ingredients taste good together. With no standard expectations to guide me, I might accidentally end up with the gaming equivalent of breakfast cereal with onions.

All I could do was keep asking myself, “Would I want to play this game?” As long as the answer was yes, the idea stayed in. I knew, for example, that I wanted to avoid the trap of a single narrative path. If the hypothetical log cabin wasn’t interesting, I wanted to be able to walk away from it, without ever needing to find the key hidden under the rug that no one told me about, or spending ten minutes convincing the computer to do normal key things with it. (“Unlock desk?” “Use key?” “Use key with desk?”) At the same time, though, too much freedom would leave the player blind. No one prefers fill-in-the-blank over multiple-choice. This was the real problem, I realized, with adventure games that tried to parse free-form commands: they had only one right answer, which was bad, but they also had an infinite number of wrong answers, which was worse.


Recent psychological studies have demonstrated the truth behind this theory of limiting choices. Our brains’ executive function, or decision-making capability, tires out over time. Like an overworked muscle, it doesn’t matter if you’re lifting weights at the gym or stacking sandbags to save your family’s home—the importance of the task has no bearing on your exhaustion. Insignificant decisions take just as much brain power as interesting ones, but without any of the satisfaction. One study found that participants scored lower on math tests after being given a large menu of lunch options, while those with fewer choices scored higher. The question of what to eat for lunch was relatively meaningless, but it took a toll. Another found that when giving free jam samples to people passing by, a purchase was more likely if there were only a few jars available, while the full array of flavors caused patrons to become overwhelmed and walk away sooner—even if they reported later that they preferred the table with more options.

There are different theories as to why people instinctively flock toward more choices even when the numbers show we are happier with fewer choices, but I think it has to do with humans’ innate curiosity. We want to try everything, which leads to frustration when we can’t. We don’t ever want to feel like we’ve missed out on something good. In fact, there is a whole class of so-called “completionist” players in videogames, who make it a point to collect every single item and score every single point possible. Most players are not that extreme, but even among moderate ones, the maxim holds. The more choices players have, the sooner they will tire of the game, and the more dissatisfied they will ultimately be. They might initially feel like they’re happier with more choice, but in the end they will walk away, just like the jam-tasters with too many flavors to choose from. It was my job, I thought, to whittle down the options and present only the best ones to the player.

So then: no wrong answers, and more than one right answer, but not too many. I began to jot down ideas. Pirates wooed beautiful young women, so that would be a choice. Pirates pieced together old treasure maps, so that would be a choice. Pirates sometimes had sword fights, so that would be a choice.

Real pirates didn’t do any of these things, of course. Real pirates slaughtered innocent people and got scurvy. Not fun. But this was a game, not a simulation, and the romanticized version of pirates was at least as prominent in culture, if not more. The classic film star Errol Flynn made four movies about brave and handsome swashbucklers, and none about greedy sociopaths.

These pre-existing narratives were, in fact, the key to making Pirates! as immersive as it was. Players came to the game with a certain backstory in their mind already—good guys wore white shirts and colorful sashes; bad guys wore long black coats and eyepatches. Give the villain a moustache, and he would take on all the characteristics of every moustache-twirling villain since childhood. A single “Arrgh, matey!” could convey the entire feel of the game, complete with setting, characters, and a likely plot. These bits of cultural shorthand allowed the player to fill in the environment without realizing they were doing it, saving us development time and, more importantly, precious computer memory.

Pirates! was an unusual challenge when it came to memory. Ship navigation and sword fighting were in 2D, to keep their calculations to a minimum, but this still left large portions of the game in text form. There wasn’t room to animate anything else. True, we were supposed to be skipping all the walking-around stuff anyway, but it was undeniably sparse. So we decided to try using individual illustrations, like a picture book the players were writing for themselves. Graphics cards had come a long way since the days of blocky crocodiles and lumpy monkeys, and Michael Haire’s skills had only improved with each title he’d worked on. Between technology and talent, we could manage some pretty impressive works of art on the computer these days—“some” being the operative word. I wanted lots, and it still seemed impossible to fit them all in. Fortunately, a programmer named Randall Masteller came to the rescue, with a new take on an old idea.

