00:00:00: Dear listeners, you are about to hear my conversation with Bruce Shelley about

00:00:05: the creation of Civilization.

00:00:07: At that time, Bruce Shelley was Sid Meier's right-hand man and assisted him

00:00:12: in the creation of Civilization.

00:00:14: We are going to talk about his previous career, how he got into microprocessing,

00:00:20: what were his tasks, how did he get into Civilization and how did he work with Sid Meier.

00:00:26: So the core of our conversation is then the Microprose era and especially Civilization.

00:00:30: At this point, just a note, as usual, there is a German-language summary at

00:00:36: the end of the conversation.

00:00:38: Bruce Shelley is American, which means we speak English together.

00:00:41: But for those of you who prefer to hear my German summary, they can jump to

00:00:46: the corresponding chapter mark

00:00:47: right away. And now have fun with the conversation with Bruce Shelley.

00:01:16: With me today is renowned game designer Bruce Shelley, who has worked on and

00:01:21: helped shape not just one, but several all-time favorite computer games.

00:01:27: Bruce, I'm very happy to have you on the show today.

00:01:29: Thanks Chris, my pleasure.

00:01:31: So which game do you get asked about more often,

00:01:35: Civilization or Age of Empires?

00:01:37: I think Age of Empires more often. Sid Meier was the genius behind

00:01:42: Civilization, and I was his assistant. He was the guy who really put that game together.

00:01:48: I was part of the team at Ensemble Studios that built the Age of Empires franchise,

00:01:52: and I've run into more people who are familiar with that game over the years

00:02:02: than Civilization, probably.

00:02:05: Today I'd like to cover with you, specifically the creation,

00:02:09: the making of Civilization.

00:02:10: But before we go there, let's talk about how you got into the industry.

00:02:15: Because when we at Stay Forever speak to game designers of that era,

00:02:20: they almost, to a man and woman, share one biographical data point,

00:02:25: and that is that they started by programming stuff on their home computer or

00:02:30: university terminal or whatnot.

00:02:32: But you, I understand, have never been a programmer.

00:02:36: That's correct. I transitioned out of the board game industry.

00:02:39: So I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and a game club there,

00:02:44: a bunch of us started a publishing company to publish role playing games out

00:02:48: of the game club at the University of Virginia.

00:02:50: And that wasn't my style of game, I was more interested in complicated board

00:02:54: games, war games, and things like that.

00:02:56: But that was an introduction to the game industry. I had to travel to trade

00:03:00: shows to help move our products, sell our products. So I met other game developers

00:03:05: and then I decided before I got a real job, I would try to make a living in the game industry.

00:03:09: And I talked to a couple of game companies and I actually got an internship

00:03:13: at a well-known American board game company called Simulations Publications

00:03:17: Incorporated, which published a magazine called Strategy and Tactics Magazine.

00:03:21: And it was a game in every magazine. And I worked there for a summer and then

00:03:25: their company was struggling.

00:03:27: But by now I had even a better resume and I wrote to several other game companies

00:03:31: and one in Baltimore called the Avalon Hill game company gave me a job and I

00:03:36: worked on board games. They're mostly word games, but other kinds of games as well.

00:03:41: And after four or five years there, I decided that this was not really working

00:03:44: out as a long-term situation.

00:03:46: It wasn't paying very well, but they asked me to move into computer games.

00:03:49: If they had a computer game division, they asked me to try those.

00:03:51: And I said, sure, I'll give that a try.

00:03:53: It looked like more of a future. So I worked there for six months or something.

00:03:57: And I found out by then, I knew that MicroProse was in the same city,

00:04:00: Baltimore, Maryland, and MicroProse was, you know, on the north side of town.

00:04:04: And I started talking to them about working for them. And eventually they had

00:04:07: me in for an interview and they offered me a job. And that was how I got into

00:04:11: computer games. I transitioned.

00:04:13: I was part of that generation who transitioned from paper and board games over to computer games.

00:04:18: And I was never a programmer. My job was to write and to hold the vision of

00:04:22: the game and explain the vision and figure out what was supposed to happen on

00:04:25: screen and explain that to the people who were actually going to make it work.

00:04:31: So if you handn't gone into games, what would you have ended up doing?

00:04:33: That's a good question. I mean, I was studied science and biology,

00:04:36: environmental science as a student, and I was working in that for a while before

00:04:40: I decided to find something new. And I was going to graduate school in economics.

00:04:43: And I thought I liked, you know, the financial world, something in that area.

00:04:47: And it turns out I can write reasonably well, and I could have been maybe a

00:04:51: newspaper person, a reporter or something.

00:04:53: And these are things that I still have some feeling for and still get involved in.

00:04:58: I think there were some other options there that could have happened,

00:05:00: but But I turned what I enjoyed doing as a hobby into a career,

00:05:04: and I never got that real job. And I talked about, you know,

00:05:08: 40-some years as a game developer, that was what happened.

00:05:10: Well, I'm glad for us gamers that you took that career trajectory.

00:05:16: But at the beginning, how old were you when you started at Avalon Hill?

00:05:19: Let's take that point in time.

00:05:21: Let's see, I was 34, I think. So I'd messed around.

00:05:24: I'd tried several things by then. I'd been to graduate school,

00:05:26: college, had worked in a couple of jobs.

00:05:29: I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

00:05:31: I mean, I was a famous American writer who said, by the time you're 40,

00:05:34: you need to know what you're going to do with the rest of your life.

00:05:36: And so here I was 30-something and still trying to figure it out.

00:05:40: But you know, it worked out.

00:05:42: And by the time you joined Microprose, you were close to 40 then?

00:05:46: I was 40, yeah, pretty much 40, I think, in 1988, I joined Microprose.

00:05:51: I was going to be 40 soon, let's put it that way.

00:05:53: Going back to Avalon Hill, our European audience might not be as familiar with

00:06:00: Avalon Hill as U.S. Americans would be.

00:06:03: What would you say, what standing did Avalon Hill have at the time that you were working there?

00:06:08: It was a leading war game producer in the United States.

00:06:12: They had been making games for 15, maybe 20 years before that.

00:06:16: They really pioneered the idea of war games for the mass market.

00:06:20: Games about the American Civil War, they did a game about Waterloo.

00:06:23: They did Afrika Korps, those were some of their popular games,

00:06:27: Guadalcanal, a lot of wars that the United States had been involved in.

00:06:31: And these were pretty traditional war games, well designed and simple to play

00:06:36: and very popular at the time.

00:06:39: And I found mine the first time I was at the beach with my family at the ocean

00:06:43: and we had a rainy day, there was no point going down to the water.

00:06:46: We went into town and I found a game about the World War I of all things in a store.

00:06:52: It was 1914, about the first year of World War I, and it was a tedious game,

00:06:56: big, lots of stuff. But to me, I was interested in this because I was learning.

00:06:59: To me, it was like you took the maps. When you bought a history book,

00:07:03: there were maps on the inside cover and the back cover.

00:07:06: What these games did was take those maps out, put them on a table,

00:07:09: and align all the units that were involved in the fighting. You'd get to refight

00:07:13: the campaign, the battle, the war.

00:07:15: You'd learn quite a bit about it. You could read about it, but here you could

00:07:18: actually sit down and be the general on one side or the other,

00:07:21: and see the decisions that they had to make.

00:07:23: And it was really illustrative to me, I mean, how it really added a whole dimension

00:07:27: to the study of history, especially these historical situations.

00:07:31: I've read a couple of interviews and articles about your biography,

00:07:35: and typically your time at Avalon Hill is shortened to a sentence which names

00:07:39: the games that you've worked on.

00:07:42: But how can I imagine that? What did a game designer like yourself at Avalon Hill do?

00:07:47: Well, when I was hired, they had bought a bunch of games from

00:07:51: another company called Victory Games.

00:07:53: I was actually hired to go through the Victory Games catalog and see which ones

00:07:58: could become Avalon Hill games and choose and then redo them for our artwork

00:08:03: and any rules changes or anything like that that need to be done.

00:08:06: Mostly it was just redoing them, packaging, and then I was given like a little bit of a free hand.

00:08:11: I mean I found other games out there that I thought would become Avalon Hill

00:08:14: games. They were small locally published things and one game was called Titan.

00:08:19: Some guys I think in Wisconsin or Minnesota had made this game called Titan,

00:08:23: and they did an expansion pack.

00:08:25: It was going out of print. They weren't going to make any more of it.

00:08:28: I said, well, this is a pretty good game. Why don't we redo this one as an Avalon

00:08:30: Hill game? And I took the original game and the expansion pack and put them

00:08:34: together to make one new game.

00:08:36: And it was a very well-received, popular game called Titan.

00:08:39: And then I'm trying to think it was another game that was going out of print

00:08:42: about B-17s over Europe in World War II.

00:08:45: And I redid that one as an Avalon Hill and I redid a game about the invasions

00:08:51: of Britain. I think it was called Britannia, about all the different people

00:08:54: who invaded Britain a couple thousand years ago. We redid that one.

00:08:58: And if you say you redid it, what did that entail?

00:09:02: Because what you're describing right now sounds more like the work of a product

00:09:05: manager than the work of a game designer.

00:09:07: Yeah, I was called a developer, not a designer. I would take the

00:09:11: game and maybe change some rules that I thought I'd played better or something

00:09:15: like that or just combined stuff.

