Every once in a while he’d show me something. He always had half a dozen prototype games on PC. We’d have paper and pencil and cards and blackboards and we’d try to break down the rules as we went along. ![]() Shelley: I came from board games, and that’s how we made board games. That was the main way of finding out if something was good? GamesBeat: You were prototyping way back then. There’s another guy says he wrote a lot of it, so maybe he did. I also wrote a lot of things – the manual, all the text in the game. I was also expected to play and tell him what I was thinking. When we did playtesting I ran all the playtesting sessions and kept the bug lists. I had to work with the artists about what pieces we needed when we got to the point where we needed art and music. Unless Sid wanted to, it was my job to go down the hall to the meetings and tell everyone what we were doing. I was his producer, so I liaised with marketing and sales and the president and anybody else who needed to know what was going on with the game. I was assigned to him to do whatever he needed. My jobs were-I was running other projects, producing other things. GamesBeat: Were you just a designer, or did you do some of the actual coding? I’ve learned that you need to have many more people looking at the product and get more input on what works and doesn’t work. Looking back, I’m thrilled it was me, but in the long term it was probably a mistake to have the focus be just one person. I’d have a crowd in the office sometimes watching me play. ![]() I never knew if he took any of my suggestions until all of a sudden it might be in the game next time I got a build.īut for months I was the only one who got to play the game. Sometimes he’d ask for a suggestion – “I’ve got a problem, how do I solve this?” – and usually he’d come up with an answer. From there on, on a daily basis I’d get a new version from him and we’d find a couple of hours to sit down and talk about what we played. He gave me this disc and said, “Play this and tell me what you think.” That was the beginning, for me. That was the first time I’d heard about the game. I still have this 5 1/4” floppy disc dated May of 1990. But the thing that was most interesting about it-Sid trusted me to a point where I was the only one allowed to play the game for months. I thought we were making something really special. Nobody knew that this little town north of Baltimore was making something that was going to go off like a bomb. First of all, we just knew we were working on something that was going to blow people’s minds. GamesBeat: What was most memorable about the original Civ for you? I came in February of 1988 and left at Christmas of 1992. GamesBeat: How many years were you at MicroProse? I was there for the original project, but it was interesting to learn about how they dealt with what followed. The things they had to deal with-I think both Sorin and Brian were articulate about some of the things we dealt with. I was gone after the original Civ, so learning more about the details of Civ 2 and Civ 3 and Civ 4 was interesting for me. GamesBeat: How did the celebration make you feel? Nostalgic?īruce Shelley: Nostalgic, sure. Based on extrapolations from sales on the Steam digital distribution and community platform, the Civ series has been played for more than a billion hours. ![]() Meier’s teams at MicroProse and Firaxis created 66 versions of the game across all platforms throughout the history of the franchise. Civilization has 33 million copies in sales to date, including 8 million for its latest, 2010’s Civilization V and its expansions. And then they doubled up on the first Civilization empire-building game, which debuted in 1991 to great acclaim. Together, they worked on Railroad Tycoon. That’s a lot like how Meier made one prototype after another on computers. He designed games on paper back in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was easier to keep revising until the game was right. Register today.īefore he worked on Civilization with legendary game designer Sid Meier, Bruce Shelley was a board game designer at companies such as Avalon Hill. Interested in learning what's next for the gaming industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next.
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