What did you do before Civ?

[grommit5]

forgot all about romance of the three kingdoms. i should pull that one out for old times.

 

[Jorunkun]

Excellent question and great replies so far. I'm 37, so here's my two cents:

Like most people here, I was into strategy and fantasy games - first Risk and Monopoly, then Tolkien and D&D (red box) etc, finally Ultima, Pirates and SimCity etc on the computer.

I was always into open-ended, "sandbox"-type games that would simulate a whole world and could be replayed again and again, allowing you to project your story onto an emerging plot; no matter what the medium. In many ways, CIV was the game I'd always dreamed of.

And it's in this direction that I hope Civ will continue to develop.

J.

 

[AmazonQueen]

My copy of Civ I was some sort of compilation (didn't get it until 96ish IIRC).
Had Civ I, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates Gold, and another game, possibly Colonisation (but I might've bought that seperately) on it. A great buy

 

[kovacsflo]

I'm 28 and in my childhood I played with Lego and cardgames (for children) with my brother. I grown up in Hungary where you couldn't buy too many toys under communism, but the government spent a lot of money to nursery schools so there where several toys and good teachers in there.

Scifi comics were popular and interesting in that time, my fafourite one was a french translationed one, originally called Vaillant.

Flóri

 

[Hasdrubal Barca]

Well, i must admit... (i hope the civ community here doesn´t find where i live and come for my soul ) but my first favorite strategy games was Dune and Centurion, i only discovered Civ 1 later but i didn´t had a copy for the Amiga 500, so only when i got a Pc did i evolved to Civilization, but by that time...there was already another behemoth on the market that got my full attention - Dune 2! Later the Comand and Conquer Series....

My Civ addition started with Civ2 since Civ1 was only played on friends pc platforms and with limited time.

 

[Benvolio]

I'm 43. I never had Civ I, but got on board with Civ II (but not till I found it in a bargain bin. Been hooked ever since!)

Before Civ I came out I used to play SimCity, F-19/F-117, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!, and a lot of other titles I can't remember. (Favorites now are MS Flight Simulator, new Pirates!, and, of course, Civ (both III and IV ).

 

[bestbrian]

Growing up Risk, Monopoly, Uno, Chess; the usual suspects. In the early 80s discovered D&D. I'm not a fantasy kind of guy, but that led into some seriously fun RPGs like Champions, Twilight: 2000, and FASA's Star Trek RPG. This led right into Avalon Hill style wargaming like Wooden Ships and Iron Men, Civilization (yes, it was a board game), Storm Over Arnhem, Squad Leader, Harpoon, and the Europa series. Then I went to college; girls and beer took precedence.
I'd had a Atari 2600 growing up (heck, I was the first kid on my block with Pong) and I had friends in high school that had computers, but I never had a computer myself. In college played on some of my friends computers (Risk, Harpoon, Madden, Magic v Byrd) and some of the guys had nintendos. Then I got my own Genesis which led to championship series of Joe Montana Football and Tony LaRussa Baseball. Always had a console after that, proceeding from the Genesis, to the Saturn, PS One, and PS Two. Never a big arcade-type or FPS fan, most of my games were Madden and strategic wargames like Pacific Theate of Operations, Allied General, and Panzer General. And at some point in the 90s I picked up Civ II for the PS One.
This past summer I decided to join the 20th century and finally get myself a computer and find out what this whole "internet" fad was about. And I treated myself to the latest version of CIV. And here I am.

 

[pikesfan]

I had a computer in 1991, but just used it for school purposes (writing papers and that). Civ 1 was the first game I played.

 

[eewallace]

There were lots of computer games out there before civ. I had a C-64 that had tons of dungeons-n-dragons kinds of programs. Early PC games that had to run in DOS were a total pain in the neck: Does anyone else remember spending days rewriting config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to get those things to run?

 

[gps]

There were lots of computer games out there before civ. I had a C-64 that had tons of dungeons-n-dragons kinds of programs. Early PC games that had to run in DOS were a total pain in the neck: Does anyone else remember spending days rewriting config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to get those things to run?

You bet I can. F-15 III was the biggest pain in th a.. - required 621 kb free DOS mem!!!
But I did it. As annoying as it was, but in those days you still had a chance to solve hardware/driver issues on your own.
Today if our great XP operating sys does not like the driver, you're basically doomed.

 

[bealystock]

Well I don't know if this qualifies as a game but the first computer I worked with was in h/s. You had to wright your own programs buy filling in punch cards (You may have seen these in old movies) then feed them into a card reader so the computer would know what to do. It had no real memory so when you took the cards out it no longer could run the program. It took 70+ cards to be able to feed more cards with names on them, so if you typed in (find g) it would list all the names that begin with g. Aaahhh the good old days LOL.