Computer operating systems were always optimized to store and display fonts very efficiently, because without text on the screen nothing else could get done. Fonts were the first thing loaded into memory, and the easiest to clear and replace. Thus, programmers had known for years that if you could present information to the computer in the form of a font, it would run faster.

Usually, this technique was applied to small images. In my original ASCII game, for example, I had used an asterisk to represent an asteroid, because standard text characters were my only option. But a font didn’t strictly have to be made up of letters and numbers. If by some anachronistic miracle my Nova minicomputer had shipped with Microsoft’s playful Wingdings font instead, that asterisk would have appeared as a small envelope. If I had used an uppercase M, it could have been a classic cartoon bomb, or perhaps a cute little rotary phone in place of a number 8. This would have rendered the rest of the computer’s functions illegible, of course, but the idea was that you could create a custom font made up of small images, and it would be faster and easier to display one of those “letters” on the screen than to use the graphics chip inside the computer to draw the same picture.

The next step forward had been using fonts for simple animation, which was the trick I’d used in Floyd of the Jungle. Each creature had been one letter of a font, with later letters in the alphabet reserved for the slightly different versions of the same creatures. Perhaps the spot normally held by lowercase c would look like the crocodile with its jaws closed, while uppercase C would look like the crocodile with its jaws open. Tell the computer to rapidly switch between c and C on the screen, and the crocodile would look like it was moving. Add two more crocodile letters into the loop, and it could walk and chomp at the same time. Once the font was loaded into memory, you could put one crocodile on the screen, or a hundred, it didn’t matter. As long as your new alphabet stayed under the total number of characters in a font, 256, the computer’s processor would be able to rotate between them as easily as scrolling down a page of text.

What Randall’s tool did was to analyze a large picture, and figure out the most efficient way to make each little eight-by-eight chunk of pixels into a font character. It was like paint by numbers: if the upper left corner was solid blue sky, then the “number 1” character could be a solid block of blue, and all the other big chunks of blue could be number 1s as well. Once we hit a cloud, number 2 would have to represent some angled bit of half-blue–half-white, but then we’d be off to the races again with a long series of all-white number 3s. The simpler the picture, the larger it could be before we ran out of characters to assign. Then after the player selected a menu item on that page, we could clear the font along with everything else on the screen, and load a new font containing the next screen’s picture.

The only catch was that we still needed to display real text. The game could contain hundreds of fonts on the disk—and with a different picture on every screen, it did—but it could only load one font into memory at any given time, so the first seventy slots of every font were filled with an identical set of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and a few special characters like commas and question marks. The remaining 186 brackets, ampersands, and so on were replaced with a mashup of colored pixels that made no sense unless they were laid out in precisely the right order, at which point they suddenly resolved into a beautiful seaside town, or a governor’s buxom daughter.

It wouldn’t have been a MicroProse game without a massive manual, so near the end of development, Arnold Hendrick joined our team to begin work on its eighty-eight pages of sepiatoned text. This was without any added bulk for copy protection, because we had graduated to providing players with a separate foldout map of the Caribbean for even greater difficulty in sharing. Physical novelties like this ran double duty as collector’s items, and were commonly known as “feelies,” a reference to the tactile entertainment featured in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. The first game to include them was Infocom’s 1982 murder mystery Deadline, which set the bar for years to come with a crime scene photo, police interviews, a coroner’s report, a letter from the family’s lawyer, and even three pills (made from candy, in reality) that had been “found” at the crime scene. The collection was originally conceived because the designer, Marc Blank, couldn’t fit all of the information inside the game, and only after piracy dropped dramatically for that title did everyone realize the potential.

