What did you do before Civ?

[jessiecat]

I guess I'm mainly asking the over-30's but anyone can answer,
What did you do before Civ 1 came out (1992?)?
Were you a gameplayer of any kind? If so, what? And if not on computers,
what did you do? I think it takes a certain way of thinking to become a
long-term Civ player and there are probably interests we shared.

Growing up in Canada (50-60's) I liked chess and board games, first Monopoly
and later Risk, Diplomacy and Trivial Pursuits. I was also into model soldiers
in a big way from about seven. By my thirties, I was heavily into painting
soldiers, table-top wargaming and historical reenactment games esp. ACW
and Napoleonic. All this went hand in hand with a passion for History
(BA degree in Modern History).
My first game, I think, on my friend's Amiga, was Populous then Sim City.
Then I discovered Civ 1 and then Colonization. I was hooked! Since then,
I've played every version up to BTS, though my fav. was probably Civ 2,
esp. the Fantastic Worlds and Conflicts in Civilization expansions.
I also, still occasionally play Sid Meier's Pirates and Age of Empires.
My question, therefore, is how did we all get here, so that this game has
become one of the major focuses of our lives.
What fatal flaws do we share, that have brought us all to this point?

 

[AmazonQueen]

Back in the 1970s I got given a subscription to Strategy and Tactics, a magazine with a game every 2 months, which started me out on the old SPI/Avalon Hill style of wargame. Later on I also got into PnP RPGs. Civ I was the first ever PC Game I bought

 

[jessiecat]

Back in the 1970s I got given a subscription to Strategy and Tactics, a magazine with a game every 2 months, which started me out on the old SPI/Avalon Hill style of wargame. Later on I also got into PnP RPGs. Civ I was the first ever PC Game I bought

Thanks for instant rsponse. Stategy and Tactics, eh? I remember that.
Guess that qualifies us a grandparents, doesn't it?

 

[clut]

whilst not quite making it to the 30's yet, my time before civ was taken up mainly with my trusty old Spectrum 128k +2. The days of Manic Miner, Matchday 2 and Elite as always happy memories.

 

[Chieftess]

Let's see...

SimEarth, SimCity, Nintendo, TRS-80 games... and a whole bunch of other classics.

 

[KMadCandy]

i'm over 30 but still in my 30s, and i don't even know some of those things you listed. you have a ton in common with my brother-in-law tho. right down to the little lead men!

i didn't know about civ until hubby got me hooked on civ2 when we were dating. growing up, we had an atari and nintendo, and we played pitfall and stuff. we got King's Quest for our first pc, and the whole family would play it basically, trying to solve the puzzles. we didn't have the internet to search for hints or cheat codes .

for one part of my answer to "what did you do before civ?" is, well, let's just say that i completely blame sid meier for the mess in my house. i think there are dust bunnies under my couch with his name on 'em. that have been there for like years. it's not that i was a total neat freak before, but i just find myself a lot more capable of ignoring the junk now. "one more turn" is way more fun than "one more load of laundry".

edit: oh, and my whole family is big on board games, except for mom. she won't play them with us at all. she says we're too competitive. ummmm, mom? it's a game, but those are my brothers over there. of course i have to win, duh! one example, in monopoly there's a rule that if the next player didn't notice you were on their property before they rolled, you didn't have to pay rent. so my little sister, who idolized me at the time since she was really young, would go after me in every game and wait just long enough to not have dad say "that was too quick!" and get me out of paying quite often .

i played trivial pursuit last year with hubby's family, boys against the girls. mom-in-law knew the answer to one of the boy team's questions, and actually asked us "can i give them a hint?" i was like "WHAT??????????? no way!!!!!! they are the bad guys, they are the other team!" i mean, who thinks like that? i love her, don't get me wrong. but she's rather like my mom about board games.

dad and one of my brothers play civ also. dad and i would send each other our highest scoring civ2 game scores to be competitive .

