Sid Meier’s Biography! The History and Career of a Legend
When it comes to legendary figures in the video game industry, Sid Meier stands atop the video game equivalent of Mt. Olympus. Known for his innovative approach to game design across multiple genres and his ability to create compelling and enduring gameplay experiences, Meier’s career is a testament to the power of creativity, strategic thinking, and focusing purely on fun.
This post delves into the human side of Sid Meier, exploring the difficult decisions he made throughout his career, the groundbreaking games he developed, and the profound impact he has had on the gaming industry. If you want to learn even more about Meier in his own words, his biography is incredible: Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games.
Early Life and Career Beginnings
Sidney K. Meier was born on February 24, 1954, in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. When he was three, his family moved to Detroit, MI, where he was raised. His interest in computers and programming began at a young age, fueled by the growing technology scene of the 1970s. Meier graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in history and an interest in computer science, a combination that would later influence his game design philosophy and choice of projects.
After college, Meier worked as a systems analyst for General Instrument, installing networked cash register systems in stores. General Instrument also made gambling machines, which led Meier to Las Vegas on a business trip. While there, Meier struck up a conversation with a co-worker he hadn’t met before. That man was Bill Stealey, a former Air Force pilot. During a closing seminar both men were attending, they held a quiet conversation to keep themselves awake. Stealey told Meier of his days in the Air Force and Meier told Stealey he was working on a flying game in his spare time.
Stealey perked up, “I really want to get into selling games,” he said. “This is the future!”1
When Meier told him that he had already sold his first video game, Formula 1 Racing, to Acorn Software, Stealey replied, “We should start a business!”
Meier wrote off the idea at first and the two men spent more time in Las Vegas in search of arcades. When they found one, Meier handily beat Stealey at nearly every game. But then they found a Red Baron arcade and Stealey saw his chance to wipe the floor with the geeky programmer. Stealey put up a respectable score, being a former fighter pilot and all, but was dumbstruck when Meier took a turn and doubled his score. Stealey exclaimed, “I’m an actual pilot! How could you possibly have beaten me?”1
Meier replied, “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.”1
After explaining what that meant to Stealey, Meier said, “I could design a better game in two weeks.”1
“Then do it,” Stealey replied. “If you can do it, I can sell it.”
This business trip to Las Vegas marked the beginning of one of the most important companies in video game history.
MicroProse
The Early Games
Meier developed a game called Hellcat Ace and handed it over to Stealey to play. Stealey handed back a list of bugs and military inaccuracies in the game. It was at that moment that Meier knew the partnership would work.
Stealey traveled around the country for General Instrument, taking copies of the new Hellcat Ace game with him. When he had the chance, he would go into computer stores and pitch the game to them.
Games at that time were simply copied onto a floppy disk and a basic printed sticker was affixed to them. Those disks would then go into a baggy with a half-sheet of instructions. When the first orders started coming in, Meier was in charge of sitting in front of his computer, making copies by hand. That took a ton of time, as each disk took a minute to duplicate and the computer could do nothing else during that time. So they hired one of the younger members of their user group they’d assembled and paid them 25 cents per disk copied. This freed up Meier to keep working on new games.
The next two games Meier developed were Chopper Rescue, a helicopter simulation, and Floyd of the Jungle. The latter offered multiplayer for up to 4 players, and was the hook that Stealey used to get the attention of computer store owners. The learning curve of Floyd of the Jungle was also not nearly as steep as the other two flight simulators.
Early Press
In 1983, MicroProse got their first reviews for Floyd of the Jungle and Hellcat Ace. Neither review was stellar, but that didn’t faze Stealey. He would call computer and hobby stores and ask for a copy of Hellcat Ace. When the store said that they didn’t carry it, Stealey would say, “What kind of computer store are you? Didn’t you see the review in Antic?”1 After doing this multiple times to each store over the course of a few weeks, he’d then call as himself and offer to sell the store copies of Hellcat Ace. The ploy worked and the computer stores would invite him in without hesitation.
