Civilization | Code Like It's 198x

Civilization gave the player one wagon of settlers in 4000 BC and asked them to reach Alpha Centauri. In between they founded cities, researched pottery and gunpowder, built the Pyramids and fought or bribed rival empires, while each turn shrank from twenty years to one. Computer Gaming World called it one of those “compulsive-addictive” games “that one can easily stay up until 4:00 AM playing”. Seven years later the same magazine listed it as its number one game of all time.

Fast facts

Designers: Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley.
Publisher: MicroProse, as Sid Meier’s Civilization.
Released: late 1991 for the IBM PC, at $69.95 in America. Amiga (1992), Atari ST and Macintosh versions followed.
Players: one human against two to six computer-controlled civilizations.
Sequels: Civilization II (1996) at MicroProse, then III to VII (2001–2025) at Firaxis Games.

From Railroad Tycoon to the fertile crescent

Meier and Shelley came to Civilization straight from Railroad Tycoon (1990), and the magazines saw the family likeness at once: the same newspaper headlines announcing events, the same hall of fame, the same single human player against computer rivals. Meier told Amiga Format he had been trying “to do another constructive game, or god game”, and that Civilization gave the player several “hats” at once: “military commander, economic planner, scientific researcher, politician and city mayor”. The project took two and a half years. “The first year was used up just thinking about the idea and developing it,” he said, and programming and testing took the other eighteen months.

The division of labour was clear, at least in Meier’s account. “Bruce does the things that I don’t like or want to do: things like spelling, checking facts, digging up the research material,” he said. Shelley also brainstormed ideas, wrote the manual and did “huge amounts of playtesting”. “I do all of the piecing together and the programming — Bruce does all the research and fact-gathering, the real work!” Shelley already knew board games from the inside: before MicroProse he had worked at the American publisher Avalon Hill, where he helped Francis Tresham with the railway game 1830.

How it played

A game began on the real Earth or on a generated planet whose land, climate and age the player could set. Every city worked the squares around it for three things: food, which made it grow; shields, which paid for buildings and units; and trade, which the player split between taxes, luxuries to keep citizens content, and research. Citizens taken off the land could become tax collectors, scientists or entertainers. Governments from despotism to democracy changed how much trade was lost to corruption and how restless the cities became.

Research followed a tree of advances. Computer Gaming World’s preview counted about forty discoveries, from the alphabet and bridge building onwards, that had to come before Advanced Flight. There were seven ancient, seven medieval and seven modern Wonders of the World, each with a lasting effect: the Colossus raised trade in its city, and Shakespeare’s Theatre kept a city happy until electricity arrived. Combat was simpler: the magazine compared it to drawing ping-pong balls from a fishbowl, with an attacker’s strength against a defender’s.

The game ended in one of two ways. A player could conquer every rival, which the scoring favoured, or build a spaceship and send it to Alpha Centauri, a voyage that took decades of game turns while the others tried to capture the builder’s capital. The preview’s writer, Alan Emrich, missed a tutorial, and grumbled that global warming struck “all too often” in the beta version and that the game had a “politically correct” bias. He still predicted it would “succeed beyond even Railroad Tycoon”, and called it “likely to prove itself the greatest discovery in computer entertainment since, well… the wheel!”

Some ideas did not make it in. Meier told Amiga Format he had wanted alliances and non-aggression pacts, but when computer allies broke a treaty “you’d end up blaming the designer”, so the politics were simplified. Multiplayer, “the thing everybody was asking for”, would have meant a redesign. Modern units stopped where they did because “we had to end the game somewhere”.

What the reviewers said

In Britain ACE reviewed the PC version in December 1991. Gary Whitta wrote that Meier had “not so much pushed the strategy envelope as driven over it with an articulated lorry”, worried that its “layer upon layer of mathematical formula” might be too much for some players, and called it “Meier’s masterpiece to date”. The magazine made it its new strategy benchmark.

The Amiga version came out in 1992 on four disks at £34.99, with some trouble on Amigas that had only half a megabyte of chip memory. Amiga Format gave it 94% in September 1992. Neil Jackson warned that it “starts to play you, rather than the other way round”, and that it was “the kind of game that’ll make your friends think you’ve become a recluse”. By 1998 Computer Gaming World listed it as its “#1 all-time game”. In 1999 PC Zone put the first game’s sales at 850,000 copies across the PC, Amiga, Macintosh and Atari ST.

The board game and the name

Civilization was also the name of a British board game, published in 1980 by Hartland Trefoil, the company of the railway-game designer Francis Tresham, and sold in North America by Avalon Hill. In both games players bought advances that opened the way to others, which is where Computer Gaming World’s 1991 preview compared them; otherwise the two had little in common. PC Zone and Computer Gaming World both reported later that the shared name caused friction from the start.

The dispute came to a head after Meier left. In 1997 Avalon Hill licensed the computer rights to its Civilization to Activision, and Activision announced its own Civilization game while MicroProse was working on more. Two magazines, Computer Gaming World in America and PC Player in Germany, reported how MicroProse answered: it bought Hartland Trefoil, the company that had invented the board game in 1980, and with it the name. The companies settled in mid-1998. MicroProse kept the Civilization name, and Activision released Civilization: Call to Power (1999) under licence from MicroProse. By then Hasbro had bought both MicroProse and Avalon Hill.

