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The Father of Civilization: Profile of Sid Meier
An anonymous reader writes with a link to Kotaku's recent profile of Civilization creator Sid Meier, and includes this snippet: "One year, as [coworker John] Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari's Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you'd steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade's leaderboard. Not bad. Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points. 'I was really torqued,' Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. 'Sid, how did you do that?' 'Well,' Meier said. 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.'"
If Depeche Mode and Cranberries are what you like, I doubt I'm the right person to give you advice on music. But yeah, if you can't think of one good new music group to show up the last 10 years, then you've evidently stagnated, so it turned out I was right all along. Luck, I suppose.
profile of Civilization creator Sid Meier...
Wait.... what? This is a massive piece of gaming culture. An important fact to remember about history. How could you get this wrong?
Civilization is stolen IP. Straight up stolen. Sid Meiers took a board game, and made a video game out of it. He didn't credit it, weaseled around questions about it, and straight up lied about it. The game is fantastic, and honestly, better suited for a computer. But as far as "Sid Meir master game designer of Civilization" goes, that's bullshit. And this is an important lesson kiddies: STEAL. And if your field is new and hip and not yet quite mainstream and free of regulation, you can be famous for it.