Along with crafting the manual, Arnold also injected a healthy dose of realism into Pirates! to counterbalance the cinematic bravado. He pushed for accuracy in the historical campaign mode, and argued against the use of famous pirates who hadn’t been alive during the time frame I’d chosen, like Blackbeard and Jean Lafitte. If anything, though, these underpinnings of realism ended up bolstering the larger theme of romanticized adventure. As Arnold explained in the designer’s notes, “those men were psychotic remnants of a great age, criminals who wouldn’t give up. . . . There was no political intrigue or golden future to their lives, just a bullet or a short rope. We found them unattractive and uninteresting compared to the famous seahawks and buccaneers that preceded them.”

That was one tricky thing about seahawks and buccaneers, though: they never died. Errol Flynn couldn’t be killed in battle or sentenced to hanging, because that would shatter everything about the universe he hailed from. And yet, a game where you can’t lose is not a game; there has to be some form of failure at risk. To make things worse, I had accidentally eliminated any clear moment of victory to end the game on, either. Military games had a set number of missions, with a satisfying explosion to end each one. But a pirate is always ready to set off on another adventure—it’s “a pirate’s life for me,” not “a pirate’s singular objective for me.” I’d given the player the freedom to choose which adventures to pursue, and in doing so, I’d abdicated the high ground of declaring which one was the best or hardest to complete. You could win a particular battle or quest for treasure, but there was no way to win the game as a whole, and no way to lose at all.

Fortunately, the two problems came together neatly to solve one another.

With regard to losing, it was really just a question of how much punishment a player would tolerate while continuing to believe in the fantasy we had created. Death was out of the question, as was starting over with nothing. Errol Flynn may lose his treasure, his ship, even his crew for a time, but he doesn’t lose his reputation. He can always stagger ashore from the shipwreck and rally the men once more. So that was precisely what we did: when your pirate lost a battle at sea, he was left stranded on an island for a time, until being miraculously rescued by his loyal crew, minus any extra ships and gold.

Still, the stranding took only an instant in the real world, which amounted to practically no punishment at all. Time had no real value in the game—unless time was running out. Suddenly, the end point became clear.

This game was not about life and death, I realized. It was about a lifetime. A pirate’s career would last about forty years between childhood and old age, and his goal was to accomplish as much as he could in that window—to have an adventurous life with no regrets. Rack up the gold, rack up the victories, rack up the wild stories to tell at the tavern. As in real life, success could only be measured as a combination of your exploits, and how much value you put on those particular exploits yourself.

I decided we would let the player choose when to retire, and instead of a numeric score, we would display a tally of successes, and an appropriate seafaring rank. We even factored in the character’s age when it came to fencing skill and ship maneuverability, by slowing the responsiveness of the controls and increasing the probability of a miss. Players could judge for themselves when the risk was too great, and aim to go out on top—or else stubbornly refuse to quit, risking battle after battle as a hunched old seadog until they had handed over their last doubloon. Just like the rest of the game, the decision to end it was theirs alone.

Ironically, our shunning of realism had led to something more realistic than any game had yet attempted. Life is not a steady progression of objectively increasing value, and when you fail, you don’t just reload the mission again. You knock the wet sand off your breeches and return to the high seas for new adventures. And if you happen to get marooned on a deserted island a few times, well, that makes for a good tavern story, too.

[corsair91]

Sid Meiers Memoir by Sid Meier
Chapter 12 pages 140-141


Pirates! Gold (1993)

...
I lent a helping hand on a few projects around the office, talking other programmers through the kinks in their code or giving advice on the latest flight simulator when asked. I put my stamp of approval on the re-releases of Pirates! Gold and Railroad Tycoon Deluxe. I fiddled around with my ongoing collection of half-working prototypes. I took some time off.


THAT's ALL FOLKS as regards Pirates! Gold (1993) in the Chapter

[corsair91]

Sid Meiers Memoir by Sid Meier
Chapter 20, Pages 219-223


Pirates! Live the Life (2004)

CIVILIZATION III SEEMED TO ACT as a falling domino, and over the next several years, nearly all of the loose MicroProse properties would be returned to us one by one. The next to come home was Pirates!, which Hasbro had sold to the French company Infogrames, who had then begun calling themselves Atari after those naming rights went up for sale. I’m sure it was mostly a financial decision on “Atari’s” part, just like it had been for Hasbro to let us make Civilization III, but it still felt really good to be acknowledged as the rightful caretakers of the Pirates! legacy.

With the seventeen-year gap, it made sense for a new Pirates! to look and feel very different from the original, but I found the transition surprisingly hard to cope with. Civilization had evolved gradually, but catapulting an old title into the modern age required both a technological and an emotional overhaul. I was especially resistant to the idea of 3D graphics, which were once again the hot new thing.

“It’s a flash in the pan,” I told the team. “It’s not going to stick.” The only thing 3D reminded me of was chunky old flight simulators and their attendant coding struggles. Years of successful 2D titles had convinced me that it was just a marketing gimmick, not to mention a huge resource hog—with so much processing power dedicated to that beautiful 3D environment, the rest of the game inevitably suffered. It didn’t matter how much everyone oohed and aahed in the first 30 seconds if there weren’t enough substance beneath it to keep them coming back for more. No, two was plenty of dimensions for me.

The team’s protests made it clear that I was alone in this line of thinking, but I held firm. We were talking about Pirates!—my first adventure game, my first break from company tradition, my first namesake—and it had to be done right.

All projects ebb and flow to a certain degree, and at some point most will reach “the Valley of Despair.” It’s that moment when it seems nothing is working, no one understands your vision, the interface is ugly, the gameplay is boring, and you can’t imagine how you’ll ever finish it. Usually it happens about halfway through the project, when the game gets too big to hold in your head all at once, and the days fill up with meetings, and every adjustment throws eight other variables out of whack. But occasionally, it happens earlier, when it turns out that the plan you were stubbornly clinging to wasn’t as good as you thought it was.

“Fine,” I thought miserably. “Let’s see what 3D would look like, just for the heck of it.”

We had all the latest tools at the office, but so far they’d only been used on some introductory cinematics for Civ III, plus one Firaxis logo screen that looked like a giant blimp flying by. I hadn’t fiddled around much with the technology, but it wasn’t my style to stand over someone else’s shoulder dictating what I wanted to see. So I spent a long Fourth of July weekend at the office, teaching myself how to use our new 3D engine just enough to create a ship battle prototype.

When I was young, my father and I used to go sailing on Cass Lake, which is right on the thumb knuckle of Michigan’s mitten shape. Though the majority of the shoreline is private property, the northern bank is within the scenic Dodge #4 State Park (the first three in the series being strangely nonexistent). In addition to sandy beaches and a few fishing spots, there is a wide public boat launch, and on pleasant weekends, you’ll find everything from canoes to small yachts easing their way down the shallow concrete ramp into the water.

Ours was a simple but convenient craft, easily strapped to the roof of our recently purchased gold station wagon. My dad had ordered a do-it-yourself kit called the “Go” that included a premade hull, mast, and sails, and required only a few sheets of plywood and some labor to complete the deck and make her watertight. Small boat kits were fairly common in those days, but this one was unusual because it had no rudder, and we would frequently get hailed by other recreational sailors as we carried it to shore.

“Hey, ah . . . there’s something wrong with your boat, buddy.”

“No, it’s fine,” my father would say, waving back cheerfully. In confirmation, he and I would climb into our little dinghy and deftly maneuver into the open water, using only the wind and a hard-earned familiarity with the physics of sailing.

The boat really wasn’t meant for two, especially not with the constant moving back and forth one has to do to keep the rigging pointed in the optimal direction. So once my father was satisfied with my navigation skills, he let me take the boat out by myself, standing on the ramp with his hands on his hips and giving occasional advice at the top of his lungs until I was too far out to hear him. Fatherly pride quickly gave way to boredom as I refused to return to shore, and soon he had to build a second boat for himself, this time entirely from scratch. We would sail side by side for hours, racing for short distances and admiring the fancy houses along the opposite shore, until my sense of the wind was second nature.

