Sid Meier

I like to do like infinitely advanced alien races.

So what I usually I have the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri supplement for GURPS.

Oh,

yeah.

You're, you're sitting with a map, looking at a map of a world and you're clicking on cities and telling units how to move across a continent.

While the source book gives you a better idea of what it's like to live down on the ground as an individual.

I like that because, again, I am such a fan of the game and the world that Sid Meier created.

I

Well, right.

So basically what Tim Burton did was he pulled a Sid Meier, right? Like, as a nobody, he put his name in the title of the first thing he ever made, basically inserting the idea into everyone's minds that, oh, this guy is somebody.

And he makes things that are, like, important because they're related to him, right? If you don't know who Sid Meier is, he's basically a video game.

Yeah.

Exactly.

which was released 35 years ago.

And Polygon have partnered with Firaxis Games, the actual development company of, of course, Sid Meier, the creator of the series.

and have produced a rather nice in-depth article, an interview with loads of people involved with the series over the years, including the great man himself, and also a video, a documentary covering the history of the Civilization series to kind of mark this rather momentous occasion.

And I very much wanted to talk about this because I was quite late to Civilization.

So a story over here on Polygon.com. And if this isn't on your regular reading list, it really should be because it's such a fantastic site with all of these great in-depth articles and things.

It's called Civilization, The Oral History.

Sid Meier's name hangs over the franchise, but crafting the ultimate turn-based strategy franchise took a village.

Good pun there, like that.

Well, my favorite game of all time is World of Warcraft because it's big, it's social gilded, and it keeps me going and going.

Sid Meier did Civilization.

I told him at one point, you have a knack for amazing your customers with gratuitous creativity, which is kind of the trick at Pixar as well.

You spend stuff that doesn't look like it makes sense, but it's so good you have to just appreciate they went this extra mile for

It was about history.

And as you, and even as you played that game, you know, I know famously they said, oh, you know, it's whatever he could find in the children's book section Sid Meier

that they put

in but it was full of of like the writings you know every time you discovered you know pottery and could build a granary it's like there was there was like paragraphs of text and some people just click by but I would read it all and I was just fascinated by it um and then um yeah so I think that that started my love of history also playing games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you know, basically a lot of video games and then books because I love maps.