During these early days of the company, both men were still working at General Instrument and were selling about 500 games per month. After two more games were added to the MicroProse catalog, including Spitfire Ace, Stealey decided to work full-time at MicroProse. Meier stayed on at General Instrument half-time.
Going Up Against Microsoft
Stealey was always the big ideas guy, and in the early days of MicroProse, he had the idea that they should go head-to-head against Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. Blending Stealey’s knowledge of aircraft flight and Meier’s focus on fun, they created Solo Flight in 1983. The game was not a perfect simulation – the flying mechanics were simplified and the plane had unlimited fuel. But what lacked in realism, it made up for in fun factor. You didn’t need to have an actual pilot’s license to know how to play the game. In fact, the most difficult part of flying is landing, and in Solo Flight, the computer simply landed the plane for you. Many reviewers loved this take on flying simulations, and Solo Flight took off.
The success of Solo Flight gave Meier the ability to quit General Instrument and work at MicroProse full-time. That turning point gave the gaming world the full attention of one of its greatest minds.
There be Pirates!
In 1987, Meier was growing bored of the combat titles that MicroProse had become known for. He was tired of making simulations and wanted to try a different genre. And that genre was going to be the swashbuckling world of pirates. Originally, the game was going to be titled Pirates of the Spanish Main!!, but Stealey worried about the change in direction of this game compared to their previous catalog.
Meier and MicroProse had a pretty loyal following at the time, and Stealey worried that their fans wouldn’t know that they were behind the new title. Stealey suggested to Meier, “Well, we should at least put your name on it.”1 And so, the title would become Sid Meier’s Pirates! It was the first game to feature Meier’s name in the title3.
An open-world adventure game, players chose what they wanted to do and when to do it in the new pirate game. This departure from the consecutive missions played to a defined ending in previous games was a risk for Meier and the MicroProse team. There was no other game quite like this in 1987. With no other games to use as a reference to see if this would work, Meier constantly asked himself, “Would I want to play this game?”1 That became a mantra he’d repeat with each new game he’d create.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! created a new formula for games, and is arguably the grandfather of all open-world games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, Elder Scrolls, and others that came afterward.
Meier didn’t create the game alone. Fellow MicroProse designer Arnold Hendrick had originally pitched the pirate idea and worked on the massive 88 page manual for it. Hendrick also pushed for more realism in the game to counter-balance Meier’s push to make it more fantastic. In the end, the game came together as a nice blend of both and was praised by gamers and critics alike. In 1988 it won “Action Game of the Year” from Computer Gaming World and was named into that publication’s Hall of Fame in 1989.
Fun fact: Incredibly, the entire open-world game of Sid Meier’s Pirates! relies on graphics that are actually a specialty font that is loaded into memory. Such a vast and open-world game would have been impossible using traditional graphics.1 3
In the Company of Tycoons
After Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Meier found himself in a rut and didn’t complete any games in 1989. He took a much needed two week vacation, and when he returned he had a new game prototype. This became a common practice for him throughout his career. Meier would take vacations to spend time with family, but also to isolate himself from all other work and concentrate on one single idea without any expectations.
The prototype he returned with was based on model railroads. Meier had a fascination with trains from a young age and knew that the fun in playing with model trains wasn’t playing with them, but rather creating the track and environment. This idea was also spurred by another video game designer, Will Wright, releasing a strange city-building simulator. That game was SimCity, and it’s success gave Meier the kick he needed to create his new game Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon.
The game enabled players to build rail lines across a map to transport goods from one place to another. In the way were rivers, mountains, and other obstacles that needed to be traversed.
Working closely on the project was Bruce Shelley, a fellow game designer who had previously worked at a board game company. Shelley’s knowledge of game mechanics mixed with Meier’s skills as a developer and love of fun helped make Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon a hit. The game sold well for MicroProse, but it also brought together Meier and Shelley, and while on a train headed to New York they decided to partner on another game. Something bigger than just the history of railroads.
