For the first few years of MicroProse, Sid Meier did almost everything on its games himself. “I actually did all the art up until Silent Service,” he told Retro Gamer, “and then we hired an artist and I realised he could do a much better job than I could.” He did the sound effects too. By 1987 his name was selling the games: Pirates! came out as Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and the habit stuck through Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. In 1989 he explained what he was looking for in a subject: “We try to pick situations where one player is the hero and has all the interesting decisions to make.” The idea became his best-known saying, usually quoted as “a game is a series of interesting decisions”: Bruce Shelley credited it to him in 1998, and Meier himself put it as “a series of interesting choices” in 2006.
Fast facts
- Born: 24 February 1954, in Sarnia, Ontario; he grew up in Detroit.
- Before games: a computer science degree from the University of Michigan, then programming at General Instrument.
- MicroProse: co-founded with Bill Stealey in 1982; left in 1996.
- Firaxis Games: co-founded in 1996 with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds.
- Best known for: F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon and Civilization.
A bet over Red Baron
Meier studied history and computer science at the University of Michigan, and afterwards wrote software for cash registers. He was working at General Instrument when he met Bill Stealey, an accountant and former US Air Force pilot. The Atari 800, his first personal computer, had got him writing games “for fun”, starting with a version of Space Invaders.
Both men told Edge in 1997 how MicroProse began. At a business meeting in Las Vegas they played Atari’s coin-op Red Baron. “The high score on the machine was something like 32,000 and I scored 35,000,” Stealey said. “Sid marched right past me with 62,000.” Meier said he could write a better game; Stealey bet him he couldn’t, and promised to sell it if he did. The result was Hellcat Ace, one of three Atari 8-bit games in MicroProse’s first advertisement, in Antic in October 1982. Meier later summed up the partnership: “I enjoyed creating the games and programming and he enjoyed selling them and running the company.”
Simulations
Computer Gaming World listed Meier as the author of MicroProse’s early games, from the arcade game Floyd of the Jungle to the wargame NATO Commander. F-15 Strike Eagle (1984), credited to Meier and Grant Irani, made the company’s name in flight simulation, and in January 1986 the magazine printed Meier’s designer’s notes on the submarine game Silent Service. In November 1986 Compute!’s Gazette said Meier had “designed or directed the design of virtually all of MicroProse Software’s popular simulation and strategy games”. In 1988 he worked with Tom Clancy on Red Storm Rising, based on Clancy’s novel.
Even the military games were built around a person making choices. “It’s not the mechanic, it’s not the guy who designed the plane, it’s not the guy back at headquarters telling them where to fly,” Meier told Compute!’s Gazette in 1989. “It’s the pilot who has the most interesting job.” Stealey supplied the realism: he had contacts, Meier said, who “could get us secret air force manuals or cool information about aeroplanes”.
Pirates! and the name on the box
Pirates! (1987) was Meier’s first game to leave the military simulations behind. MicroProse’s advertisements called it “another winner from Sid Meier”, which “combined the best of simulation, role-playing and strategy games”: the player was a 17th-century privateer captain, raiding treasure ships on the Spanish Main. In Britain it was billed as “the world’s first swashbuckling simulation” and cost £14.95 on the Commodore 64.
It was also the first game with Meier’s name in its title. According to Retro Gamer, Stealey “was adamant that Meier’s name be on the box”. Meier was less sure about it. “My name on the box is not a guarantee,” he told Computer Gaming World in 2001. “I still have to write good games.”
Railroad Tycoon and Civilization
His next designs moved further from combat. He often started a game, put it away and came back to it. Railroad Tycoon (1990), made with Bruce Shelley, “started off as a model railroad game,” Meier said. Civilization began as “a SimCity type of game, with zones for farms and cities”, until he felt he “was playing the game with gloves on”; he shelved it, made the spy game Covert Action (1990), and returned to it. Even halfway through he was not sure it would work: “In the back of my mind, I was going, ‘You’re a geek and no one will understand this.’”