I had tried to bring a little bit of this experience into the original Pirates! by making the player contend with wind direction during battles. The way to move forward into the wind is by tacking, or sharply angling your ship back and forth, like a road winding up a steep mountain. I had assumed everyone knew this, but many players found the process counterintuitive, and it was generally considered one of the more frustrating aspects of the game. With 3D, however, I was able to include so much more nuance. The ship tilted with your turns, and steered from the helm in believable arcs rather than rotating from the middle like a dial. The sails billowed and twisted as they caught the wind, and fluttered helplessly when aimed too directly into it. For the first time, the maneuvering felt true enough for non-sailors to grasp what was going on.

Plus, it was a ton of fun to animate all the little pirates jumping off the enemy ship before it sank. We’d bent the “no one dies” rule a few times over the years, but I wanted Pirates! to retain its sense of innocence, and if 3D could help us do that, so much the better.

Of course in retrospect, Pirates! had been the perfect instrument for 3D even without the swimming scallywags. It was the most story-based game I’d ever made, ideally suited for both picturesque environments and full-scale cinematics. The original’s main breakthrough had been an extravagance of still images on the screen, and now the remake could once again showcase the latest graphics technology.

Once I’d finally seen the light, the team was reinvigorated and the rest of the game fell easily into place. But to be honest, I’m still wary of 3D cinematics even today. Certainly there are appropriate uses for it, but 3D has an almost hallucinogenic ability to convince game designers that they’re moviemakers. Stephen Spielberg* can’t react in real time to the twitch of your wrist, or change the ending to suit your mood. His interaction with you, profound as it may be, is strictly one-way, and the worst thing we can do is subordinate our unique two-way abilities beneath a jealous imitation. Beautiful is nice, if you can swing it, but we don’t need to look any further than Minecraft to prove the modern-day value of gameplay independent from graphics.

Even with our priorities firmly in place, the new Pirates! had to contend with the constraints of added graphics more than once. In the opening 3D cinematic, for example, we introduced an overarching nemesis who could be hunted throughout the game. In keeping with the spirit of the original, Marquis Montalban’s nefarious story line remained optional, but simply assigning him a nationality—which we had to do, in order to animate his clothes and accent—caused problems for players who wanted to stay on good terms with the Spanish. Attacking a criminal within an ally’s borders wasn’t an impossible scenario, and we wouldn’t let it damage your friendship too badly. But if the player went so far as to court the governor’s daughter in Havana, she would soon be kidnapped by Montalban’s subordinates and whisked away to his home country—which is to say, the cantina next door to the governor’s house. We acknowledged the plot hole with a little humorous dialogue and moved on, but it illustrates how even a single cinematic cutscene can harden the story structure, and end up removing more plot than it adds.

Shortly after the modernized Pirates! was released, I found myself in Germany with a few hours to spare between press interviews. We decided to visit a tourist attraction in Hamburg called Miniatur Wunderland, home of the largest model train in the world. At the time, they had just finished their fifth major section, with a total of 560 trains pulling nearly 6,000 cars behind them. Several hundred other vehicles rolled freely on magnetic pathways hidden beneath the city streets, and each hour the model’s twenty-six computers ran a full day’s worth of drama: police cruisers pulled over speeding civilians, firetrucks responded to flickering windows leaking tendrils of real smoke, and a space shuttle periodically launched in search of tiny, tiny aliens.

It was both an adorable and perfectly timed experience. Fans had begun asking for other classic remakes almost as soon as the new Pirates! had been announced, and this little side trip to Hamburg was just the thing to get my creative juices flowing for an update to the original Railroad Tycoon.

There were ownership issues, as always. Immediately after my departure, MicroProse had sold the license to PopTop Software, who had later been acquired by Take-Two Interactive. Coincidentally, we were already in talks with Take-Two after they had purchased the Civilization license from Infogrames in late 2004, though the buyer’s name wasn’t made public for several months in order to keep the development of Civ IV under wraps. In just eight years, Firaxis had already had relationships with four different publishers—Electronic Arts, Hasbro, Infogrames, and Atari—and while some of these were technically the same group of people under a different name, there were always new executives to answer to, and the disruption to the workflow was the same. In the case of Hasbro, we didn’t even get the chance to release a single game before the corporate moniker had to be changed once again. Now, we were looking at a fifth relationship with Take-Two, and more than anything, we just wanted stability.