Sequels

MicroProse made the first follow-ups: CivNet (1995), a multiplayer version, and Civilization II (1996), designed by Brian Reynolds with Meier. Civilization II sold more than 1.2 million copies by 1998, 160,000 of them in Britain according to PC Zone. In 1996 Meier, Reynolds and Jeff Briggs left MicroProse to found Firaxis Games. Meier told Computer Gaming World he had “gotten my name back”: MicroProse could use Sid Meier’s Civilization only for games made while he was there. Firaxis’s next strategy game was Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999), published by Electronic Arts: a game set on an alien planet that begins where Civilization’s space race ends.

The series itself followed Meier to Firaxis after Infogrames bought MicroProse’s owner, Hasbro Interactive. Civilization III (2001), published by Infogrames, added culture: temples, libraries and wonders now pushed out a city’s borders, and a small town could defect to a more cultured neighbour “without firing a musketball”. PC Gamer gave it 92%. Take-Two Interactive bought the rights to the series in 2004 and Firaxis itself in 2005, and later games came out under its 2K label:

Civilization IV (2005), designed by Soren Johnson, gave religion a much larger role. Its theme song, “Baba Yetu”, was the first piece of video game music to win a Grammy.
Civilization V (2010), directed by Jon Shafer, replaced square tiles with hexagons and allowed only one military unit on each.
Civilization VI (2016), designed by Ed Beach, spread each city across several hexes of specialised districts.
Civilization VII (February 2025), also led by Beach, split history into three ages, Antiquity, Exploration and Modern, and asks the player to choose a civilization for their empire at each change of age.

2K said in 2024 that the series had shipped more than 70 million copies.

A genre name

Civilization was not the first game of exploring and conquering a map; Computer Gaming World’s first description of it said players explored the world “in an Empire-style manner”, after the earlier computer game Empire. The name now used for the kind of game it made popular came later. In September 1993 Alan Emrich, previewing MicroProse’s Master of Orion, gave it a “XXXX” rating for “the essential fourX’s of any good strategic conquest game: EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate”, and 4X stuck.

Sources

Computer Gaming World issue 86, September 1991: summer CES report, first description of Civilization (“in an Empire-style manner”).
Computer Gaming World issue 89, December 1991: news (Meier, Civilization, IBM, $69.95); pp. 86-90, Alan Emrich, “Making the Best of All Possible Worlds: A Preview of Sid Meier’s Civilization” (Meier “with Bruce Shelley”; the Avalon Hill board game; 4000 BC to Alpha Centauri; turn lengths; wonders; combat; the space race; scoring).
ACE issue 51, December 1991: Civilization review by Gary Whitta; the ACE Strategy Benchmark.
Amiga Format issue 38, September 1992: Neil Jackson’s interview with Sid Meier (the god game, two and a half years, alliances, multiplayer, Bruce Shelley’s role); Amiga review by Neil Jackson (MicroProse, £34.99, four disks, chip memory, 94%).
Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993: Alan Emrich’s Master of Orion preview and the “XXXX” rating.
ST Format issue 50, September 1993: Atari ST demo and price (£34.99).
PC Gamer (UK) issue 19, June 1995, p. 50: 1830, Francis Tresham and Bruce Shelley at Avalon Hill.
The One issue 37, October 1991: Francis Tresham’s company Hartland Trefoil.
PC Player (Germany), March 1998: Activision, Avalon Hill, MicroProse and the purchase of Hartland Trefoil, “die 1980 das Spiel Civilization erfand”.
Computer Gaming World issue 165, April 1998: Terry Coleman, “Will the Real Civ Please Boot Up?” and the Civ Scorecard (Meier’s “gotten my name back”; Activision’s 1997 deal with Avalon Hill; Hartland Trefoil; CivNet; Civilization II; Alpha Centauri; “CGW’s #1 all-time game”).
Computer Gaming World issue 171, October 1998: “Civ Who? Activision and MicroProse Settle Their Civilization Dispute”.
Computer Gaming World issue 174, January 1999: Terry Coleman on Civilization: Call to Power (the 1997 licence, the lawsuit, MicroProse and Avalon Hill both owned by Hasbro).
PC Zone issue 55, October 1997: news of Activision’s deal with Avalon Hill. Issue 75, April 1999: Civilization: Call to Power review and history (850,000 copies; the friction over the name; the mid-1998 settlement; the licence from MicroProse; Civilization II’s sales; Alpha Centauri).
PC Gamer (UK) issue 104, Christmas 2001: Civilization III review (Firaxis, Infogrames, £30, culture, 92%).
For MicroProse’s history, Meier’s departure and the Hasbro and Infogrames purchases, see the MicroProse entry and its sources.
Wikipedia, “Civilization (series)” (web, secondary): Take-Two’s purchases of the rights (2004) and of Firaxis (2005); 70 million copies shipped by June 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)
Wikipedia, “Civilization IV”, “Civilization V”, “Civilization VI” and “Civilization VII” (web, secondary): release dates, designers, religion, “Baba Yetu”, hexes, districts and ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV