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Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier's Civilization

GDC Festival of Gaming

555K subscribers • 54 videos on Hallway • Conference channel

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2021.
  • Presented by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, creators of Civilization
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 9 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

225K views9 years ago4 recommendations

Game developmentHistory and cultureGame designPostmortems and making-ofRetro games and consoles

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley share the development history and design decisions behind the creation of the original Civilization game.

In this 2017 GDC classic game postmortem, Civilization creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell the story of how Shelley's background in board game design and Meier's history of sim game development blended together perfectly to create what is perhaps the biggest and longest-running strategy game franchise in the world. GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives. Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/Official_GDC Check out our Facebook page for GDC exclusives facebook.com/GameDevelopersConference Visit our site: ubm.io/2ctNvqZ

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a classic game postmortem detailing the design, influences, and mechanics of Civilization.

simonhon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Sid Meier's Memoir”

Ordered. Funnily enough I recently came across this GDC presentation by Sid and Bruce Shelley on the development of the original Civilization0. Highly recommended. The influence of Empire as one of the inspirations of the game was obvious to anyone familiar with it. If you're interested there's an excellent updated implementation of Empire on the App Store1. I'd love to be able to get a version of Civ 2 on mobile. It's still by far my favourite iteration of Civ. Or Pirates! 0 link to this video 1 link
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simonhon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’”

Check out this great GDC talk by Sid and Bruce on the history of the development of the game. link to this video They mention Empire as an influence, and there's a really nice modern implementation of Empire available for Windows and iOS. link link
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eriknstron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy”

> I made a chatbot that rolled dice, and it was constantly criticized for being "broken" because four 3's would come up in a row. > These accusations would come up even though they (all being computer science majors) know it's possible (although unlikely) for these events to happen. They just don't trust the black box. This reminds me of a talk 1 given at Game Developer's Conference (GDC) about the game Civilization, in which the Sid Meyer -- creator of said game -- spent a bit of the time talking about the difference between fairness and perceived fairness. The talk is only an hour long and worth watching. 1: link to this video
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cpetersoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization”

Here are videos of two GDC 2017 talks about Civilization that I enjoyed: Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier's Civilization (with Civilization creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley): link to this video Absolutely No Pressure: Continuing a Successful Game Series with Civilization VI (with Civilization VI lead designer Ed Beach): link
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codetrotteron Hacker News • Recommends

On “How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)”

> The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. You might enjoy these videos as well: link to this video link
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