00:09:17: The most popular game I think I worked on that time frame was called 1830.

00:09:21: It was a railroad game that was designed in Britain.

00:09:24: I had played that fella's games a lot. He did an 1829 series about railroads in Britain.

00:09:31: He did a civilization game which later had an impact on something else we made

00:09:36: when we made Civilization years later.

00:09:38: And I was telling you should make a game about railroads in america. You know,

00:09:41: I got that communicated with him and he says, yeah, that'd be great So he

00:09:44: designed a game for us And we sent it to us and I felt it was too hard or not

00:09:49: as interesting enough for the american audience so We had an awful lot of correspondence

00:09:54: back and forth about what we could do to change the game I'm playing it with

00:09:56: guys in baltimore and we're talking about what we would change or what we don't

00:09:59: like or didn't like And he's playing it with his brother and a couple of guys in northampton,

00:10:03: england And they're talking about what you know, and they're really heavily

00:10:06: dominated by what he thinks Everything he did, they loved.

00:10:09: And everything in America, we didn't really like too much. So one of the things

00:10:12: about the game, I don't want to bore you with this, but the game unfolded.

00:10:15: You could only buy one railroad to start the game. And when that one was functioning,

00:10:18: you could start the second one. And when that was functioning,

00:10:20: you could start the third. And it had a slow progression.

00:10:23: I thought America was more of a wide-open place. So the big change we made was

00:10:27: all the railroads were available.

00:10:28: You have so much money. If you want to start a railroad in New York or Baltimore

00:10:33: or Philadelphia, wherever you want to start it, But that's up to you.

00:10:36: You got to make it work. And that opened the game up dramatically.

00:10:39: And everybody thought it was a big improvement. So after a while,

00:10:42: my friend in Britain, Francis Tresham, I think he's actually passed away now.

00:10:46: But he says, well, I just want the game published in America.

00:10:49: You do anything you want with it. So he gave us like a free hand.

00:10:52: So we made the changes that I thought were important, or we thought were important,

00:10:56: and they published it. And it's a pretty popular game even today.

00:10:59: I mean, I know that there's a whole series called 18XX Games about railroading,

00:11:04: and there's a lot of them, apparently.

00:11:05: And I've been told that 1830 is one of the best or one of the most favorite

00:11:09: of all the ones that they made. And I think that I'm pretty proud about that,

00:11:12: if that's the case, you know, that we had an influence on that whole series,

00:11:15: and that they're still very popular.

00:11:17: I can imagine. And you also mentioned that you you then had a brush

00:11:21: with the microcomputer games division of Avalon Hill, because they moved into

00:11:25: computer games pretty early, if I'm not mistaken, like in the early 80s.

00:11:28: Yeah, they were a pioneer in computer games. They were publishing

00:11:32: computer games in like 87, maybe 86. I'm not sure how far back they go.

00:11:36: Back to 1980, actually. That's when they originally started.

00:11:40: Jay Taylor Okay. Yeah, well, they always did things as inexpensively as they could.

00:11:45: So basically, one guy would make a game for them, and they would sell it.

00:11:48: And that worked really well when there was nothing out there.

00:11:51: But as soon as like good games came along or good studios started publishing,

00:11:55: like Electronic Arts and Microprose started making games, their products were

00:12:00: not up to snuff as far as being competitive.

00:12:02: You know, they would rely on one guy working at home somewhere to make a game.

00:12:06: They asked me to look at some of these. And I remember the first computer game

00:12:09: I worked on had four colors, four color graphics, and we could use white,

00:12:13: black, cyan, of magenta on the screen.

00:12:16: And I remember I had to work with these guys. One was doing a basketball game

00:12:20: and this terrific NBA all-star was not a good rebounder.

00:12:24: And I said, this guy's the best rebounder in the country. How is he not a rebounder in your game?

00:12:27: I don't understand this, you know? So those were the kind of issues I was dealing with.

00:12:30: It was trying to help these guys think they were all men, polish their products

00:12:35: into a usable game, but they were really simple. And what happened was a friend

00:12:40: of mine said, you should try this game. And he asked me to play Sid Meier's Pirates.

00:12:44: On Amiga or something like that. I went over to South, we played that game.

00:12:47: I said, wow, now here's a game that's pretty interesting. This is much better

00:12:51: than things that I'm working on.

00:12:52: And so I said, well, if I'm going to try and make a job out of this,

00:12:55: I should talk to this company about a job. I actually built a solitaire game

00:13:00: called Patton's Best, which was about tanks, a US tank division in World War

00:13:04: II and was played by solitaire.

00:13:06: I said, well, here's a demonstration and I can make a computer game.

00:13:10: All the games back then were pretty much solitaire.

00:13:12: So I built a solitaire board game. I could probably help them with a solitaire computer game.

00:13:16: So by solitaire you mean a single-player game?

00:13:18: Yeah, a single-player game. You don't play against another person,

00:13:22: you play against the game.

00:13:23: And how did you make that?

00:13:24: Well, I made it at Avalon Hill. I did a lot of incredible amounts of research

00:13:28: on what it was like to work in a tank during World War II, especially an American Sherman tank.

00:13:33: Tank. And it was based on the experience of one American tank division called

00:13:36: the Fourth Armour. It was part of Patton's Third Army and the Fourth Armour

00:13:41: Division was considered quote his best. I mean, one of the guys in serving that

00:13:44: regiment wrote a book about his experience called Patton's Best.

00:13:47: And we used that title for our computer game and just followed the experience

00:13:51: of that tank division across Europe where the battles they fought.

00:13:55: And so the game would generate these situations where you had to figure out

00:13:58: how to survive in your tank and it helped fight.

00:14:02: I did a lot of research on what happened when tanks were hit.

00:14:04: It's funny because years later I met a neighbor who actually served in a Sherman

00:14:09: tank all across Europe, from North Africa all the way to Austria through Italy and stuff like that.

00:14:13: He told me, he said, we ran into the German tanks, we backed up and called in

00:14:17: for air power because their tanks were much better than ours and we didn't want

00:14:21: to fight the tanks. So it was pretty funny to hear him tell me that.

00:14:23: Not a good basis for a game. Running away.

00:14:27: No. The 4th Armored did engage with other tanks, there were some famous tank

00:14:31: battles they were involved in.

00:14:32: So that was a computer game?

00:14:34: It was not a computer game, it was a board game that I made.

00:14:37: I don't remember the computer games I worked on at Avalon Hill.

00:14:40: Some guy was taking Wooden Ships and Iron Men, a board game,

00:14:43: and making that into a computer game.

00:14:45: I thought it was okay, he was just translating the game to a digital format,

00:14:49: and it was a basketball game I worked on, which I didn't like,

00:14:52: because I thought the stats were all wrong.

00:14:55: It sounds like you were not very enthusiastic about the Avalon Hill computer games.

00:14:59: I didn't think it was the future, and so I was encouraged to look for another job.

00:15:03: And I was happy to find out that Microprose was in the same city, not too far away.

00:15:08: And that took me a year, I think, to talk to them. And finally,

00:15:12: they got to a point where they were expanding. They'd hired a bunch of people

00:15:15: from Coleco, and they had me come in for an interview. I spent the day there,

00:15:18: and they offered me a job the next day, which I took.

00:15:22: And that was in 1988, 1989?

00:15:26: Yes, 1988, early 1988.

00:15:27: In his memoir, Sid Meier mentioned that he was not involved in hiring you,

00:15:32: but that he was surprised afterwards to learn that the company had hired a designer

00:15:36: who was not also a programmer, because apparently that was highly unusual at the time.

00:15:41: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I always tease them. I'm not teasing them.

00:15:45: And I said, you know, you have all these programmers, and you have all these

00:15:47: artists, and you don't have anybody who's actually made a game before,

00:15:50: you know, well, you need to hire me, because I've made games,

00:15:52: you know, I mean, there's something else that goes on besides programming and art.

00:15:56: There has to be a theme behind it. Now, Sid was a natural, he was a brilliant game designer.

00:16:01: But it turns out, it's hard to find people who have all those skills in in one

00:16:05: person. I mean, there aren't many people that I've met over the years who are

00:16:09: great programmers and great designers at the same time.

00:16:12: I think they hired me and it turned out when I got there, there were already

00:16:16: other guys there who had not been programmers.

00:16:20: I can think of like Lawrence Schick, who's still making games today.

00:16:24: He had an office next door to me and he was not a programmer to my knowledge.

00:16:27: I mean, I don't think he was a programmer. And there might've been others at the time.

00:16:31: And gradually they build out a staff of design people who are not programmers.

00:16:35: I mean, there's an awful lot that goes into a game that doesn't involve programming, you know.

00:16:39: True. I mean, your assumption that this is a specialized occupation

00:16:44: game designer has proven to be correct, because that's how we understand it these days.

00:16:49: But what were you hired for then? In what role, for what project?

00:16:53: They were building a game called F-19 Stealth Fighter.

00:16:57: And they needed somebody to help with the maps, build the maps,

00:17:00: and then actually build the...

00:17:02: It was sort of like art, but we were using 3D technology to build 3D objects,

00:17:06: and so they ended up doing that.

00:17:07: I remember I built a stealth fighter out of like seven coordinates or ten coordinates,

00:17:12: and they all thought it was great because it minimized the programming need

00:17:15: of the computer, and it still looked like the plane we were supposed to be flying.

00:17:19: And so I remember deciding where the air bases would be, and maps and worlds.

00:17:24: I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was more like that kind of work,

00:17:28: just building the settings for the things and stuff. I was in 3D world a lot, that's what I remember.

00:17:36: That's pretty interesting to me, because to be honest,

00:17:39: Bruce, I had difficulties understanding your role at MicroProse during the time that you were there.

00:17:45: Here's a list of things that you did while you were at MicroProse that I took

00:17:49: from several sources. So you were doing the 3D objects for flight simulations.

00:17:53: I think you were also doing research for flight simulations.

00:17:56: You wrote game manuals. You made a budget analysis for Railroad Tycoon for the

00:18:02: management of micro pros.

00:18:04: You, at the request of Sid Meier, wrote a list of things that could be improved

00:18:08: in Empire, which was a competing strategy game. You were a sounding board for

00:18:12: Sid Meier, who bounced ideas and prototypes off of you. And obviously,

00:18:16: you assisted Sid Meier with the game design.

00:18:18: But even halfway into Civilization, when the two of you had already collaborated

00:18:24: on Railroad Tycoon and Covert Action, Sid Meier stated that you were not working

00:18:29: full-time with him because you had other assignments within the company.

00:18:33: To me, that's kind of all over the place, and most importantly,

00:18:36: it's all auxiliary work for someone else.

00:18:40: Was there something at Microprose that you owned?

00:18:43: Not really. I mean, I was also a producer. We had some outside developers working

00:18:48: on a game. It was a game about destroyer escorts and world war two.

00:18:51: I mean, I had to take a train up to New Jersey and meet this team and talk about

00:18:55: their game and shepherd it through the production process and get it finished

00:18:59: and published. And then it was an internal project. Sid had done a game called

00:19:03: a helicopter game. I forgot what it's called.

00:19:05: Gunship.

00:19:06: Gunship. Yeah, and they were gonna port it over to another program I think the

00:19:10: Commodore 64 or something like that and I was responsible for that.

00:19:13: I was in charge of that project I had to organize the

00:19:16: art and the programming and get it through the production process get it all

00:19:20: tested And I finished two games on the same day as a producer They both went

00:19:25: as we used to say gold The code was finished and the project was sent off to

00:19:29: be manufactured I think Commodore 64 and Destroyer Escort went gold on the same day,

00:19:34: so I was managing those as a producer.

00:19:37: You know, Sid was the guy who was doing most of the art and the programming

00:19:41: on those early games internally until the project got lit and got more help.

00:19:46: But there were things he didn't want to do. It was like, go meet the sales team

00:19:49: or something like that. I'd have to go meet the sales team and give a presentation

00:19:52: on what we were working on.

00:19:54: And I had to work with the people laying out the manuals.

00:19:57: I had to run the play tests, you know, because that was another job for a,

00:20:01: quote, producer kind of person.

00:20:03: I was managing the bug list. These are the bugs. And he'd decide what we was

00:20:07: gonna fix and what was gonna be a feature and what we're gonna ignore.

00:20:10: And I'd have to go through the testing and make sure that things were fixed,

00:20:13: you know. Okay, he says this is fixed. Please check this and make sure it is

00:20:17: fixed. So, I mean, there was all the little stuff like that.

00:20:20: And then part of the every day was talking, just sitting and talking with him.

00:20:23: I mean, he would give me a version of the game we were working on at some point in the afternoon.

00:20:29: Maybe at the end of the day and then i would play it in the morning i was using

00:20:32: the offices for him and i'd play it in the morning for an hour or something

00:20:35: like that and then he come in and say when you're free come on down so i go

00:20:40: down and sit in his office and we'd sit there and talk.

00:20:41: Maybe an hour maybe longer and talk about what i thought of the latest version

00:20:46: you are like i didn't like and you know where he was thinking and we would do

00:20:50: the ideas for making it better and start programming and i go off maybe do something

00:20:54: else i was had to do one of the responsibilities.

00:20:56: Or I'd just go back and play it. It's hard to say I mean, I know a

00:20:59: fellow who sat across the hall He said you guys when you start

00:21:02: talking I couldn't get any work done because it was so interesting what you

00:21:05: were talking about You know the way that game was coming together he says I

00:21:09: had to either close the door or just sit there and listen because of the talks

00:21:11: you guys had about Making this game and changing games and just games in general

00:21:16: were so interesting I couldn't get anything done as long as that conversation was going on So

00:21:20: that was really fun to be talking to him about how this worked and noodling

00:21:24: the ideas and trying to make it a better game.

00:21:26: But Sid Meier was not your manager, right?

00:21:29: No, I mean, we didn't know this at the time until the company went public.

00:21:32: He was an independent contractor by now. He had been a co-founder of the company,

00:21:35: but he didn't want to do some of the things the president wanted to do.

00:21:38: So they came to an agreement. The president bought him out. And Sid was just

00:21:41: getting paid on the projects when he finished them. He got so much money for finishing a project.

00:21:45: But I was an employee, so I reported to the guy in charge of games development.

00:21:50: Who was that?

00:21:51: Oh gosh, Ted Markley was the last one, I think. And before that,

00:21:55: it was a fellow named Steve Meyer, who became a really good friend of mine later

00:21:58: because we both ended up in Chicago and became good friends.

00:22:02: But Steve left at some point. He had a disagreement, I think,

00:22:05: with Bill about running the company.

00:22:07: Several of the executives left at some point because they didn't get along with the president.

00:22:11: Ted his job was depending on what with other guys

00:22:14: were doing not what Sid was doing So we were

00:22:17: always last in line for help to make a game You

00:22:20: know like art music and things like that Because his pay depending on what the

00:22:24: other people were doing not what Sid was doing Sid was gonna get so much money

00:22:28: for finishing A game and I was just a piece of stuff laying around that they

00:22:32: gave Sid to work with so they didn't care much about Me I came to work there

00:22:36: for a very low salary because I came out of the board game industry And so years later,

00:22:40: when I left, part of the reason was I never caught up to the other designers.

00:22:43: I was way behind everybody else's pay.

00:22:45: And that was one of the reasons that I was okay leaving. But that was another story.

00:22:49: Yeah, we'll get to that later, because that's also an interesting

00:22:52: part. But at this point in time, I mean, that's an interesting constellation.

00:22:55: You didn't know yet that Sid Meier was an independent contractor.

00:22:59: You still thought he was a partner and part of the management team.

00:23:03: Yeah, yeah, we didn't know that.

00:23:05: But de facto, Sid Meier could not command any resources within Microprose, right?

00:23:10: He could command them, but it was a struggle, because the guy who ran the

00:23:14: whole division, who everybody worked for, was getting paid on what everybody

00:23:18: else was doing, not what Sid was doing. So there was a natural bias.

00:23:22: Our bonuses for civilization were penalized because we were late.

00:23:26: And my thinking was, well, if you'd given us the art and the music and the other

00:23:29: stuff when we needed it, we would have had that game done on time.

00:23:32: So I was a little bitter about the fact that our bonuses for finishing Civilization

00:23:36: were penalized when it was out of our hands whether it was going to be done or not.

00:23:40: But that's maybe just my thinking, and it may not be the case. I don't remember now.

00:23:44: Let's keep that in mind. I'd like to come back to that a bit later.

00:23:47: Do you still remember how you met Sid Meier? How did he notice you and realize your potential?

00:23:55: Well, we were on the same game together. I don't know if I actually physically

00:23:58: talked to him. be in meetings or something like that and I know who he was and.

00:24:03: I guess I had to work with him right away, so we had conversations and stuff

00:24:07: like that, but he's a quiet person, pretty distant.

00:24:10: He used to say that he would not bother meeting anybody, new employee,

00:24:13: until he'd been there like six months and he was sure that they were going to

00:24:16: stay because he didn't want to waste his time. I know that's probably cruel,

00:24:18: but he was a very private individual. He was born in Switzerland.

00:24:22: He's like a Swiss watchmaker, very private.

00:24:24: So I think I had to deal with him immediately, so we got along fine, and then I just worked.

00:24:29: I just kept my nose down and worked. I wanted this job to be a success So I

00:24:33: try to volunteer for extra stuff,

00:24:35: you know that nobody else wanted to do or something like that like these projects

00:24:39: But we're not that interesting like the Commodore game There was a programmer

00:24:43: there It was considered kind of difficult to work with and everybody's kind

00:24:46: of like rolling their eyes about having to manage him And I said,

00:24:49: I'll take that job, you know, if that's a challenge I'll take it because I'd

00:24:52: like to show that I belong here

00:24:54: And I'd like to solve a problem for the guy in charge if I can solve this problem

00:24:58: for you That's gotta be good for me, right?

00:25:00: So let me take that job." So I was doing things like that.

00:25:03: And we played board games, too. We did a little board gaming playing after work,

00:25:07: and I think I was encouraging that. Like, I brought the 1830 board game that

00:25:11: I made at Avalon Hill. We played that.

00:25:13: And I think years later, that would be part of the inspiration for Railroad

00:25:16: Tycoon, and we brought over the Civilization game from Avalon Hill that the

00:25:20: same fella had designed, Francis Tresham.

00:25:22: And I think that helped, you know, encourage the idea of what became the Civilization computer game.