My first vidio game console was something like polymorfic or something like that and it came with the pong game, we played that for hours and thought it was amazing. then came atari 2600, 5200, nitento, sns, then my first real computer.

For other pre vidio games I have over 100+ board war games from spi, avalonhill, decision, ect. oh and yes I used to get the stratagy & tactics mag too I still have alot of the somewere around the house, the board games take up a whole closet in the back bedroom. (read as game room). When I was in the army I learned about D&D and we played during manning duty where they don't care what you do as long as you stay awake and ready to man your positions if an alert was called.

Well lunch break is over better get back to work.

 

[grommit5]

You bet I can. F-15 III was the biggest pain in th a.. - required 621 kb free DOS mem!!!
But I did it. As annoying as it was, but in those days you still had a chance to solve hardware/driver issues on your own.
Today if our great XP operating sys does not like the driver, you're basically doomed.

as sad as this may sound i kinda miss my dos sometimes. there was a strange sort of satisfaction around tweeking everything to get that 620+ memory out of the old beast. even with quarterdeck it was a challenge sometimes.

 

[DragonHawk]

There were lots of computer games out there before civ. I had a C-64 that had tons of dungeons-n-dragons kinds of programs. Early PC games that had to run in DOS were a total pain in the neck: Does anyone else remember spending days rewriting config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to get those things to run?

Heh I had to do that well into my Win 3.1 days. I even had to shut SoundBlaster off and free some memory for some of the game to run on my 486 DX4.

 

[jkp1187]

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.

Oh...I totally forgot about SSI.... Germany 1985, R.D.F. 1985, President Elect, Geopolitique 1990.... Every one of them low on graphics but high on quality.

I wish SSI was still making wargames of that kind of quality today. (Matrix Games appears to be in the same ballpark nowadays.)

 

[davhey04]

One game that paved the way to civ for me was Empire and Empire Deluxe. Good stuff.

 

[grommit5]

One game that paved the way to civ for me was Empire and Empire Deluxe. Good stuff.

i still have empire deluxe installed on my computer. i love the simplicity. played it about 3 months ago.

 

[PimpyMicPimp]

I was playing Empire Earth II a lot, trying to get more out of it than just the basic RTS Mass Unit Race experience. I kept trying to do more things with diplomacy and trade, but in the end, all it took in that game was a horde of units to do anything.

Then I found Civ.

 

[Dark Sheer]

Hmmm, lets see, you mean there were life before Civ?

If I recall correctly, in the younger days I played Chinese Chess and Board Games such as Monopoly and Cluedo. PC was not there yet, mind you.

The first computer I encounter was a ZX-81 owned by the Electronic Club of my High School Shortly after that I got my hand on my first computer which was a Apple II+ clone. The screen was monochrome (green! ) and the first game I played on it was Mystery House. A graphic adventure written in Basic (Graphic as in simple line graphic ). Seeing how interesting the program logic was (logic was one of my interest, being a Chess player ) I soon pick up basic programming on my own and slowly move on to Assembly language then later on things like Pascal, Fortran, Cobol etc. It was during the Apple II days that I learn how to manipulate computer graphics. In those days Apple II+ has 8 color (As compared to 4 color in CGA ) but we were able to produce a total shade of 128 color by putting different colored pixels side by side.

Game wise, while I was in the Uni I came across a classic in adventure game : UltimaIV which I promptly fell in love with and stayed with anything that is Ultima related until today. Then on a faithful day while I was in store I saw something called F-15 Strike Eagle. THAT was the very first Sid game I played (A true fly sim in 3D but only in wireframe ). Of course, due to that game I learned about the name Sid Meyer and from there onwards it was one Sid game after another, including M1A1, Pirates, Sword of Samurai and of course Civilization! Back then there are games from 3 companies that I NEVER missed: Microprose (Sid's), Origin (Richard Garriot's) and Koei (Heh, because of wanting to play the game so much I actual bought an Oxford Japanese-Engish dictionary and picked up quite a lot of Japanese along the way )

But I guess what causes me to be interested in Civ1 so much was because I am always a history lover and still am today. (I doubt many people read history record like the original text of Shui Shu or History of Shui Dynasty for pass time ) World war history was my main interest in School days and painted figures and models were the thing of the day. I still have some nicely painted Airfix, Matchbox, Tamiya and Hashegawa models with me until today.

Hmm...I think I just some bright light at the end of the tunnel after seeing the flashback of my live. Wait! Nah, its just the ending of another round of Civ game.

 

[necrosmith]

Date.





(I need 10 characters, so here).

 

[smeiter.de]

I never knew that there was a time before civ

I played board games like Risk, Conquest, Axis and Allies...