13. Sid Meier's Civilization. The best video game series
Table of Contents
- Developer: MicroProse, Firaxis Games
- First game release year: 1991
- Number of main installments: 6
"Just one more round! The last one! I'll invent masonry and I'm done!” Such excuses to play late at night worked 30 years ago and they work just as well today. Civilization is absorbing as hell! It allows you to feel like the ruler of a global empire, gives you a feeling of continuous progress, offers rewards even for just waiting and taking the proverbial turn. The subsequent installments show how the quality of computer visuals changed, as the main game rules remain unaltered. Nay, they don't need them at all. Civilization, on the one hand, has a very simple formula, but thanks to a large number of variables it is so complex that each game is different anyway.
Yesterday, though partly today, my Russian Empire was fighting the Japanese. Another siege, another technology, I'll just see how my first aircraft carrier is built. In short, I played Civilization VI last night almost until 1 AM. Today I wake up and open my email inbox – i see some texts to edit when a friends texts me "such excuses to play at night worked 30 years ago and they work just as well today.” The man knows his game.
Martin Strzyzewski
It's a game that's "hard to spoil" – just like it's hard to spoil a game of chess. We're reaching for the latest installments to please our eyes with the new visuals, to check out the news that's mostly visible to veterans of the series. Fortunately, the creators understand the timelessness of Civilization and release a new version only when we begin to forget when the current one was released. And each comeback is like getting to a favorite place – a familiar place with no strange surprises, bringing back fond memories and greeting us with the best it has.
PLAGIARISM, BUT BETTER!
Civilization as we know it was created by the legendary Sid Meier, but the game in question was not his original idea. He based it on a board game by Avalon Hill, completely ignoring something like copyright. His then partner at MicroProse, Bill Stealey, had to spend the entire lunch talking to Avalon Hill's boss and negotiating the possibility of selling the game. No one believed in the great success of the computer version, so the Avalon boss decided that it was enough for MicroProse to place discount coupons in the boxes for the board release as part of the advertising. While he actually could advocate for a margin on each box sold... And how did Sid Meier respond to a statement by Stealey saying Civilization was plagiarized? "I know, but my version is better!”
