Legendary game series Civilization is 25 years old this year, and Dean Takahashi reports on its long journey from revolutionary god game to a cultural touchstone in its own right.
Few game franchises live to see a 25th anniversary, but Civ, as most gamers and industry folk call it, is thriving. It has 33 million copies in sales to date, including 8 million for its latest, 2010’s Civilization V and its expansions. Meier’s teams at MicroProse and Firaxis have created 66 versions of the game across all platforms, and based on extrapolations from sales on the Steam digital distribution and community platform, the Civ series has been played for more than a billion hours.
Many hours were lost to this game, but my most enduring memory of its early iterations was the fact that city names had a short character limit. I thereby found, as a young teenager, that it honed my creative instincts for devising succinctly offensive city names. This "economy of stupidity" has proven a most valuable skill.