 

[jessiecat]

i'm over 30 but still in my 30s, and i don't even know some of those things you listed. you have a ton in common with my brother-in-law tho. right down to the little lead men!

i didn't know about civ until hubby got me hooked on civ2 when we were dating. growing up, we had an atari and nintendo, and we played pitfall and stuff. we got King's Quest for our first pc, and the whole family would play it basically, trying to solve the puzzles. we didn't have the internet to search for hints or cheat codes .

for one part of my answer to "what did you do before civ?" is, well, let's just say that i completely blame sid meier for the mess in my house. i think there are dust bunnies under my couch with his name on 'em. that have been there for like years. it's not that i was a total neat freak before, but i just find myself a lot more capable of ignoring the junk now. "one more turn" is way more fun than "one more load of laundry".

edit: oh, and my whole family is big on board games, except for mom. she won't play them with us at all. she says we're too competitive. ummmm, mom? it's a game, but those are my brothers over there. of course i have to win, duh! one example, in monopoly there's a rule that if the next player didn't notice you were on their property before they rolled, you didn't have to pay rent. so my little sister, who idolized me at the time since she was really young, would go after me in every game and wait just long enough to not have dad say "that was too quick!" and get me out of paying quite often .

i played trivial pursuit last year with hubby's family, boys against the girls. mom-in-law knew the answer to one of the boy team's questions, and actually asked us "can i give them a hint?" i was like "WHAT??????????? no way!!!!!! they are the bad guys, they are the other team!" i mean, who thinks like that? i love her, don't get me wrong. but she's rather like my mom about board games.

dad and one of my brothers play civ also. dad and i would send each other our highest scoring civ2 game scores to be competitive .

Love that family of yours! Mum used to beat hell out of me on Scrabble.
She didn't believe in helping (or taking prisoners!) My present partner got
hooked on Zelda on the SNES and played Civ for awhile. She's still hooked
on RPG's and adventure games. Even takes precedence over the 12 grandchildren,
and housework, of course.

 

[gps]

What did you do before Civ 1 came out (1992?)?
Were you a gameplayer of any kind? If so, what? And if not on computers,
what did you do? I think it takes a certain way of thinking to become a
long-term Civ player and there are probably interests we shared.

I always liked board games, especially chess, but few of my friends shared that enthusiasm, so I always dreamed of owning a chess- or later a personal computer. Bought my first ZX Spectrum at age 15 in 1985, especially enjoying games like Boulder Dash, The Hobbit (like to read also and are a big admirer of Tolkien’s work), Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy and Delta Wing, my first ever contact with a primitive flight simulator.
When ’88 came and I had my first encounter with Defender of the Crown at a friend’s – I was hooked and knew instantly I NEEDED a machine like that. Continued my pilot career with Interceptor, great flight simulator. Remember classics like Turrican II, Silkworm or the first Lucasfilms like Battlehawks 1942, Battle of Britain, Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken or Indiana Jones III? Good old times! Also enjoyed Sid’s first hits Silent Service, Red Storm Rising, Railroad Tycoon, F-19 and Gunship.
So Civilization DOS was a logical move when it was released. Although I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed by it, it did not really play as easy as Railroad Tycoon, did not look too great and was lacking the realism of Sid’s sims. At that time my brother and I shared a PC and an Amiga using both to their advantages, but with games like Red Baron, F-117, Gunship II, the Need for Speed franchise and stuff like that around focus soon shifted towards the PC. In ’93 I discovered my interest for race sims like Indycar Racing, NASCAR Racing or Grand Prix II with Grand Prix Legends in ’98 kind of being the climax and the end of that era (for me at least). Also enjoyed Civ II which was kind of more accessible and visually more satisfying than the predecessor.
Due to work, annoyance of copy protections / game quality in general (bugs) and other interests PC games kind of moved to the background for the last six or seven years – with only exception of such jewels as Der Patrizier II (The Patrician) or Port Royale I and II, Railroad Tycoon II and III, newer entries in the NFS series and – together with the kids – Lego Star Wars. Then I tried Civ IV and am hooked until the present day. I also caught up with and enjoyed Civ III, that I missed at it’s original release.

 

[JJ Boston]

I've basically been playing video games since I can remember. I started out with the NES and I've had every major nintendo system since. In fact, I literally can't remember what life was like before Mario.

I started PC gaming with Sim City, and the LucasArts adventure games. I love the whole dynamic of PC strategy games, but the Civ series has easily been one of the tops since I started playing the series about a year after Civ3.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Thanks for instant rsponse. Stategy and Tactics, eh? I remember that.
Guess that qualifies us a grandparents, doesn't it?

Not quite a grandparent yet. My oldest is at uni now.
I was a history geek as a kid. Never managed to get any of my friends to share my pleasure in moving little bits of cardboard around maps

 

[6K Man]

I played chess and AD&D in the 80s and early 90s. Got hooked on Civ1 in 1995, Civ2 in 1997.

 

[silver 2039]

N64 was what I would always play with my friends and other console games. Once I discovered Civ 3 I didn't touch my old consoles since.