“The entire history of human civilization!”1
Civilization
After the launch of Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, he and his wife, Gigi, became parents to a son, Ryan. Meier took some time off to be with his new family and didn’t feel the need to work on a new prototype, because just two weeks before the birth of Ryan he had handed a prototype of a new game over to Bruce Shelley.
The prototype was for Civilization.
The initial prototype for Civilization was very different from the final game. The biggest difference being that the prototype was a real-time strategy game, not turn-based.4 The real-time version of the game wasn’t great and Meier was unhappy with how it didn’t quite engage players.1 He set the Civilization prototype aside and finished up another game he had been working on and off again, Covert Action. The break allowed him to mull over the issues with Civilization until he decided to make the game turn-based instead of real-time.
Turn-based gameplay allowed players the time to think and strategize their next move instead of trying to figure out what had just happened previously. And each turn the player took would change everything in the game, especially early on. It required time to think. Adding in that time took a concept that was good, and made it into a great game.
Giving Up Control of MicroProse
During the development of Civilization, Meier and co-founder Bill Stealey found they had competing visions for the company. Meier wanted to keep creating this new genre of strategy games while Stealey wanted to get into the arcade market. Meier would later note:
Meier sold his half of the company to Stealey. In return, Meier would become an independent contractor and receive payments and royalties for only the games he personally created.1
This new arrangement benefited Meier because he would be able to solely focus on the projects he wanted to create, without any involvement from other executives at MicroProse. He eventually got Bruce Shelley back onto his team to help with the final development of Civilization.
Launch of Sid Meier’s Civilization
MicroProse didn’t put a lot of marketing behind the launch of Civilization. The term “strategy game” wasn’t a big draw in 1991, and MicroProse didn’t necessarily want to push a game that they had to pay Meier royalties for. However, even without a big marketing push, consumers started talking and sharing the game with others. In the next few months after launch, the game went viral. It won several awards and Computer Gaming World called it “a new Olympian in the genre of god games” and would later name it the best game of all time.5
In the months after the launch of Civilization, Sid Meier started getting more publicity than he’d ever had to deal with. After the success of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, and now Civilization, Meier was becoming a household name (in households that owned a computer.)
Post-Civilization Doldrums
Fans and journalists alike wanted to know what Sid Meier was going to create next. No one was more curious about this question than Meier himself. Following up a good game was hard enough, nevertheless a game that critics called “more addictive than crack.”1
In his personal life, Meier and his wife, Gigi, separated amicably. It was a lot all at once for Meier. He tried hard not to let his personal life and the pressure of post-Civilization get to him, and followed up his blockbuster hit with updates to his two other hits in 1993.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! Gold was an update Sid Meier’s Pirates, which added much better graphics that were no longer simply a customized font. The update went over well with players and critics, but the gameplay was nearly the same as the original, which left fans of the original wanting more.
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon Deluxe added better graphics as well to the established engine of the game. It also added more historical periods for players to play. But otherwise, the gameplay was very similar to the original. But Meier had very little to do with its development. MicroProse was simply using his name to sell more games.
With these two updates, fans were still clamoring to know what original game Meier was going to do next.
They didn’t necessarily like the answer.
Sid Meier’s C.P.U. Bach
Like his passion for trains, Meier’s passion for music ran deep and he wanted to take on something completely different than anything he’d done before. After studying music theory, and working with MicroProse composer Jeff Briggs, Meier found what he thought was an algorithm for making beautiful music in Bach’s style, and wanted to program an AI to do so based on player inputs. This was nearly 30 years before the modern generative AIs like ChatGPT and MuseNet.
The game would launch on the new Panasonic 3DO.
The game let you choose styles and instruments to play. It would then compose the music based on what you chose. Players could also choose to see 3D renderings of musicians and instruments playing or abstract colors that went with the music. From a programming and development standpoint, it was well ahead of its time.
But it wasn’t Civilization.
Sequels?
Meier lent a hand on another project that was in the spirit of Civilization. Game developer Brian Reynolds had created a variation of the game called Colonization that focused on early American colonization. MicroProse asked Meier to help give him guidance. Despite never writing a single line of code for the game, MicroProse wanted to slap Meier’s name on it. The name had value, and MicroProse wanted to squeeze every dollar they could out of it. So Brian Reynolds’ game went to market as Sid Meier’s Colonization. Surprisingly, Reynolds was okay with the decision.1
Civilization II was helmed by Reynolds as well. Meier was involved at the beginning and served as a mentor on the project, but Reynolds held the reins and made decisions that Meier strongly disagreed with at the time. One of the biggest issues was the menu item in the game called “Cheat.” Meier hated that it wasn’t something that could be found through gameplay or word of mouth. It was simply an easy way to win a game, and Meier hated the idea. He also hated that Reynolds allowed for variables to be changed in the source code, which was just another form of cheating in Meier’s mind.
“I could not be convinced this was a good idea,” Meier later wrote1 in regards to the cheat menu and ability to mod the code of the game so easily. Handing over this level of power to the player went against everything he stood for as a game designer. It was his job to ensure the player had fun, not the players’. He was sure that giving players the ability to change the game meant that they would never want a sequel to it.
Once again, MicroProse slapped Meier’s name on it and shipped Sid Meier’s Civilization II.
Cheats and Modding
Modding is what propelled Civilization II into the stratosphere. Fans went nuts with it, and instead of tearing the game apart, they just made it better. Mods were shared over the budding new technology called the Internet, and some were even released in official Civilization II expansion packs.
Moving on
Bill Stealey’s bet that arcade games were the future of gaming didn’t pan out well before Civilization II debuted. Despite the success of the original Civilization game, the rest of the games MicroProse developed performed poorly. In 1993, Stealey was forced to sell MicroProse to the company that brought Tetris to the US PC market, Spectrum HoloByte.
Shortly after the sale, Stealey stepped down from his role as CEO of MicroProse. Bruce Shelley also left. With Stealey and Shelley’s departures, Meier would later say, “MicroProse really wasn’t ours, anymore.”1
Spectrum HoloByte had anticipated that Civilization II would only sell 38,000 copies. It would go on to sell 1.2 million copies, nearly 10 times as many copies as their original port of Tetris. Despite its success, Spectrum HoloByte still gave little to no support to Meier and his small team. They wanted giant blockbusters like Sonic the Hedgehog or licensed deals for major motion pictures, not nuanced games for specific audiences.
At last, it all became too much, even for Meier.
In 1996, Meier, Reynolds, and Jeff Briggs all would leave MicroProse to form a new company where they could get back to creating the titles that they wanted to create. The new company would be called Firaxis, named after a music composition by Briggs that combined the words “fiery” with “axis.”1
At this time, Meier was also dating a friend of his sister named Susan. While having dinner one day, he mentioned that he got a lot of fan mail. When she asked how people knew who to write to, he replied, “Well, my name is on the box.”1 He then took her to a video game store and showed her copies of Sid Meier’s Civilization and other games. It apparently impressed her, and they would later get married.
Firaxis Games
After tying up loose ends with MicroProse and exiting as gracefully as they could, Meier, Reynolds and Briggs opened their new office in Maryland. Briggs was named CEO of the new venture with Reynolds and Meier being the game designers.
Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!
With the ability to pursue the games he truly wanted to make and with no pressure from other executives, Meier jumped into a passion project based once again on his love of history. He had made many Civil War prototypes at MicroProse, but none were good enough to fully develop. They were missing a level of detail that he really wanted to see in a full Civil War game. In 1997, he finally had the computing and graphical power to bring his vision to life.
