This being a country rather than a city simulator, the spaces between the cities were just as important as the urban centers themselves. Meier abstracted away most of the details of the individual cities, letting the player decide only on which key buildings were built, whilst boiling each city down to a handful of numbers detailing its population, its economy, and its quality of life. This, then, was the first of three conceptual layers which would eventually make up the game of Civilization that the world would come to know. Whereas SimCity had let the player build her own functioning city, Civilization would let her build a whole network of them, forming a country - or, as the game’s name would imply, a civilization. In fact, his first conception of Civilization cast it as a much more obvious heir to SimCity than even Railroad Tycoon had been. It had succeeded magnificently on those terms, but Meier wasn’t done building on what Wright had wrought. Thus Railroad Tycoon had attempted to take some of the appeal of SimCity and “gamify” it by adding computerized opponents and a concrete ending date. The programmer and simulation designer inside him recognized Will Wright’s so-called “software toy” to be a stunning achievement, yet the purer game designer within him was always a bit frustrated by the aimlessness of the experience. Like Railroad Tycoon before it, Civilization was born out of Meier’s abiding fascination with SimCity. And then - because what else should a recently married game designer spend his evenings doing? - Meier had embarked on a third project on his own time, a game he was already calling Civilization. The same pair was, with considerably less enthusiasm, returning to Covert Action, one of the rare Meier designs that he could just never quite get to work to his satisfaction. He and his protege Bruce Shelley were finishing up Railroad Tycoon with justifiable enthusiasm. At the beginning of 1990, for instance, he had no fewer than three ambitious projects on the boil. During Sid Meier’s astonishingly productive first ten years as a designer and programmer, games poured out of him in such a jumble that even his colleagues at MicroProse Software could have trouble keeping straight what all he was working on at any given time.

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