Civilization came out in late 1991 and became the game he is known for; its own entry tells that story. Its success was not built on research. “We have a saying round here,” Meier said, “which is ‘We do the research when the game is finished’,” because he did not want to fill a game with obscure facts.
Firaxis
The 1990s were hard for MicroProse. Spectrum HoloByte took it over in 1993, and in 1996, amid layoffs, Meier left with Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs to found Firaxis Games in Maryland. He 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 kept making the kind of game he had made at MicroProse. Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! (1997) was a Civil War battle game, and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999), published by Electronic Arts, began where Civilization’s space race ended. When Infogrames bought MicroProse’s owner, the Civilization series itself came to Firaxis, starting with Civilization III (2001). Meier remade Pirates! in 2004.
At Firaxis he worked more and more through other designers. He told Edge in 2006 that he encouraged people to contribute ideas, “because you never know where the next good one’s going to come from”, and that working with Bruce Shelley, Brian Reynolds and Soren Johnson let them “really blossom as designers”. XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012), Firaxis’s remake of Julian Gollop’s X-COM, was “really his design and his vision”, he said of its lead designer, Jake Solomon; his own involvement was “fairly limited”. He also prototyped games that never came out, including a dinosaur game that went through three versions over a month or two each and “just wasn’t as cool as dinosaurs needed to be”.
He went on making smaller games of his own, such as Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol (2013) and Sid Meier’s Starships (2015), and in September 2020 W. W. Norton published Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games.
Honours
In 1999 Meier was the second person inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame, after Shigeru Miyamoto. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Conference in 2008.
Sources
- Antic vol. 1 no. 4, October 1982: MicroProse Software advertisement (Hellcat Ace, Chopper Rescue, Floyd of the Jungle).
- Computer Gaming World issue 14, January 1984: reviews of NATO Commander and Floyd of the Jungle (author Sid Meier). Issue 19, November 1984: F-15 Strike Eagle (authors Sid Meier and Grant Irani). Issue 25, January 1986: Silent Service and Meier’s designer’s notes.
- Compute!’s Gazette, November 1986, p. 24: Meier “designed or directed the design of virtually all” MicroProse’s simulation and strategy games.
- Compute!, January 1988: Pirates! advertisement.
- ZZAP!64 issue 30, October 1987: Pirates! advertisement (“the world’s first swashbuckling simulation”) and price.
- Computer Gaming World issue 49, July 1988, p. 22: Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy and Sid Meier.
- Compute!’s Gazette, March 1989, p. 13: Tom Netsel, “Reality to Simulation: Designers Speak Out” (the pilot; “all the interesting decisions to make”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 145, August 1996: Meier, Reynolds and Briggs leave MicroProse to found Firaxis.
- Edge issue 43, March 1997: Meier and Stealey on the Red Baron bet.
- Computer Gaming World issue 165, April 1998: Meier has “gotten my name back”. Issue 168, July 1998: Bruce Shelley, “Sid once defined a game as a series of interesting decisions”.
- Edge issue 75, September 1999: Stealey, “an accountant and an airforce pilot”, met Meier at General Instrument.
- Computer Gaming World issue 202, May 2001: profile of Meier at Firaxis (the name on the box; Railroad Tycoon, Civilization and Covert Action; the dinosaur game).
- Edge issue 159, February 2006: interview with Sid Meier and Soren Johnson (a game as “a series of interesting choices”; working with other designers).
- Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013: interview with Sid Meier (the Atari 800; Stealey; doing the art and sound until Silent Service; Pirates! and his name; research; the dinosaur game; XCOM; the Hall of Fame and GDC award).
- For MicroProse’s history, see the MicroProse entry and its sources; for Civilization, Firaxis and the later series, the Civilization entry.
- “Sid Meier”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): birth date and place, Detroit, the University of Michigan degree, the cash-register work, Gettysburg! (1997), Ace Patrol (2013), Starships (2015) and the memoir (W. W. Norton, 8 September 2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier