Civilization I and Me

[BigDaveDiode]

I first found Civilization 1 when I was in the computer lab in the Engineering school about 1990 or so - some fellow students had pirated a copy of it, and installed it on every computer in the lab. I saw them playing it, and when they left their workstations I gave it a try, and was hooked - it was so intuitive and had such a good "Civilpedia" that I didn't need any instructions to do basic gameplay. I confess that I did copy the pirated version and played it for a while, but later on I bought it legally when I saw it for sale in the campus bookstore "bargain bin."

I've played a lot of games in my life since I first had PCs of my own, but Civilization 1, for some reason, has always been my favorite. My wife tried to get me hooked on Civ 2, Age of Empires, Rome, and others, but it seemed like I needed to make such a huge investment of time to learn the rules of a new game every 6 months.

When I started my professional job after school, because of my unusual position I was one of the only folks given a laptop to use (an 80286 Toshiba), and I always had Civ 1 installed on the hard drive. I admit that the first couple of years that I was sent all around the country, I was a bit unnerved - I had never really traveled outside of the 4-state area, and suddenly having to be told to grab a bag and fly to Maine, Washington, New Mexico, etc. for a week really didn't sit well with me. That and I hate flying. So why tell this? Because Civ 1 helped a lot - it helped me forget I was flying in an aluminum tube at 600 mph and 35,000 feet, it helped me forget that my company put me up in a hotel with holes in the walls and roaches on the floor, and it helped distract me late at night when I was far from home.

My first international trip they sent me to a country where I did not speak a word of the language and I had no idea what to expect. With jet lag and the culture shock of getting on several planes and ending up in China 35 hours later, it was really, really nice to have good old Civ 1 on my computer as I sat up in a hotel room in Shanghai at 3:30am wondering how the hell I was going to teach 30 Chinese engineers when I didn't speak a word of Chinese. Playing a few hours of Civ 1 really helped me decompress after the flight, and get ready for 10 hours of lecture to 30 blank faces.

My best experience with Civ 1 overseas: I was on a train heading to Paris on a hot summer day, after a grueling 2 weeks of work at a client's offices in the countryside. My French client was traveling with me, and we were both worn out and not talking much. He looked out the window idly and asked me in Franglais (I speak some French) what my favorite computer games were. I told him Half-Life (at the time) thinking he would have never heard of Civ 1. And his response was "this is embarrassing...I like this old American game. Maybe you have heard of it? Civilization." And it got my attention, so I asked him to show it to me. He fired up his laptop, still seeming embarrassed and apologizing for how "old" the game was, and after booting I saw - sure enough, he had Civ 1 on his laptop. This immediately led to an hour of animated conversation about Civ 1 while our train rolled on towards Paris. After we arrived, we had planned to go our separate ways (I was going to sight-see in Paris for a couple of days) but instead he was so enthused that somehow, he had run into another person who not only liked Civ 1 but still played it, even in the 2000's, that he ended up taking me out to dinner.

So it's 2010 and about 20 years later, I'm still playing it. Now that I have the code for the editor that Dack wrote, I hope to try my hand at making a map or two. While I appreciate and respect the incredibly complex and detailed games of today, you can bet that years from now, in a cramped airplane seat, dingy airport, or hotel room somewhere in the world, I'll be sitting in front of a computer reading "King Barack Obama, your people have discovered roads,..."

[void]

great story!

[C1v1l1z@t10n]

Yeah great story! I travel to Paris everyday (Monday-Friday) and got 1 hour train in and 1 hour back, I play very often Civilization 1 (on My MacBook Pro Windows 7 64-bit with DosBox installed with of course Civ1)

I have same history 1990 first seen the game etc... when I lived in Sweden I remember speaking a lot about Civilization with my friends and on the metro on guy heard our conversation and wanted to tell us this GREAT cheat in Civ1 "Guys do you know that if you let a settler build a road and you click on it you can build again until it is finished on teh same turn!!!" LOL yeah we never known that actually I never do that when I play, just click on a settler to wake him up if barbarians or another enemy is so close so they can attack it

[SaltyPepper]

Nice... I was a 12 y/o kid when my brother got a copy 20 years ago and we drove my parents crazy playing hour after hour. Lost the copy over the years but thanks to this site, im going to be showing my 12 y/o how to play.

[ran2]

Civ was the first game i ever played in 1993...1994? my parents thought I could learn from it being born in 1992 i was really young at the time it was a birthday gift I think any way it was really fun although I didn't really start playing it a lot until after I got my CIV:Call to power disc scratched up I don't remember when that was.

[erobinson32]

I convinced my parents that it was educational, which is one reason they used to let me play so much. I wonder what percentage of non civ players know who Hammurabi is.

[Theov]

I don't know how old I was. but we spend so many hours...
We would spend days and evening on his father's computer trying to conquer the world. We came of the nintendo age and then jumped into the 'smart' games. This made us warmongers. We added so much humor and play until the sun came up. We could let our imagination get the best of us; meaning: your city is bad placed and we need a canal, WAR! We didn't care. We cared only for our people. But we were good.

Thinking of... I should phone that guy to check out how he is. It's been 10 years.

[GibsonS]

@erobinson32: I actually looked up who these people were that I was apparently matching in world-leadership circles. No way I would have learned about Simon Bolivar et al without Sid Meier's mentoring throughout my formative years!

Despite having played many other great games over the years, Civ1 is the only one I still keep coming back to (not even Chucky Egg has that status!). It kept me sort-of sane for the year I spent living in a porta-cabin in the Qatari desert...

[michaelsander]

I played the game when I was a little boy around age 7 since 1991, I didn't understand the game completely (government switching, tech trees, city walls, building settlers) until about 1 or 2 years later, but I was playing it all the way until 1996 when civ2 came out.