Due to a strange quirk of my gaming history, I never played a numbered Civilization game beyond the original Civ (also known as Sid Meier’s Civilization: Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time). That game I utterly consumed back in the early 90s when it was released, probably completing the game with every possible combination of civilization and victory condition.

Civ II, for example, wasn’t released until 1996, five years after its predecessor (I had spent much of that intervening period playing Civ), and at that point Quake, and then the mod Quake 40K/Chapter Honour (boy, there’s a site I haven’t seen in ages), become my time-sucking game of choice.

During most periods of my life, I’ve tried to consistently play games in a variety of genres—in the 90s, I was mainly into adventure games, shooters, and strategy games—but I’ve also generally had one game that lurks in the background, filling the cracks in my gaming time between this title or that title. Civ was probably the first game to hold that honor. (more…)

Last month, I wrote up my initial reactions to Spore, based on some hands-on at Will Wright’s Emeryville studio and following a long interview with Soren Johnson, Spore designer and former Firaxis designer on Civilization III and IV.  That full interview has finally been posted.  It was conducted with my coworker Brandon Sheffield in hot tag-team style.

The interview starts out very much about Spore (obviously), but towards the end it actually starts to angle more towards a discussion about strategy games in general—why they’ve become successful, why they’ve faced challenges, and what their future may hold.  Johnson obviously has a lot of perspective on the matter, and it’s particularly interesting since he was the designer on Spore charged with ensuring the game will be of interest to hardcore gamers, not just the more casual crowd that has typified Wright’s audience with The Sims.

He also speaks a lot about the Civilization series, and the pressures to satisfy an increasingly hardcore and competent audience by the fourth game in the series, at the potential expense of the broader audience that made the series big in the first place.

And did you know the original Civ was conceived as an RTS?  Sid Meier changed his mind.  I didn’t know that!  Maybe you did.