Sid Meier

I remember Spore.

Yeah, Spore was Sid Meier, right? The civilization guy.

Sid

Meier, yes.

That is going to do it for us.

Our next game, by the way, Sid Meier's Pirates.

Or as Brian would say, Sid Meier's Pirates.

Sid Meier's...

Sid Meier's Pirates.

Pirates.

right yeah as as pitched i said hey scott as pitched i should play the old one and you play the less old one from 2004 and we should we should meet up because it's talk like a pirate day i believe next friday right before we air this episode that's coming up yeah i hate talk like a pirate day but yeah yeah so do we want to just do we want to like we want to play it like that

I'll play the newer one you play the 87 and let's meet in the middle and talk about the differences I played enough of the old one to remember things anyway so I'll have a reference for you I think that's great let's do it we're going to do that next week and both are retro funny enough by our measuring so if you want to get your Sid Meier's Pirates on we're going to be ready for you that'll be next week here on Play Retro In the meantime, if you are bored, not bored, if you're playing Shenmue and you just can't get enough Shenmue, I'd like you to support us at patreon.com slash play retro.

It's...

Yeah, we're li- yeah, it's literally, uh, Sid Meier level, uh, diplomacy going on here.

Oh, you unlocked it.

You unlocked the memory in my head.

Yeah.

So do I. Sid Meier's

Railroad.

Railroad? Two?

We don't see the realistic pirate thing anymore, really.

Sid Meier's pirate.

Was that the last one? Actually, the Xbox one adaptation of Pirates of the Caribbean, the movie is like a very serious, somber, like strategic ship battling and pirate simulator.

Like it has it has no fantastic elements.

We hope to teach you something new about the topic, what it took from the world as its inspiration, or what it gave back to the world in its legacy.

Today, we are celebrating 35 years of Sid Meier's Civilization, the 1991 strategy game that took a 28-year-old stated ambition to write the ultimate strategy game and basically turned it into the foundation of an entire genre.

I'm David Kasson, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host, who I have no doubt has personally lost more sleep to this game than any responsible adult should admit to on a podcast.

He is, of course, my brother Rob Kasson.

That realization set him looking for paying work, and he found it in an unlikely place.

A local bank that wanted video games for its lobby as a way of making financial responsibility feel cool to teenagers.

So Sid Meier built a piggy bank game where you caught falling coins and a Frogger-inspired piece where you hustled money across traffic to safety, presumably standing in for the perils of impulse spending.

It was admittedly a strange gig, but it was his first taste of getting paid to make something up from nothing, and it planted a question.

All right, so what's your history with this game and or 4X games? We've played Civilization.

Sid Meier's Civilization was the big one we did on this show.

The OG.

This is not a Sid Meier game, but it's kind of like the next big one.

Yeah.

So as far as...

So maybe there were a couple other imitators in those intervening years, but I don't think there were any really big ones.

There is stuff that we've talked about, like SimCity and...