Slashdot Mirror
The History of Civilization
You may recall back in March, when a group of smart folks got together to form a game canon. They essentially nominated the ten most important games, ever. Gamasutra has begun a series of articles which will explore the storied history of each of these titles, and they've started with Sim Meier's Civilization series. Benj Edwards' history of Civilization begins with a rundown on the series itself, and wraps with a lengthy Sid Meier interview. Required reading, essentially. "Meier [is] comfortable with a legacy inextricably tied to Civilization: 'I think that if that's what's on my epitaph, "Did Civilization," that would be fine.' In musing about the fate of his beloved series, Meier finds himself satisfied with what the future might hold for the franchise: 'There's probably somebody getting ready for their first day of college that's probably going to be a part of Civilization in ten to fifteen years from now. I think it'll be around for quite a while.'"
The ver excellent Civilization strategy guide "Civilization, or Rome on 640K per day" or something to that effect, had a section on modding the game.
One of the mods was editing the text that was part of the opening cinematic, and the example the guy used was, in part that very sequence, as well as the digital watches bit.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
They only make slanting references to Civ II onward. No mention of the fact that Civ spawned an entire user community, a complete user created manual on the early internet describing all the intricacies of the game and "cheats" (utilizing bugs) that could stretch the game score far beyond what was envisioned.
Then there's the entire segment of history regarding CivNet, the user community generated effort driven by the fact there would be no Civ II originally. Or the fact that CivNet's efforts were wrapped into Civ II. There's a whole set of firsts buried in that time period that probably deserve mention. Civ was the first computer game I'm aware of that spawned such a large and intense interest in it that a user community spawned up around it that also culminated in new code being written.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The term "canon" is used in literature to describe a generally-accepted set of "great" literary works, and it makes perfect sense to extend this concept to games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon
Perhaps next time you'll educate yourself (or at least read your own link) before denigrating others!
But Civ 1 has more modern units like riflemen and mechanised infantry. Phalanxes aren't upgraded, they stay exactly as they are.