Barring a few well-trodden anecdotes, such as founding his company on the back of a bet made in Las Vegas, Meier has preferred to focus on his games rather than himself. Meier, by contrast, is quite literally a brand: his name has been at the top of his games from 1987’s Pirates! onwards.īut as well known as his name may be, few know much about the man himself. An unusual figure in the field, Meier gained a reputation as an auteur in an era when the names of individual developers were rarely known to the players of their games, and occasionally went uncredited entirely. That same approach could be said to have guided Meier’s life. Give players too few choices and you aren’t really making a game, you’re making interactive fiction give them too much, and the panoply of options renders the whole thing more stressful than entertaining. For Meier, good game design comes down, at its core, to a series of “interesting decisions”. What makes the Civilzation games so compelling? The fans are a cut above I’d know as I am one of them, having racked up 530 hours on Civilization VI since I bought it at the beginning of lockdown.

And yet it took just six years for players to spend a billion cumulative hours on the fifth iteration of Meier’s engrossing Civilization series, a nation-building game that has seen them shepherding their peoples from the foundation of their first city in 4000BC to an eventual victory through military, cultural or scientific might, millions of times over. O ne billion hours, veteran game designer Sid Meier notes in this light and enjoyable memoir, is an unfathomable length of time.

Game of thrones civilization