The programmer and simulation designer inside him recognized Will Wright’s so-called “software toy” to be a stunning achievement, yet the purer game designer within him was always a bit frustrated by the aimlessness of the experience. Like Railroad Tycoon before it, Civilization was born out of Meier’s abiding fascination with SimCity. And then - because what else should a recently married game designer spend his evenings doing? - Meier had embarked on a third project on his own time, a game he was already calling Civilization. The same pair was, with considerably less enthusiasm, returning to Covert Action, one of the rare Meier designs that he could just never quite get to work to his satisfaction. He and his protege Bruce Shelley were finishing up Railroad Tycoon with justifiable enthusiasm. At the beginning of 1990, for instance, he had no fewer than three ambitious projects on the boil. During Sid Meier’s astonishingly productive first ten years as a designer and programmer, games poured out of him in such a jumble that even his colleagues at MicroProse Software could have trouble keeping straight what all he was working on at any given time.
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