00:25:28: I see. So what was Bruce Shelley like at the time? If Sid Meier was private

00:25:33: and quiet, as you mentioned, how would your co-workers have described you?

00:25:38: Well, I was a little more outgoing, for sure. I mean, I wanted to fit in and

00:25:41: I got along pretty well with everybody, I think.

00:25:44: They had a softball team, so I played softball just to get to know people.

00:25:48: And then what was even more valuable, I think, well, maybe not valuable,

00:25:51: but they had a basketball court in the warehouse.

00:25:54: And I found out they were playing basketball. So I volunteered to play basketball.

00:25:57: I played basketball in high school and I still played basketball.

00:26:00: You know a couple days a week you are very tall right i'm six foot two you're

00:26:05: just tall for my age So I played basketball and I'm playing with the executives of the company now So,

00:26:11: you know Not only i'm playing with the guys in the warehouse and executives

00:26:14: and a couple other guys from game side But most of the people in the basketball

00:26:17: games were not in the game development side.

00:26:19: They were from the business side And so I got to know all the executives and

00:26:23: people were laughing they were not they were laughing kind of stunned You know

00:26:25: like i'd walk around the building and and the vice president of marketing or

00:26:29: sales or something like that I was like, Hey Bruce, how are you today?

00:26:31: And all the guys are going, Hey, how do you know him? I said,

00:26:33: well, I played basketball with him a couple of days a week, you know?

00:26:36: And I remember, I'll make, I'll think it's a funny story, but we're playing

00:26:39: basketball and Bill Staley, the president of the company was part of the game.

00:26:42: You know, he's a very aggressive player and he's tough. He's really hard player.

00:26:45: And I wouldn't take that. I fought back, you know, I fought hard and I remember I hit him one time.

00:26:50: We're going for a loose ball and we clashed into each other and I think I knocked

00:26:53: the wind out of him and he fell down, I'm thinking, you know,

00:26:55: I've been in a company a couple of months and I think I just lost my job,

00:26:58: you know, I just knocked the CEO of the company, I almost knocked him out.

00:27:02: And he got up and recovered, and we got on and went on to play.

00:27:04: And after the game was over, I would rush back. We had a bathroom shower in

00:27:08: the development side. I went back and showered real quick.

00:27:11: And the executives would come down later and shower, the VP of my boss,

00:27:15: the head of development, the head of marketing, the head of sales,

00:27:17: they'd all come down later.

00:27:19: So I'm finished. I'm coming out of the shower. I got to go to work, right?

00:27:22: And I'm thinking, man, did I lose my job? And every one of these executives

00:27:25: is going, that was awesome, Bruce.

00:27:27: High five. They were all giving me a high-five, like that was great.

00:27:33: So I thought, okay, maybe I haven't lost my job. I don't know, it's funny.

00:27:36: Apparently you didn't. I mean, wasn't Bill Steele an Air Force pilot,

00:27:40: a military man, so he should know how to take that.

00:27:44: Yeah, he was. He was a pilot. He went to Air Force Academy. He's still very

00:27:48: big on that. We're Facebook friends and he's always posting pictures of his

00:27:51: colleagues playing golf and talking about the Air Force Academy football team

00:27:54: or something. And he played lacrosse in college. He was an athlete himself.

00:27:58: I played lacrosse in college a little bit too, so we had that in common.

00:28:02: He was a big soccer fan too. We had soccer games too. I never played soccer.

00:28:06: That was the first time I ever played soccer.

00:28:08: Okay, so you've established yourself at Microprose. Can you take us on a mental

00:28:14: tour through the offices?

00:28:16: You already mentioned the basketball court in the warehouse,

00:28:19: but what were the offices like? How many people were there even at Microprose?

00:28:22: Was it a large company already?

00:28:23: That's a good question. I'd say probably a hundred people maybe.

00:28:28: The main entrance was in the middle of the building. It was one long thin building,

00:28:32: a long one-story building.

00:28:34: And you entered in the middle, when you came in, it was a reception area,

00:28:37: there's usually somebody there waiting at the door.

00:28:39: And then there was a big room where we could all meet, you know, like a conference room.

00:28:44: If you went to the left, if you turn left, when you came in,

00:28:46: you went down to business side, that's where Bill's office was,

00:28:50: the president's office, and that's where marketing was and sales,

00:28:53: and the warehouse was in that direction as well.

00:28:56: If you turn right, you went through another door, and that's where all the game

00:28:59: development was, all the game developers are on the right. When you went down

00:29:03: the hall, the first office on your right was Sid's office, a big office.

00:29:07: There was a hallway that went around in a loop, a square, and there were individual

00:29:12: offices. Most of us had individual offices. My office was as far away from the

00:29:16: front door as you could get, practically.

00:29:19: Lauren Schick was sitting next to me, and one of our top programmers was across

00:29:23: the hall. Actually, there were two programmers across the hall from me.

00:29:26: There was another recreation room there on the corner down that way,

00:29:29: and we'd have some meetings there occasionally, and there was just a mixture

00:29:33: of artists and programmers and designers in these offices all around the square.

00:29:37: That was my home for five years or so.

00:29:39: Okay, so now let's skip over Railroad Tycoon and Covert Action

00:29:45: and go straight into the inception of Civilization.

00:29:49: So there's a story about that, that Sid Meier tells, that the two of you had

00:29:54: finished Railroad Tycoon, and now the question was, what's next?

00:29:58: You were sitting on an Amtrak train to New York, discussing a potential next

00:30:03: project, and the two of you decided that it had to be something bigger than

00:30:07: railroads. Okay, what's bigger than railroads?

00:30:10: The entire history of human civilization.

00:30:12: Do you remember it that way too?

00:30:14: I don't remember exactly that conversation, but like I said,

00:30:17: we talked every day, sometimes for hours, an incredible number of stuff got

00:30:22: covered. Sometimes it had nothing to do with our work.

00:30:25: But it was very interesting. He and I were both very avid readers,

00:30:28: reading of all kinds of history and stuff. And I think, as I recall,

00:30:31: the idea that a topic should be a big topic. When you're making a game,

00:30:35: make it a big game. Make it a big topic.

00:30:38: I think we were influenced because we played this board game civilization.

00:30:42: We'd also been playing a lot of Empire Deluxe and talking about that game,

00:30:46: what was right about that game, what was not, what could we do to make it better.

00:30:49: And then we talked about it. And we were also influenced by SimCity,

00:30:53: that game. I think those three things came together as we were finishing Railroad

00:30:58: Tycoon and what he had done with Railroad Tycoon.

00:31:01: And I thought that we were looking for something new, as you say.

00:31:04: And then these three things that we've been playing, each brought something

00:31:08: to the puzzle. And he came up with the idea, the concept that it would become civilization.

00:31:12: I remember, you know, he was always tinkering with his computer.

00:31:15: He had projects on his computer all the time, little games. He was thinking

00:31:18: about, we never knew when something he was tinkering with would turn into a real project.

00:31:23: I remember one was about making yourself tiny and going inside the human body

00:31:27: and going around and killing organisms.

00:31:29: As like a rocket ship in the bloodstream killing villains.

00:31:33: That was one of his games. And there was another one about a family spreading

00:31:36: west across the United States, having children, all getting involved with the

00:31:40: settlement and this alliteration of the American West.

00:31:42: There was another game he had. And he had several of those. And I think one

00:31:45: day, I remember this explicitly because he gave me a disc in May of 1990.

00:31:49: He gave me a five and a quarter floppy disc that had Civilization on it,

00:31:53: the first version of Civilization.

00:31:55: And I saved that this, because I had not saved the first version of Railroad

00:31:59: Tycoon when he gave me that. It went away and got redone or something, rebranded.

00:32:02: But I saved that first version of Civilization, and I had it for years and years and years.

00:32:07: I was going to give it to a museum that's recording the history of computer

00:32:11: games, and I asked him if that was okay. He said, no, I want that.

00:32:14: So I mailed it back to him, and I think his team at Firaxis got it running again.

00:32:18: So they actually got the first playable version of Civilization that ever existed

00:32:23: off of Sid's computer running again at their offices at some point.

00:32:26: I said, you should put that online, let people see that, just what it was like.

00:32:29: I think it was a real-time game, and it was a little different than what was

00:32:33: finally published. But that was the way we worked. I mean, every day,

00:32:36: I'd get a new version and play it, and go back and talk to him for an hour or

00:32:39: two about what we liked and didn't like, and he'd get a new version made.

00:32:43: I gave a speech or a presentation years later at the German Game Developers

00:32:46: Conference, I think, called Design by Playing, and we learned that making board

00:32:50: games, that's how we made board games. And here we are doing the same exact

00:32:54: thing with computer games.

00:32:56: Prototype early, play it every day, make changes based on what you're thinking about.

00:33:00: Forget about these long design documents, just play it and make changes.

00:33:03: That was the way he worked. And he didn't let anybody else play it,

00:33:06: which I thought was interesting.

00:33:07: Because it became pretty clear pretty soon, this is an interesting game,

00:33:10: people are really liking it.

00:33:12: And other guys wanted to play it, people who wanted to work with him wanted

00:33:15: to play it. He said, no, no, for now it's just Bruce and I. And I'm telling

00:33:17: you, for months, I was the was the only one allowed to play it.

00:33:19: What made you special to him?