 

[jkp1187]

Before Civilization?

That would've been 1991. Gosh.

Well, if we're just talking about games played....

Games produced by Infocom featured prominently in my library. So did F-15 Strike Eagle, Sid Meier's Pirates!, and Kennedy Approach. All for the Commodore 64, naturally. For the PC, I had Chris Crawford's Balance of Power (and its sequel, The 1990 Edition.)

There was also this game called Hidden Agenda about running a post-revolution country in Central America that was quite good, although it never had a lot of sales.

I was playing PBEM Diplomacy on Prodigy. I also briefly played Pax Britannica on GEnie. I had a copy of Supremacy and a bunch of its modules that I almost never played with anyone else (b/c I didn't know anyone else who actually was interested in playing....)

Oh, and Axis and Allies. (Of course, I also have a copy of the most recent update that still gets pulled out every once in a while...)

 

[Tully Bascombe]

My first computer game was SimEarth, but then I didn't buy one until Civ II. I guess I got out of the house a lot more back then.

But as others have mentioned, I dabbled with Strategy & Tactics and similar war games way back in the misty past.

 

[LlamaCat]

in the 80s, it was all Atari all the time... nothing beats Pitfall on the Atari. Then it was Commodore 64 gaming...Summer Olympics, Lode Runner, even a strip poker (mom caught me playing it once - how did I get my hands on that at that age? I can't remember)

then we used to play Risk on those small Macs with the black and white screens at my college newspaper, this was early 90s... we would each sit at the computer and play a turn then get up and let the next person play his turn. God, what a hassle to think about it now.

actually right around that time I first got exposed to Civ ... my dad bought the first Civ for my younger brother for Christmas, thinking it would help teach him about history. Instead he ignored it and I got hooked. Then it fell off my radar during college (Civ 2 times) and when Civ III came out, I was like: yeah!!

I completely missed the whole Sim early days... for some reason I never even heard about those type of games.

ps.... the Commodore 64 is on display in the Smithsonian museum here in Washington DC. Nothing makes you feel older than seeing a museum display of literally just your old computer at home!!

 

[grommit5]

well, my first computer was a TI99/4a. 16k mem and a the usual cartidge slot for that era. played moon patrol, burgertime. from there went to a 8086 processor. 512 ram and 5 1/4" dual floppies, when i upgraded from monochrome to a vidoe card thet displayed 4 whole colors, i thought i had it made. played a lot of SSI D&D gold box. still do play them occasionally. pen and paper d&d too!

 

[Civinator]

My first computer was a C-64. Here I mostly played games made by SSI: Colonial Conquest, a nice game for its time between Civ and Risk (but without a techtree), USAAF by Gary Grigsby (here I can remember, that it was very pleasing to catch these P-38´s over a certain hight) and some other strategy games. Than my C-64 got assistance by a Sinclair that my father didn´t need any longer. Desert Rats and Operation Vulcan were nice games to play on that machine. All were war-games. I have all these games until today. Than came "Pirates". After pirates I had enough money to move to a pc. Just in time for Civ 1 and MOO 1 (that I prefered over Civ 1).

Edited: Just looked in my USAAF handbook: It was the P-38 and not the P-47 with a reduced mv-rating in altitudes equal or above 20.000 feet.

 

[grommit5]

SSI totally rocked. some of the best games made in those days.

 

[Civinator]

SSI totally rocked. some of the best games made in those days.

Yes. And when I compare the handbooks of the old SSI-game USAAF and those of Civ 4 and Civ 3, that now still are laying in front of my flatscreen, I have to confess, I really like the old handbooks much better. The letters were bigger and there were much better pictures and technical explanations of the units in the old handbook. These old handbooks made much more fun and until today they are very useful for modding other games.

 

[DragonHawk]

I did not play Civ seriously until civ2. So for me it was strategy games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1, 2, 3, 4), Bandit Kings of Ancient China, Napoleon, Gemstones, and the likes. Does anyone remember/played these games???
I also played adventure games like Freddy Pharkas, Leisure Suite Larry, Eco Quest and the likes...
I found Colonization which I actually loved more than Civ2 games since Col had more micromanagement and trade options (yes I love going tribes to tribes buying tobacco for the cheapest price and sell the cigars back to them or the Europeans for tons more $$$)
I love Master of Magic and Master of Orion (1&2) games. I spent countless hours playing these games. The strategic aspect of the combats was great. I love the fact that different species have inherent differences and you can create highly customized colonies/cities based on their inhabitants and/or resources.