Instead of a top down view of a map like the original Civilization, his new game would give an isometric view of the battlefield like Civilization II. This “two-and-a-half-D”1 perspective brought the action much closer to the player and enabled better character models that could be seen marching, aiming, firing, and reloading. The game got the title Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! and was ready for distribution. There was only one snag.
Since leaving MicroProse, Meier and team didn’t have a distributor.
Bing and EA
After putting out a request, Firaxis received many offers from distributors. One was from Electronic Arts (EA). EA was the distributor for Will Wright’s Maxis, the creator of the iconic SimCity games. This boded well for Firaxis, but what also stood out to Meier and team was that EA’s executives actually played and appreciated video games. Their main contact at EA was Bing Gordon.
Despite not being a developer himself, Gordon was an accomplished figure in the video game industry and gave feedback on games he helped distribute. His love and passion for video games would later get him inducted into Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.
Firaxis and EA penned their distribution contract and Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! hit the shelves. It was a success, selling over 200,000 copies, and was named the Best Strategy Computer Game of 1997 at the Origins Awards6. The tiny team at Firaxis had the momentum it needed for its next venture.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri & Hasbro’s Gambit
While Meier was working on Gettysburg!, Brian Reynolds was prototyping what was a clear successor to Civilization. However, Firaxis didn’t own the rights to the Civilization name and couldn’t tie it directly into the previous game’s lore. That didn’t stop them from moving forward with the project.
Alpha Centauri was basically Civilization, but on a distant planet. Meier recalls that the team internally saw this as the successor to the endgame in Civilization when the player successfully launches a new explorer to a star system to win the game.1 Now you got to play as that space explorer and start fresh on a new world.
Critics and fans praised the space-aged version of Civilization, and Alpha Centauri sold even better than Gettysburg! with nearly 300,000 units being sold by the end of 19997.
However, toy giant, Hasbro, had bought Spectrum HoloByte/MicroProse a year before and seven months after the release of Alpha Centauri, they released Civilization II: Test of Time. The toy giant had deeper pockets and more people to do development on their update of the series. Plus, they had the Civilization name. Surely, the new Civilization game would stomp Alpha Centauri into the ground.
Fans and critics saw through the charade that was Hasbro’s attempt at cashing in on a brand. Civilization II: Test of Time would get widely panned, scoring only 4.2 out of 10 in PC Accelerator. Meanwhile, Alpha Centauri had scored nearly perfect across the board, with GamePro giving it 5/5 stars. David had slain Goliath, and Firaxis had their second hit.
The Rights to Civilization
Hasbro’s gamble on acquiring Spectrum HoloByte/MicroProse had backfired spectacularly. Despite having the rights to the Civilization and Railroad Tycoon names, there was one name they didn’t have rights to – Sid Meier.
One Hasbro employee, Tony Parks, who had been with MicroProse since the Civilization days rose through the ranks and became the SVP of Research and Development at Hasbro. When Test of Time failed miserably, he convinced the executives at Hasbro that without the name Sid Meier, the name Civilization meant nothing. Fans of the franchise were also demanding that Sid Meier and his team get the rights to their creation back. Hasbro was in a lose/lose position. If they kept the name, no one was going to buy their titles. If they gave back the name, they would be handing over one of their most prized titles.
Civilization III & Dinosaurs
Once again, Sid Meier played the role of mentor as Jeff Briggs took on the task of designing the next installment of Civilization. The game would garner heaps of praise from critics and sold over 550,000 copies, surpassing both Gettysburg! and Alpha Centauri. Of course, one of the winning scenarios of the third installment of the game is to build a spaceship to reach Alpha Centauri.
The thing keeping Meier occupied at this time was the idea of creating a dinosaur game. After uncovering old prototypes of a dinosaur game, he tried repeatedly to make the mechanics of such a game work. The first few versions were basically Civilization, but with dinosaurs. That didn’t work. Then he tried making the game not for the entire history of dinosaurs, but just one era. Again, it didn’t work and was “hugely boring,”1 in Meier’s own words. He redid it again, and this time called the prototype “DinoCraft”1 and modeled it after the hugely popular StarCraft, which had come out just a couple years before.