00:33:21: He said years later that I was everyman. My tastes were broad enough that they

00:33:26: covered a large part of the marketplace.

00:33:27: I wasn't an extreme hardcore player and I wasn't a noob.

00:33:31: And i was you know reasonably smart enough that i captured a big part of the

00:33:35: audience and what if i didn't like it.

00:33:37: It's probably not good for a lot of people if i did like it was probably good

00:33:40: enough and it was just enough of a sounding board for him.

00:33:44: That i represented the whole marketplace is a tester and i'll use later after

00:33:48: that i said that was a mistake because there were mistakes that gain or publish

00:33:51: every fix pretty quickly and i think we need to find those earlier so when i

00:33:55: was working let's say it on some studios we put a heavy emphasis on testing.

00:34:00: And we had everybody in the company play our games in ensemble every week.

00:34:04: You were required to play the game every week, once at least, and talk about it.

00:34:08: For Age 2, we hired some of the best players in the world to come work for us,

00:34:12: to test the game. Because I thought testing was a little short for Civilization,

00:34:16: and I wanted to make sure we didn't make that mistake again.

00:34:18: When you were looking for new projects, and ultimately Civilization

00:34:23: made the cut, I heard Sid Meier mention in passing somewhere that The two of

00:34:27: you originally pitched a sequel to Railroad Tycoon to the management, is that correct?

00:34:32: Yes, true. There was going to be a sequel to Railroad Tycoon.

00:34:35: We actually worked on it for a month.

00:34:37: I came up with new maps, and I think it was going to be other countries in Europe,

00:34:40: that's where it was going to go. I can't remember, maybe India.

00:34:43: I don't remember now exactly what it was in, but the president of the company,

00:34:46: he was focused on flight simulators.

00:34:48: He wanted a flight simulator every year, being a pilot. He thought that was a big, big moneymaker.

00:34:54: Railroad Tycoon started off slow. It wasn't a massive hit right away or anything.

00:34:58: And I think he didn't want to spend any more money on it. So he couldn't really

00:35:01: tell Sid what to work on, but I was forbidden to work on it.

00:35:04: I was told, no more Railroad Tycoon. You, no more Railroad Tycoon.

00:35:09: How would you describe the relationship between Sid Meier,

00:35:13: who was the company's star designer, and Bill Steele, the president,

00:35:16: who basically ran the show?

00:35:18: I'm not sure how to say that. I think Bill was focused on the company other

00:35:22: than Sid, and Sid was the wildcard.

00:35:25: He could hit a home run, you know, and get a massive hit, or he could do a game

00:35:28: that maybe wasn't that big a deal, but.

00:35:31: Bill was focused on we were building arcade games at the time they had a big

00:35:35: investment in arcade games And he had built this other teams like brian reynolds

00:35:39: was making games who went on to be pretty well known For the company and there

00:35:43: were other games being developed and I don't know I'm,

00:35:46: not sure that he got along fine with sid as far as I can tell I never saw any

00:35:49: kind of In a monster or anything like that.

00:35:51: They just got along fine I think he just basically if he had to say he just

00:35:54: put up with sid And hoped that they would deliver something,

00:35:57: you know, because sid had made the company, you know, those early games had

00:36:01: made the company so there was no question that he was important and

00:36:04: he just kind of hoped that he would get another winner you know

00:36:07: which of course he did I mean civilization was a

00:36:10: massive hit and made a lot of money for the company and I think it opened up

00:36:13: the eyes of the management to the company Bill and others that wow here's a

00:36:17: game that's not a flight simulator is doing fantastic you know it's really making

00:36:21: money so I think they got along fine but Bill was focused on the other parts

00:36:26: of the company that he actually could control.

00:36:28: I see. I mean, Microprose had at that point already published a

00:36:31: couple of strategy games. Sid Meier had written a couple in the 80s,

00:36:35: but apparently that was not the genre to be in at that point.

00:36:38: I'm not sure what the thinking was. They didn't share their thoughts

00:36:41: with me about that kind of stuff. But when Sid asked me to be his assistant

00:36:45: or work with him, I said, I'm happy to do this, man. This is great.

00:36:48: I thought this was an incredible opportunity for me personally.

00:36:51: I was happy. I was dating the woman I was going to marry at that point.

00:36:54: I would work this job for nothing if I could figure out a way to make a living.

00:36:57: I'm having so much fun with what I do.

00:37:00: Every day to make these games. It's so interesting and so much fun that I would

00:37:03: do it for nothing if I could make a living some other way because it was just a blast to work with him.

00:37:09: These conversations and the things I was learning and the experience I was having

00:37:13: and the games we were making. I mean I was pretty sure when we were building

00:37:16: Civilization that we were making something that's going to rock the world.

00:37:19: The gaming world was going to be really really excited when this game came out

00:37:23: and I mean one of our salesmen was Glenn Drover.

00:37:26: He now has his own game company. He builds board games now mostly.

00:37:29: He was hired, but he wanted to be a game designer, but they hired him as a salesman

00:37:32: because that's what he was, and he became one of our best salesmen.

00:37:35: But every time he was in town for a sales meeting, as soon as he was free,

00:37:38: boom, he was down in my office. Okay, show me what Sid's building now.

00:37:41: And he was dying to play it. He was asking all these questions,

00:37:44: standing on my shoulder, sitting to pull up a chair and just watch.

00:37:47: So I mean, people knew we were making something really cool,

00:37:50: and I knew we were making something cool.

00:37:51: And it's just a question of finishing it and getting it in the public's At the

00:37:55: point where Sid Meier gave you that first prototype in May 1990,

00:37:59: he tells the story that you immediately recognized that prototype as something special.

00:38:07: Do you remember what you saw in it?

00:38:11: Well, I guess I would say that it embodied all the good things about game development.

00:38:16: You know, it started off slow.

00:38:17: I have an expression I've used years later called the inverted pyramid of decision-making,

00:38:22: where you have a couple things to think about, and as soon as you make those

00:38:26: decisions, that's opened up four more, and then it becomes eight,

00:38:29: and then it becomes 16 decisions you have to make.

00:38:32: You're incredibly engaged. There's an expression in gaming, is it fun or is

00:38:37: it not fun? I think as a professional, you need to know what makes it fun.

00:38:40: Fun is just a word for the common people, but as a designer,

00:38:43: you need to understand why is it fun and why is it not fun.

00:38:46: And I think that game engaged my mind with these decision-makings.

00:38:50: I mean, Sid is actually in a speech he gave one time, a game is a series of

00:38:54: interesting decisions. And he told me years later that he still believes that's the case.

00:38:58: But I think a game is more than just a series of decisions, but it is a series

00:39:01: of decisions. And I think he did a good job of capturing that.

00:39:05: There's the unknowns, the map was going to be hidden.

00:39:08: You didn't know what was out there. So you're discovering things,

00:39:11: you're making decisions, you're exploring.

00:39:13: I mean, it's the 4X game, right? It was a classic improvement on that style

00:39:18: of game. And personally, I thought it was great because I'm interested in history.

00:39:21: I've read a lot about the origins of humanity.

00:39:25: So it captured my imagination immediately. And I thought there must be an awful

00:39:28: lot of people out there who would find this really interesting as well.

00:39:31: And that proved to be true.

00:39:33: And then you entered that iterative circle that you've described of him making

00:39:37: a daily build, you playing it, providing feedback, the two of you discussing

00:39:41: it, that turning into the next prototype, and so on and so on.

00:39:44: So that was essentially the professional collaboration that you had.

00:39:47: Now, how would you describe your personal relationship or your dynamic?

00:39:53: Well, I think we became good friends. I mean, he came to our wedding when I

00:39:56: got married. He came to our wedding.

00:39:58: We did lunches, you know, together. I mean, Railroad Tycoon, we did field trips.

00:40:02: I mean, that was incredible. We went up to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania,

00:40:05: where the steam railroad runs, and the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum is located.

00:40:09: There's a hotel where all the hotel rooms are actually railroad cars that you

00:40:13: sleep overnight in. So, we did this day trip up there, and we just immersed

00:40:17: ourselves in electric in our railroads. Then we went to Washington, D.C.

00:40:20: Took the train to Washington, D.C., as you mentioned. And then we went to the

00:40:23: Smithsonian Museum, looked at their railroad exhibit. So he had a way of getting

00:40:27: people fired up for what they're working on.

00:40:29: And I think we became friends. We talked like a lot of stuff,

00:40:32: not necessarily game stuff. We had several interests. We talked about history

00:40:36: and biology, and he's a very interesting person. And our interests mirrored

00:40:41: each other in some ways. We read some of the same books or talked about books we read.

00:40:45: And we played these board games. And we talked a lot about the skill of a board

00:40:50: game designer, how a game is actually made. Nobody had written a book on game development.

00:40:55: There was nothing, you know, we all learn by trial and error, you know.

00:40:58: So I think what he was interested in doing, and to some extent me as well,

00:41:02: is like, how do we get the next level of game designers a couple rungs up the

00:41:05: ladder of learning what to do without having to go through all the hard work that we did through?

00:41:10: I mean, he really gave a lot of thought to what was actually going on as you

00:41:15: built a game, and the principles of game development, and things like that.

