I am 41 years old tomorrow, and for most of my life I've had a game of Civilization in rotation. The first Civ arrived in 1991, popularising the nascent 4X genre and quickly becoming a PC gaming icon. But Civ could have looked very different. Instead of a slow, deliberate turn-based game, it was almost Age of Empires.
Back in 2017, I interviewed every Civilization lead designer for a magazine feature, The complete history of Civilization, which was later published on the site. Until recently, each game had a different lead, starting with Sid Meier and the OG Civ. This tradition continued until Civ 7.
Civ was born out of Meier and Bruce Shelley's desire to push the boat out after the success of Railroad Tycoon. Instead of running a company, how about running a nation, and eventually the world?
"We were young, and we had no fear," Meier told me.
But Meier started to worry that their ambitions were too grand. He needed to find a way to make this imposing challenge more accessible for would-be world conquerors. One of the accessibility solutions was ditching the popular hex-based map model for simp...
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