Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games | Paperback
Sid Meier
WW Norton
Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs / Business / Science & Technology Published Sep 7, 2021
9780393868296

"The life and career of the legendary developer celebrated as the “godfather of computer gaming,” and creator of Civilization.

"Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world’s most popular video games, including Sid Meier’s Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier’s Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry. Writing with warmth and ironic humor, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio, MicroProse, founded in 1982 after a trip to a Las Vegas arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games, from vintage classics like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, to Civilization and beyond.

"Articulating his philosophy that a video game should be “a series of interesting decisions,” Meier also shares his perspective on the history of the industry, the psychology of gamers, and fascinating insights into the creative process, including his rules of good game design.

CONTENTS

ONE BILLION HOURS: An Introduction
1. WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
2. ADAPTATION
3. CRUISING ALTITUDE
4. D-DAY
5. COLLECTIVE EFFORT
6. AHOY!
7. AND THEN BILL BOUGHT AN AIRPLANE
8. OVERT PROTRACTION
9. HANG ON A SECOND
10. ALL ABOARD
11. HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, PART I
12. TURNING POINTS
13. IF IT AIN'T BAROQUE
14. SEQUEL-ISH
15. THE DISPERSING
16. INTERESTING DECISIONS
17. BACK TO THE FUTURE
18. EXTINCTION
19. ARTIFICIAL TURF
20. INTO THE WIND
21. HIGHER EDUCATION
22. FUZZY MATH
23. SOCIAL MOBILITY
24. FUNNY BUSINESS
25. BEYOND
Special Thanks!
Sid Meier’s Complete Gameography!
Index!

An exerpt from the Introduction..

"What follows is a largely chronological examination of all the games I’ve produced over my lifetime, from the wildly successful to the completely unheard of. It’s a thorough list, including a few that were developed outside the traditional career model where you do things like “make money” and “get sued if you copy other people’s ideas.” Just as every sprawling empire can be traced back to a single settler, my reputation as a benevolent industry patriarch wasn’t built in a day, and the truth is I was once a young kid who didn’t know there were rules, making games out of not-so-original ideas for maximum fun and minimum (often nonexistent) profit. Fortunately, I’ve been told the statute of limitations has expired, so I’m ready to come clean. But whether they took a billion lines of code—not an impossible estimate for all of the Civ products combined—or less than a hundred, there is one thing every game in this book has in common. They are fundamenta
lly comprised, as all games are, of a series of interesting decisions.

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* Origin: nntp://news.fidonet.fi (2:221/6.0)