00:41:18: So the idea of prototyping early, design by playing, you know,

00:41:22: play every day, you know, recode, those kind of things. That was very interesting

00:41:27: for me. I think we shared an interest in that because I came from that board

00:41:31: game industry, which he had not experienced.

00:41:33: And I saw how we did it over there. And there was so many parallels to the same

00:41:38: thing. We became pretty good friends, I think, you know, no question about it.

00:41:41: I remember going to lunch one time and decide whether we're going to make Railroad

00:41:45: Tycoon or Covert Action. I mean, it was a funny lunch.

00:41:48: And I said, well, my money's on Railroad Tycoon. I mean, I was interested in

00:41:51: in a railroad as a kid, you know, we used to ride trains to visit my grandparents,

00:41:54: overnight trains, and I had a model railroad.

00:41:57: I had model railroading merit badge as a boy scout, you know,

00:42:00: so I was interested in trains. And so I remember that lunch at a steakhouse

00:42:04: and we sat there and decided that we would do railroad tycoon.

00:42:07: And he went back and told Bill, we're going to stop working on the covert action

00:42:10: game and do railroad tycoon.

00:42:12: And I think Bill went, okay, whatever. And so that's how we got to do it.

00:42:16: But then that's why we couldn't do railroad tycoon too, because Bill says,

00:42:20: okay, I let you skip that.

00:42:22: Spy game, Covert Action, but now I want you to finish it." So we had to finish

00:42:26: Covert Action before we could go on to something new.

00:42:30: So Civilization was a little bit put on the sideline, and the Railroad Tycoon

00:42:34: 2 was completely stopped, and we did Covert Action. And my memory of Covert

00:42:38: Action was, one of the things about it was, I said, well, this little sub game

00:42:41: is not that interesting. Can we do something about making it?

00:42:44: He says, nope, nope, nope, we're just finishing this.

00:42:45: We're not going to putz around with this game.

00:42:49: It was not a passion project for either of you.

00:42:51: He agreed to do it, and it was interesting enough that he would do it,

00:42:54: but it wasn't a passion project at the end.

00:42:56: So I stopped making suggestions about how to make covert action better,

00:43:00: and we just completed it. And then we got to do Civilization.

00:43:04: And as you described, initially Civilization was just between the

00:43:09: two of you. But at some point, then Sid decided to share it within the company.

00:43:13: And in the designer's notes in the manual, there's this line. I think you wrote that.

00:43:19: Wrote, it proved to be extraordinarily popular with the employees within Microprose.

00:43:25: What did that mean?

00:43:26: Well, it meant that when we had a game that needed to be tested,

00:43:29: we'd ask people to play it.

00:43:32: Sometimes you had to really work hard to get people to play it and give you feedback.

00:43:35: That wasn't the case with Civilization. Everybody wanted to play it.

00:43:39: Everybody was playing it and bombarding us with ideas and suggestions and things like that.

00:43:43: So it had a tremendous reception within the company. We opened it up to more players.

00:43:48: Everybody had to give it a try. Everybody was very enthusiastic.

00:43:52: They loved it. They said, okay, this is going to be great. I mean,

00:43:54: the way I felt day one, now the whole company felt that way.

00:43:58: It seems that everybody was happy to play the game at that point,

00:44:02: but you mentioned once that it was pretty difficult to get people to actually

00:44:06: work on the game. Why is that?

00:44:09: Well, that was because getting people to work on the game was handled

00:44:13: by the guy in charge of game development.

00:44:15: I mean, we wanted more art, let's say. We wanted more art pieces.

00:44:18: We wanted some programming on the front end or back end of the game or something.

00:44:23: And so that meant that the guy in charge had to allocate people from the staff

00:44:28: to do the work. I mean, Sid couldn't go tell this guy to work. I mean, he had to go to...

00:44:32: Our development VP to get people to do it. And he said, well,

00:44:36: that guy's busy on something more important to me, you know,

00:44:38: so it was a struggle to get help.

00:44:41: That's what I meant by that. Eventually, as the company's enthusiasm for the

00:44:45: game was just palpable, we got the help we needed, but it still meant the game

00:44:49: came out later than expected.

00:44:50: I see. Well, art is actually a great segue into the next section of things that

00:44:55: I'd like to discuss with you, because I have a couple of questions about specific

00:44:59: design elements of civilization that I find striking, and I'd love to hear your take on those.

00:45:05: So first of all, in 2017 you did that GDC post-mortem with Cid,

00:45:11: and in that post-mortem you mentioned that for both of you, graphics were not

00:45:17: particularly important.

00:45:20: If we look at the typical strategy game of that era, they were visually rather bland, I would say.

00:45:26: But But Civilization ultimately turned out to be a visually rich VGA game with

00:45:31: a surprising amount of eye candy. How did that come about?

00:45:36: We were going through a transition with graphics in that time period.

00:45:39: I started off with four-color graphics, and we were so excited when we got 16

00:45:43: colors we could put in a game.

00:45:45: Although we couldn't use all 16, we didn't have the programming power to use

00:45:48: all 16, we had to develop a palette. And then we got 64 colors to make a game,

00:45:52: and so it was like, wow, we're rich beyond imagining.

00:45:55: So I think that we had grown up in a world where we had to be minimalist.

00:45:59: The graphics was not something we had a lot of functionality with,

00:46:03: so we focused on the decisions the player would make, the game design,

00:46:07: not so much what it looked like.

00:46:09: So I came out of a world where what it looked like was secondary to the decision

00:46:13: making the player would make, the things the player would be doing.

00:46:15: And I think Sid, to some extent, was restricted by that as well.

00:46:19: But then when the graphics became more and more of a functionality,

00:46:23: we had our art director who had a good ideas about how to make it look better.

00:46:27: And so a lot of the decisions about the art.

00:46:30: Fell to the art team, and they did a wonderful job.

00:46:33: I think the credit for that, in a lot of ways, would go to the art people,

00:46:37: who took that ball and ran with it, made some really good decisions about how it would look.

00:46:41: It certainly wasn't me. I was not art-oriented.

00:46:44: I was focused on decisions the player was making, how the game proceeded,

00:46:48: the technology and the things you unlocked, how the game would flow.

00:46:53: The art was like somebody else's responsibility.

00:46:56: Was there a producer on Civilization?

00:46:59: To the extent there was a producer, it was me. I was the guy who did all the

00:47:03: stuff that Sid didn't want to do, and I think that I had a responsibility of

00:47:08: liaising with everybody.

00:47:10: The art was decided, I think, by our art director. I'm kidding.

00:47:13: He's an old man. His name is Mike. I can't remember his last name.

00:47:17: But he would make a lot of decisions about art, and he was very good at that.

00:47:20: He would have a theme for our look, and I think it was a credit to him that the game looked so well.

00:47:25: So I'm imagining right now, and you correct me if that's wrong,

00:47:28: that for the longest time during the development, there was basically this prototype

00:47:33: with programmers' art that Sid created by himself in there.

00:47:38: And then at some point, that gets passed on to the art director,

00:47:41: or they get drawn into that project group.

00:47:44: And then they basically just take what's there and expand on that and turn that into beautiful art.

00:47:51: I think that's probably the case. You'd have to ask Sid how much

00:47:54: of his original art went out in the game. Is it published? I don't know.

00:47:57: I don't remember giving a lot of thought to that. I guess I looked at it every

00:48:00: day, and things were changing every day, so...

00:48:04: Thinking that, oh, SID's art's been changed never entered my mind.

00:48:07: Looking back, whatever, 35 years, I don't remember thinking about that as much.

00:48:12: If it looked better, I was pleased, and I was still focused on how I was playing.

00:48:17: Maybe everything in that game is new, and none of it is originally SID's handmade

00:48:21: art. I don't remember now.

00:48:22: I'm just reinforcing that point, or asking that question,

00:48:25: because I'd say that yes, Civilization is a very clever and even elegant game

00:48:31: mechanically, but what tends to get overlooked is that for its time it was also

00:48:36: visually very appealing.

00:48:38: And I think that is a key element of why it was ultimately such a huge success.

00:48:43: It's pretty much the same story with Age of Empires six years later,

00:48:46: because I think that most people who saw Age of Empires first recognized it

00:48:50: as an extraordinarily beautiful game.

00:48:53: And that is part of the appeal that drew people to that game.

00:48:56: And I think it's the same with Civilization for its time?

00:49:00: That's probably true. I mean, I can't argue with it. I think that's very true.

00:49:03: It's like another presentation I made once at a game promise was like,

00:49:06: when you're making a new game, you have to be different, differentiate and innovate. You can't copy.

00:49:12: It has to be different when you look at it. Age of Empires was different when

00:49:15: you looked at it. It was not Command and Conquer. It was not Warcraft.

00:49:19: It was different. And it was also historical. But civilization was different

00:49:23: than anything out there at the time.

00:49:24: I think it looked different than some of the other strategy games that are out

00:49:27: there. And I think that was a big selling point. It was like the artwork drew

00:49:30: you in, it welcomed you, you felt familiar with it, you wanted to explore,

00:49:33: you wanted to see more of it. And that's a very positive aspect of the game.

00:49:37: If the game can hold your interest because of what decisions you're forced to

00:49:41: make, it can also be enhanced and dramatically enhanced by how much fun it is

00:49:45: to look at the stuff you're seeing on screen.

00:49:47: Indeed.

