hubby (who i met in 95) had played colonization and Civ1. he bought Civ2 in March 96, not long after release. i remember the date because...
the oscars were March 16 that year (google found me that, i'm not bitter enough to remember the exact date). he'd promised to watch them with me, since having company to make catty comments to is much more fun than watching solo. he however had serious and complete 'one more turn' disease and never did save it and come to the tv room. we weren't married yet but he was at my house on his pc (he lived in a boring army barracks). i was reallllllllllllllly mad at him, i mean now it is more than a decade later and i'm a bit bitter still. even after playing it myself and getting the bug i'm still like 'dude the show only lasts 3 hours get your butt out of the chair for a bit.'
i was interested in what he was doing, so during commercial breaks i read the manual. stereotype alert: he's a guy, he of course hadn't ever opened the manual, and i'm a girl so i do read 'em. i'd come across something complicated and kept going "OMG honey this is too confusing for me! what does X mean? how the heck do you do Y?" he laughed and said "i'll show you later."
so, a couple days later i started my first game. he watched, and i asked him for help at times but that can be tricky. i didn't like him telling me 'nono do this not what you're doing' all the time, if you know what i mean. if i ask for advice that's cool, but i wanted to learn it, not have him pressure me or make me feel dumb. and we have different styles, i'm generally more of a build-first annihilate-later type than he is. it went smoothly tho.
after a while i was more hooked on it than he was! at one point my central air conditioning was broken, needed total replacement not just repair. i bought a window unit for the bedroom until i could afford to buy a new central. i of course moved a pc into the bedroom so that i could play civ2 and not boil to death. priorities baybee!
then going to visit my parents at christmas i found out my dad was a serious civ2 addict. i mentioned some changes i'd made to rules.txt for when i wanted different kinds of games (i miss how easy civ2 was to mod, but love how helpful CFC is to figure out how to mod parts of civ4, and how generous folks are in sharing what they've already done). dad had never touched rules.txt to change anything, so he had me send him the files with mods in them (like i made things upgrade that normally wouldn't, i forget what now specifically).
i remember one civ 2 game i saved, and worked on when i wanted something mindless, where i left one enemy city standing, totally starved them out with troops on just about every square, and a sea blockade, and FILLED the map up with cities. got my population up as much as i possibly could, went full luxury at the end for complete happiness and got a huge high score. mailed the save game to my dad and he thought i was crazy (for SOME reason). he's still addicted. he recently lost his civ4 disc1 and emailed me in a panic to send him mine FedEx and he'd send it back, luckily he found it the next day before i'd gone out to send mine.
i did eventually forgive hubby, who is now officially hubby, we got married in june 1996, the same year of the oscar incident, which shows i can be a VERY forgiving person given the magnitude of his sin there. but i'm still a bit bitter.
