Nostalgia question

Since this is about nostalgia, let me tell you when I first heard about civ1.

I was about 10 years old. I still remember I was in the car and my father told me he had heard about a game that sounded awesome. It was called civilization, and it was about rewriting history. You could chose everything that happened in history to be different, and see what happens.

Of course, it wasn't exactly like that, but that's what he had heard. Some time later, in a friends house, he happened to have the game and he showed it to me. The whole screen black except a few tiles, a square unit moving a few, needing to press next turn.... I thought what the hell is this !

Then I tried it. Still remember I got Rome. having no idea about resources or anything I buit Rome on a tile surrounded by water except 1 tile, thinking that looked very defendible. I still remember 1 more thing about that very first game. After hours of playing, I discovered London, and it was level 11. OMG level 11, how is that even possible, I thought.

And since then, it became my favourite franchite up until today.

It's curious how I remember all this, when I was only 10.

If you really want nostalgia the first time I played "Civilization" was on a tour of a college in 1979 ( a year before I got my first computer) on a mini-computer (probably a PDP-11). You played Imhotep and had to guide Egypt to prosperity while storing enough grain to offset plagues of locusts or storms etc. while making sure you used enough to keep your population growing. That hooked me on Civilization type games. There were a lot of variants for that game, usually written in BASIC and text only. I had one on my TRS-80. Good times (but I wouldn't want to go back).

I played it on Amiga 500. The hardest part of playing this game was - english language and no manual - at those times it was impossible/almost impossible to buy legal versions of games in my country.

LeeS said:

I picked it up on a whim in 1991 or 1992 --- big mistake

Started my 1st game after getting home from work....next thing I knew it was 6am

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Me too, last half of 1991. Bought my first PC just to play this amazing game. A 386 DX 20 Mhz, but it had a turbo button that increased the cpu speed to 25 Mhz.

Most of my nostalgia is for Civ 2. I tried playing Civ 1 again recently, and I just couldn't stand it for more than a few minutes. Maybe because I was trying to play all the game mechanics like it was Civ 5. (Unit stacking? What's that?)

That said, as noted by others, my biggest "nostalgia" from Civ 1 if you can call it that is when I would lose a battleship to a phalanx. It didn't even make me mad when it happened (after all, it meant I probably had a pretty sizable tech lead), it just made me laugh.

I received it as a gift. Played it on a Packard Bell and used the small floppy to load the game. I got a sound card just for Civ I. Been playing ever since. Ever time I start a game it is a new experience. Not like most games where you know where everything on the map is.

I started computer gaming on a mainframe. I think the first one was a text game about an underground cave. With magic and dwarfs and such. I still remember the magic word XYZZY.

I've played pretty well all the Civ games soon after release. I'm 59. And yes... my first Civ-1 game turned into an all-nighter.

Just one more turn...

Wojciech_R said:

Hi,

Is there anyone here who played CIV 1 just after release (1991)?

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I started playing Civilization a couple of months after release.

Been near a quarter century of Civ now.

Luckystrike77 said:

Me too, last half of 1991. Bought my first PC just to play this amazing game. A 386 DX 20 Mhz, but it had a turbo button that increased the cpu speed to 25 Mhz.

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And now we have speed step instead of an easy to use button, sigh. All right actually I do have such a button but I had to buy a $500 motherboard to get it and the panel takes a 5.25" slot but those turbo buttons used to be ubiquitous.

Ah nostalgia we had it so good.

No.

I do remember seeing a mate playing it on one of the machines at our 6th Form College in 1992-ish, but I was still really into SimCity, F-117 and Lemmings, so I didn't grab a copy from him at the time (all my PC games were pirated, I'm now ashamed to say). Lucky for me, though: if I'd started playing Civ in 1992, I probably would have flunked all my A-levels, instead of just scraping a poor Maths grade

Finally bought Civ on a whim in early 2002, played it almost exclusively for the next 7 years. And then I bought Civ3...

I wish I could proeprly remember when it was, but I feel like I've been playing since around then, I would've been 8 or 9... My Dad had an 'apricot' 386 of some sort with minimal memory and the hills and mountains were all single tiles and didn't merge into larger formations.