00:49:48: And so I think that perhaps is an underestimated, undervalued aspect to civilization

00:49:53: that it did look really great on your screen compared to what was out there

00:49:57: at the time and what you've been playing up to that point. So the art was a very positive.

00:50:02: Addition to the game, a component to it.

00:50:04: I'd say there's another undervalued aspect of Civilization,

00:50:09: and that doesn't go back to the art team, but to you as the designers.

00:50:14: Having great game mechanics is one thing, but then there's the interactive layer,

00:50:19: so to speak, of the user interface.

00:50:21: How is information presented to the users, and how can they interact with that?

00:50:25: And quickly coming back to Railroad Tycoon, because I think one of the best

00:50:29: things about Railroad Tycoon is the sidebar,

00:50:33: which has the mini-map and it

00:50:34: has the train list with the small visual representations of your trains.

00:50:41: That's a fantastic example of what we would today call information design,

00:50:46: which is selecting and presenting key pieces of information in such a way that

00:50:50: the users can understand them easily and interpret them easily.

00:50:54: And I think the same quality is in Civilization, which contains even more systems

00:50:59: than Railroad Tycoon did, but it excels at visualizing the pieces of information

00:51:04: that the player needs in order to understand them and then essentially manage them.

00:51:09: So I think given its complexity, Civilization is pretty easy to read.

00:51:14: How did that come about? Was there something that you were striving for?

00:51:19: I don't recall. I would say that that is all Sid's responsibility.

00:51:22: That's his work I don't remember having any input on that kind of stuff.

00:51:25: Maybe I did I don't remember Maybe I told him I liked it and I encouraged him

00:51:29: to do more But I don't know but

00:51:30: I don't recall ever having conversations where I said you got to do this.

00:51:33: We're missing this This is missing. You need to put it in there I don't remember

00:51:37: anything like that, but he would present these things in a new version and I'd

00:51:41: say really like it That's really positive. I'd really helped me.

00:51:44: Maybe that's the kind of feedback I would give him but I don't remember personally

00:51:47: personally, being instrumental in all that information flow.

00:51:50: Okay, I see. So one last thing that maybe you might remember,

00:51:54: because there is one thing that is suspiciously absent from the game,

00:51:58: and that is a load function.

00:52:01: So you cannot load your save game from within the game session.

00:52:05: You have to quit back to DOS and then restart the entire game to load.

00:52:10: And that is such a glaring omission that it has to be on purpose. Do you remember why?

00:52:16: I have no idea about that. Programming issues like that were way out of my bailiwick.

00:52:22: I thought this was most certainly a design decision, that for some reason,

00:52:26: you didn't want players to just quickly load a game.

00:52:30: I had the impression, that would be my theory right now, that Sid and you wanted

00:52:35: players to stick with the decisions that they made, even if they turned out

00:52:39: to be detrimental, and just continue playing.

00:52:43: Well, you know, it's possible that that's the decision that was made.

00:52:47: I just don't recall it. You know, I don't remember having that being an issue.

00:52:50: I'm not the kind of person who's an optimizer who would quit to start over and

00:52:54: do it better the second time I would start playing and then I would just keep

00:52:58: going. If I made a mistake, I'd say, well.

00:53:00: I'll remember not to do that next time, and I'll just keep going.

00:53:03: The time I had invested in the game at that point would be something I didn't

00:53:07: want to throw away. I mean, I'm too Scottish, maybe, to throw away all that

00:53:10: effort and start over. I don't know. I just don't have any recollection of that

00:53:13: being a discussion point.

00:53:14: That's fine. Okay, then maybe to wrap up the design part,

00:53:19: a quick what-if scenario.

00:53:21: What would you say, Bruce, how would Civilization have looked like,

00:53:25: turned out, if you hadn't been involved?

00:53:28: Oh gosh i'd say you'd be very close to what it is you know i mean i represented

00:53:32: every man and i was giving him feedback regularly and i think there's a few

00:53:36: of the ideas in the game may have been mine but i

00:53:39: mean i work with a bunch of really talented people there i think it's his partner

00:53:43: have been one of the other designers.

00:53:45: I would probably been very similar i mean i think that the central design was

00:53:49: all his and i don't have been a whole lot different but i would not learn as

00:53:52: much so i'm eternally grateful that i was involved.

00:53:56: And it made a difference in my life. I think having worked on that game in the future of my life.

00:54:00: So, but I'm not sure that some of my colleagues wouldn't have done very well

00:54:04: working with him on that team, maybe because we got along real well,

00:54:07: it helped him move ahead and maybe fast, maybe faster.

00:54:11: Some of my colleagues were more confident in their ability.

00:54:14: Let's say it might've been argued more for something that he didn't really want.

00:54:17: I mean, I'd make my case. And if he says no, and I say, okay,

00:54:21: decision's made, but I think some of my colleagues might have been saying,

00:54:24: Hey, this is not right. I'm telling you, you got to change this.

00:54:27: They'd be more aggressive about fighting for their position.

00:54:31: So maybe I was a little easier to work with than somebody else.

00:54:33: But I'm not sure that he couldn't have made that game without my help.

00:54:37: Sounds like you may be underestimating your role,

00:54:40: even if you were primarily the sounding board.

00:54:43: But it seems like you helped Zid organize his thoughts, make decisions,

00:54:48: get to quick decisions as well, and keep that back and forth of ideas and feedback going.

00:54:55: That's very possible. And maybe because I'm this kind of person I am that worked

00:54:58: really well for him and it encouraged him.

00:55:00: You know, like I said, some of my other people might have had a much higher

00:55:03: confidence in their own abilities and argued more forcefully and take longer

00:55:07: to get decisions made or something like that. I don't know. But you know,

00:55:09: it's hard to say. I mean, I think we had a great relationship.

00:55:12: We work really well together.

00:55:14: It probably helped the game, maybe more than I'm willing to say,

00:55:17: but I think he was a smart guy. He was a genius on that project,

00:55:21: and I was the second stringer, and I helped him, and there's no question about

00:55:24: it. But he would have done that game without me, I would have never done that

00:55:26: game without him, I don't think. It's hard to say.

00:55:28: You were the representation of the audience, in a way, which is extremely important.

00:55:34: That's a good analogy, I think. But I was a smart enough audience that I would

00:55:38: give feedback and have ideas, and it wasn't just the average player.

00:55:42: I mean, I had some skills and some experience, and I'm sure it helped him.

00:55:46: Yeah, I think we all know that providing useful feedback is an

00:55:50: art in itself. It's not a skill that everybody possesses.

00:55:54: But anyway, so the game gets released in 1991.

00:55:58: At which point did you realize that it was a success, a massive success?

00:56:02: I don't really know exactly when. I don't recall. I just know that the reviews were terrific.

00:56:08: I'm not even sure if they ran out of them at some point. They didn't make enough

00:56:12: in the first run and it's possible.

00:56:13: I don't remember that. I just know that it seemed to hit the ground running.

00:56:18: It got great reviews and people were talking about it.

00:56:21: At the time, we didn't have an internet, and so the word of mouth was like the

00:56:25: magazine articles took a while to appear.

00:56:27: The sales numbers were only really feedback.

00:56:30: And then, of course, there were some problems with the game.

00:56:32: People figured out a way to beat it or easily or something or cheat,

00:56:35: so we had to do some coding right away. At some point, they had to redo some

00:56:39: things really quickly. We didn't have the instantaneous feedback that you do today.

00:56:44: When something is published within 24 hours, you've got a lot of people who've

00:56:47: tried it, and a lot of social messaging is flowing.

00:56:51: So you know right away something about your game. It took a while for us to get feedback. But...

00:56:56: At the scale we were used to, it was very fast and very positive.

00:57:00: And did the success of Civilization change anything at MicroProse?

00:57:05: I'm not sure about that. I would think that the management team was a little

00:57:08: more open to different ideas instead of just simulators.

00:57:11: Well, there's a market out there for something else, you know.

00:57:15: I think that they were pretty impressed with how that game was selling.

00:57:19: And the other teams were encouraged to make some different kinds of games,

00:57:21: I think. So the other people working there got permission to work on some different kinds of games.

00:57:26: Okay, now we're coming back to your exit at Microprose.

00:57:30: Now the interesting thing is, at that point in time, Civilization is out, it's a smash hit.

00:57:36: You and Sid Meier had proven for the second time that you were something of

00:57:40: a dream team. Regular Tycoon, Civilization.

00:57:44: You have commented earlier that this was your dream job, working with Sid in

00:57:49: particular. And Sid commented that he enjoyed working with you very much.

00:57:56: And yet, less than a year later, you're leaving Microprose. How did this dream team get broken up?

00:58:04: I was married by then. My wife was an executive with a big bank,

00:58:09: a city bank, and they offered her a job that would force her to work for somebody

00:58:13: she didn't really care about that much. And so she decided to retire and find

00:58:17: a job in the Maryland-Baltimore-Washington area.

00:58:19: They wanted to move again. She already moved nine times for the company and

00:58:22: they wanted to move again So I was happy with my job And so she said I'll find

00:58:26: something else and so she took a year off and look for another work and then

00:58:30: it turns out the economy was in terrible shape and she was having trouble finding a job and Meanwhile,

00:58:35: Sid and I were putzing around with a Civil War game that the Battle of Gettysburg

00:58:38: I think is what it was or the American Civil War.