Unfortunately, nothing worked. Finally, at his wit’s end, Meier turned his attention away from dinosaurs, and toward another passion of his – golf.
Fore!
After reading about a contest to design golf holes in a golf magazine, Meier thought that modeling golf holes could be a fun prototype. After developing it, he showed it to Bing Gordon at EA, who immediately said, “This feels like it could be part of the Sims universe.”1 EA owned Maxis, which owned all of Will Wright’s Sims games, which were at their absolute peak in popularity. Gordon got Meier in touch with Maxis, and together they created Sid Meier’s SimGolf. We wrote up an entire article on it. 🙂
Embracing Change…and Updating the Past
After securing back the rights to Civilization from Hasbro in the early 2000’s, the next title to come back to Meier and Firaxis was Pirates! It had been 17 years since the launch of the original Pirates! and Meier was concerned about jumping right into such an old property that hadn’t aged over time like the Civilization series. Plus, the game was his original namesake. If it was going to be done, it was going to be done right.
One of the biggest issues Meier had was the pressure to make the game with 3D graphics.
However, he was the only one in the room with that thought. The team wanted to remake a Pirates! game with 3D graphics. PCs were at a point where they could handle it, and a lot of new games were featuring full 3D environments and characters. “It’s not going to stick,” Meier protested, but later relented.
The game went into production with Meier at the helm. The 3D world soon won Meier over. He was able to give players more nuance with the better graphics, showing the tilt of the ship as it turned and sails catching the wind and billowing out. He also enjoyed animating the little pirates jumping off of the sinking ships. Meier, as a game designer, grasped onto the new technology that he was apprehensive to touch before.
The game would launch in 2004, again with Meier’s moniker – Sid Meier’s Pirates! Live the Life. Again, it was a critical hit, placing second to World of Warcraft for Computer Games Magazine’s Game of the Year. The game would go on to sell more than 1.5 million units.8
Railroads!
In 2006, Meier would design and release another 3D updated version of a classic title. This time, it was an update to Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon. Sid Meier’s Railroads! was a modest success. Critics were split on the game.
Sid Meier’s Starships
As of the creation of this article, the last game Meier designed is Sid Meier’s Starships. The game goes beyond Civilization and allows the player to explore the galaxy, meeting alien races with diplomacy or combat.
Ongoing Civilization Games
Meier would not helm the ship for another Civilization game. Instead, a new designer would be named for each of the sequels. Only the original was ever designed by Meier himself. The idea was that the game needed new ideas constantly introduced into it, and the same people wouldn’t be able to do that. Meier handed over many of his titles to others to run with, and trusted that they would do well by the title. And that they did. Each Civilization game created by the Firaxis team would go on to be a hit.
In total, the Civilization series has sold over 70 million games. In 2022 it was inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play.
Ongoing Legacy
Sid Meier’s name is synonymous with strategy games. He pioneered the genre and gave gamers the ability to be pilots, pirates, railroad tycoons, generals of massive armies, and even god-like figures controlling the fate of entire civilizations. In creating this article, it was amazing to see all of the games he created or helped bring to fruition, either on his own, or through his mentorship of others who took the baton and ran with it.
Meier is the most awarded game developer ever,1 and it’s thanks in part to his lifelong philosophy:
If you would like to read more about Sid Meier, please pick up a copy of his biography. It’s a fun and easy read that goes into amazing detail around the decisions and some of the lore around Meier’s games.
References:
- Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games
- Sid Meier’s Bio on Wikipedia
- Sid Meier’s Pirates on Wikipedia
- Ars Technica Interview with Sid Meier
- 150 Best Games of All Time from Computer Gaming World
- Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! on Wikipedia
- Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri on Wikipedia
- Sid Meier’s Pirates! Live the Life on Wikipedia
- Sid Meier is The Most Awarded-Winning Developer Ever!