So, instead of signing yet another licensing contract, we came to a much bigger agreement. Take-Two would first buy up all of the remaining MicroProse properties from Infogrames and elsewhere, and then acquire our studio outright. It would take a lot of paperwork, but the lawyers assured us that Humpty Dumpty could be put back together again.

The decision was dramatic, but relatively easy to make. We’d always suspected that Firaxis would end up with a permanent publisher at some point, and if it were inevitable, certainly this was the best way for it to happen—with everything handed back to us, and no more piecemeal negotiations over properties we’d invented in the first place. Take-Two considered our games to be a good counterbalance to some of their other franchises, like Grand Theft Auto, and they were happy to let us do our thing with minimal interference. So in January 2005, they unveiled themselves as the buyer of the Civilization license, revealed the upcoming release of Civ IV, and announced the acquisition of Firaxis all at once. It was a hefty press release. Two months later, we added Sid Meier’s Railroads! to the roster as well.

It was a little ironic that, after all that effort, we didn’t end up using the Tycoon brand. Owning the license was still prudent, since our game was clearly related, but we decided that we wanted a little distance between ourselves and the genre as a whole. PopTop’s sequels had been solid, but the last fifteen years had seen an absolute glut of “tycoon” titles, from studios of every size and quality. Players could be fish tycoons, toilet tycoons, moon tycoons—and that was just back in the early 2000s. These days, we can lord our business acumen over beard trimmers, Dairy Queen franchises, or even game development studios (who are presumably making their own tycoon games, like an entrepreneurial nesting doll). Not all of them were bad, but some were downright terrible, and the genre had evolved enough that what we were making just didn’t belong.

With Civ IV only a few months away from release, I knew I would be alone on the Railroads! design team for a while. Rather than wait around for an artist to become available, I installed a copy of our modeling software on my computer, and started learning how to use it. I’d mastered our 3D physics tools during Pirates!, but my early ship models had been swiped from somewhere—probably the Civ IV artists, now that I think about it—and I guess they didn’t have any useful train graphics to steal. So I had to make my own.

Obviously, I didn’t expect my art to stay in the final version of the game, but I made it anyway, because it’s important as a designer to sit in all the chairs. Understanding the needs of each department and learning their requisite tools will improve your output, ease communication with your coworkers, and provide a critical perspective when it comes time to admit you were wrong about an idea. But most importantly, it will make you more self-sufficient.

When I wanted to put a ballroom dancing minigame into the new Pirates!, for example, not everyone thought it sounded fun. I had to give them a demonstration, which meant creating, among other things, a tool to mark the beats of the music so the computer would know whether the player had nailed the rhythm. If I’d had to rely on someone else to put that together, it likely never would have happened—some still wished it hadn’t, but that was mostly due to a bug that made the timing harder than it was supposed to be. I still maintain the dancing was one of the neatest innovations in the remake.

Likewise, I doubt I could have sold a publisher on the idea of a golfing strategy game without a functioning prototype, and you can pretty much forget everything I made prior to 2000. Ideas are cheap; execution is valuable. When people used to ask me how to get into the industry, I’d say, “Get a copy of DPaint and a C++ compiler.” These days it’s more like, “Get a copy of Photoshop and a Unity tutorial,” but the principle hasn’t changed—there’s no guarantee your talents will be discovered, but they certainly won’t be if you never make anything. The best way to prove your idea is a good one is to prove it, not with words but with actions. Sit in the programmer chair until you have something playable, then sit in the artist chair until you have something crudely recognizable, then sit in the tester chair and be honest with yourself about what’s fun and what’s not. You don’t need to be perfect at any one job, you just need to be good enough to prove your point, and inspire others to join you.

[Roland]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing it, corsair91.