It took me many years to figure out that this was a side-effect of a problem though (low conventional/base memory) and I learnt a lot about how to load DOS modules into extended memory (editing config.sys, LOADHIGH=..., autoexec.bat lh ...) and then worked on getting as much available memory as possible. I can't even remember the specifics on how I learnt about this, I vaguely remember something called memmaker though, maybe that helped me optimise originally, such useless information that's no longer relevant!

I'll try and chat to my Dad and work out exactly when it was, it must've been around then, as I remember when Monkey Island 2 was new on mail order place he ordered his games from... Might've been a bit later with us being in the UK, but gotta have been 1992 at the latest.

My father had gotten it for Christmas, not sure if it was 1991 or 1992. Well, he never played it, but I tried it. And enjoyed it. I always played on chieftan or warlord and just rolled over my opponents and dominated every game. I was only about 10 or 11 when I first started playing. I remember that I would get home from school, get a snack and beverage, then go into the computer room and turn on the TV and play Civilization for hours.

It always annoyed me when a veteran bomber would lose to a settler, but I justified it in my mind by saying things like "well, maybe the bomber had a mechanical failure and crashed."

I also remember refining my empire skills, and playing on such easy levels, I would often only have two cities that cranked out units. Imagine that? Having these blowout victories with only two productive cities? Ha! But this led me to getting Civ 2, then Civ 3 a few years later. It was only about two years ago that I started playing Civ 3 with a mind at upping my game and taking on the higher levels.

FYI- I tried Civ 4, it was ok, but couldn't really get into it. And as far as I'm concerned, Civ 5 shouldn't even be in the franchise. Completely different game than its predecessors.

There seems to be this age-30-something stratum of us who all got the game from Dad, who obviously paid attention to computer game reviews, and picked it up shortly after release. I'm sure this happens with a ton of games, but it's quite interesting to remark on with your peers 25 years later.

My dad wasn't into computers. Infact, he just now learned how to open his e-mails, but god forbid he had to send one or attach something. I still get new year's greetings from his colleagues in my inbox... Suffice to say, I got the game from a neighbour around '94. It has been a major influence (or maybe confluence?) on my interest in history, culture, geopolitics and language. I was 8 in '94 and only knew basic English back then, so I literally played with Websters on my lap to read the Civilopedia.

What I'm most fond of in Civ is the AI. It sometimes builds magnificent empires. And the gameplay too, once you got the hang of it, the game plays like an arcade, unnoticabely light on controls.

I first played the game in over 20 years after it was released. I wasn't even alive in 1991. I think I'm probably the youngest person who plays Civ I.

Wojciech_R said:

Hi,

Is there anyone here who played CIV 1 just after release (1991)?

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...me.
Amiga version, first.

Me, I came across it in 1995 during my twelve-month mandatory military service. We led a peaceful life at the sleepy navy base in northern Norway so there was plenty of spare time for games. I remember being introduced to Doom (the original first-person-shooter game), Civilization 1 and Transport Tycoon. Also I played MarioKart for the first time.

I got pretty hooked on Transport Tycoon, and I liked MarioKart a lot, but Civ1 didnt do it for me, it was too cryptic. I wanted to like it but I didn't understand it well, it was like playing a complicated boardgame where someone had hidden the rulebook.

I actually remember being very close to erasing it, but in the I kept it together with the others on some floppy disks. It must have been a year or so later before I picked it up again and slowly starting putting the pieces together. And here I am now having played it on again-off again over a period of 20 years. Never even liked any of the other Civ-series games, somehow the retro look of the original and the two-dimensional layout appeal to me, and it's just an excellently crafted game, it's so fluid, you can play it in a million different ways.

CELTICEMPIRE said:

I first played the game in over 20 years after it was released. I wasn't even alive in 1991. I think I'm probably the youngest person who plays Civ I.

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Not alive in 1991 and you play Civ 1! Wow. You are definitely the youngest Civ 1 player (until my 9 month old daughter learns how to use a computer, then your record is toast!)

I played it first time in February 1992, after my friend got it. He even learnt me how to play it.

I don't remember the exact month, but I'm certain I first played Civ on my Amiga, around 1992, after seeing it for the first time on the 386 PC of a friend. I still have the original box and disks in my collection, however I can't tell if they work, since I don't have my Amiga anymore ...