00:58:41: That's what we were messing around with I actually left the company at the Christmas party.

00:58:45: It was my last event in 1992 So I worked there in 91 and 92 on other things.

00:58:51: I think it was mostly the Civil War game. And the problem was that my wife's

00:58:54: job paid three times what I was making, and she was offered a job in Chicago

00:58:58: three times what I was making.

00:59:00: And we were struggling a little bit with her not working. I was the lowest paid

00:59:04: designer in the team at the company, and I kept getting raises,

00:59:08: but they were not catching me up to what the other guys were making.

00:59:11: So people were telling me, you're getting way underpaid, you know,

00:59:13: this is not fair. And going well. So we decided we would go, we would leave.

00:59:17: The Civil War game was not really going to take off, I think,

00:59:20: and so I didn't know what we were going to do next.

00:59:23: The company was struggling a little bit, I think. I don't know,

00:59:25: it wasn't doing great with other projects.

00:59:27: I don't remember the whole thing, but basically it was an economic decision.

00:59:30: We could live on my wife's salary, couldn't live on mine. So we moved,

00:59:33: and I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

00:59:35: I actually was hired by a California book publisher to write strategy guides

00:59:39: for computer games, because they had written books about civilization,

00:59:43: maybe Railroad Tycoon also, and so I asked them.

00:59:46: Would you be interested in me having these books?" And they said,

00:59:48: absolutely. You wrote these manuals you can write. So they hired me to write

00:59:52: books about games. And I actually worked on a strategy guide for the colonization

00:59:56: game that Brian Reynolds did for Microprose.

00:59:59: So I wrote that strategy guide and three or four others or something.

01:00:03: That's what I did for the next pretty much the next two years.

01:00:05: So you mentioned that you were one of the lowest paid game designers at Microprose.

01:00:11: I wonder, I mean, this might be a bit of a sensitive question,

01:00:14: but you were working with Sid Meier and you had this great working relationship.

01:00:18: I mean, we know that Sid was no longer a partner at Microprose,

01:00:21: but he certainly was someone with clout in the company.

01:00:24: I wonder why didn't he leverage that clout to give his co-designer a great race

01:00:30: or a bonus or to retain him after all?

01:00:33: I don't think it ever came up in the conversation,

01:00:35: you know. It wasn't that big a deal.

01:00:37: I mean, I think other guys were making more money. I mean, one guy was telling

01:00:39: me, You're way underpaid compared with other people are making I know for a

01:00:42: fact that when I was hired There was another guy they're interviewing and he

01:00:46: wanted X amount of money and I was hired for significantly less than him And

01:00:51: then six months later he showed up.

01:00:52: So I figured he must have got what he wanted, right? So right away I thought you know,

01:00:55: hey, maybe he did get that money Why did they pay me like, you know $7,000 less

01:01:00: or whatever it was even though they kept giving me raises They said you got

01:01:03: a good raise and I said, yeah But did I catch up to anybody and then I recruited

01:01:07: a friend of mine to come work?

01:01:08: And I think they repaid him more than I was making. I was already working on

01:01:11: these games and they recruited a guy to work in their other game division for

01:01:16: more than I was making. They had no experience in these games.

01:01:19: It wasn't eating at me or anything like that, but I was happily married and

01:01:22: my wife was making three times my salary and I didn't know what the future of the company was.

01:01:26: They were struggling in some cases. I mean, the company was sold not too long

01:01:29: after I left. Within a couple of years, I think it was sold to another company.

01:01:34: So I don't remember much about it. Maybe it was just an adventure to go to a

01:01:38: new place and start something new.

01:01:40: I worked for two years with something with Sid. We didn't come up with any other

01:01:43: ideas for a game. It wasn't going to be anything. The Civil War game was eventually published.

01:01:48: He did it with Jeff Briggs, but it didn't have the same feeling of anything

01:01:51: like what we've done with Civilization, if by any means.

01:01:54: Did you feel appreciated at Microprose?

01:01:57: I did. What mattered to me was what Sid thought and what my colleagues thought.

01:02:02: The other people, those managers, you know, I was just another cog in the wheel,

01:02:05: you know, and especially whatever I did for Sid was fine, they liked it,

01:02:09: but I wasn't thought of anything special. I will say, when I left,

01:02:12: they had a party for me, which I don't think they ever had for anybody.

01:02:15: They actually had a party and people dressed up and it was really,

01:02:19: really, really nice. They really set me off in style.

01:02:23: So I think I was appreciated. I remember feeling really moved by the fact that

01:02:27: they actually took time out of their day to have a party, to say goodbye and

01:02:31: made fun of me and stuff like that. It was really nice.

01:02:34: Do you wish that you would have had the opportunity to work with Sid Meier again?

01:02:39: At one point I talked about it, because I talked about working with him from

01:02:42: a distance. I said, look, I'm going to be in Chicago, in the Chicago area,

01:02:46: I could work with you remotely.

01:02:48: And he said, no, I don't think it works the same. He just wasn't interested

01:02:52: in it. So I look for something else to do.

01:02:54: Okay. So that concluded your time at Microprose.

01:02:59: And I mean, from the perspective of a gamer, I would say that's a good thing,

01:03:03: because ultimately that led to you working on Age of Empires,

01:03:07: which obviously became another classic.

01:03:10: But that's a story for another day. So Bruce, Thank you so much for joining

01:03:15: me and for giving us so much insight into the development of Civilization and

01:03:20: your role in it. Thank you.

01:03:22: You're welcome, Chris. Like I tell you, it was a dream to work on that project.

01:03:26: It was a great experience.

01:03:27: It opened up doors for my future, and I learned so much.

01:03:31: I'm always grateful for the opportunity to work with Microprose and especially work with Sid.

01:03:39: It's great. Thank you very much Bruce Shelley, that was a very pleasant conversation

01:03:43: and now I will briefly summarize for you what we talked about and what he told us.

01:03:47: I asked him at the beginning what he is actually more often asked about,

01:03:53: about Civilization or Age of Empires.

01:03:57: And he said, and that also sets the focus for the further conversation a bit,

01:04:01: Age of Empires was the game where he was deeply involved, was a really solid

01:04:06: part of the design team and he also says in advance that Civilization is the

01:04:11: game of Sid Meier and he only worked with him.

01:04:15: Okay, but let's go into the background. How did Bruce Shelly come to Microprose?

01:04:21: Bruce Shelly was just under 40 when he started at Microprose.

01:04:24: That means he had already done a lot before. He had already seen a lot of things and studied a lot.

01:04:30: He first studied biology and environmental science at the University of Virginia.

01:04:34: He then worked in that area and then went back to university, this time at BWL.

01:04:42: Tried to figure out what he wanted to do in his life.

01:04:46: During this time at the University of Virginia, there was a game club.

01:04:51: A game club not in the sense of computer games, but that were board and pen and paper games.

01:04:56: And with a group of members from this club, he then started a small publisher for pen and paper RPGs.

01:05:01: That was, as he said, not his genre at all. He preferred the complex tabletop

01:05:07: war games, But for him it was an entry card into the gaming industry.

01:05:13: So again, the gaming industry in the sense of board games, physical games.

01:05:17: And he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, especially because he came

01:05:21: into contact with manufacturers through his commitment to this small company.

01:05:24: And so he got an internship at a company called Simulations Publications Incorporated,

01:05:31: a provider of strategy games, especially from a monthly magazine called Strategy

01:05:37: & Tactics Magazine, wherever the rules for a whole game were contained.

01:05:40: There he was only there for a summer, then he realized that the company was

01:05:45: not doing so well, then wrote applications at this time and with the qualification

01:05:48: of this internship he was one of the really big ones in the industry,

01:05:52: namely at Avalon Hill in Baltimore, Maryland.

01:05:56: He is 34 at this time.

01:05:59: Avalon Hill is the market leader in the USA for serious strategy games,

01:06:06: war games, the tabletops. A pioneer in this area.

01:06:11: Many historical scenarios, often World War II. Bruce told that he came into

01:06:16: contact with these games when he was on vacation with his family as a teenager on the beach.

01:06:22: And on a rainy day, they discovered a first world war strategy game in a local shop by Avalon Hill.

01:06:29: And he sank in there. That was very small-scale, complicated rules,

01:06:34: but it was like, he said, like if the map from a history book and it is also

01:06:38: very instructive to play something like that.

01:06:41: Well, as I said, he comes to Avalon Hill, where he is hired to work through

01:06:45: the catalog of another company that Avalon Hill had just bought,

01:06:50: Victory Games, and to decide which games should be re-released and to make adjustments

01:06:56: there and then also for other games that will be brought to Avalon Hill at this

01:07:01: time. We're in the mid-80s here.

01:07:04: An example he mentioned was a game called Titan.

01:07:07: It comes from a small local manufacturer, who had already released the main

01:07:11: game on an add-on. It's a kind of chess with fantasy creatures on a hexagonal playing field.

01:07:18: Then Avalon Hill took over and his job was to combine this game with the add-on,

01:07:23: refine the rules and ultimately make it ready for publication for Avalon Hill.

01:07:27: So he was very busy with rules adjustments, equipment and so on.

01:07:30: It didn't really occur to me like the work of a game designer,

01:07:35: but rather like that of a product manager.

01:07:38: And he said, his title was Developer, so Entwickler, which he hardly did at Avalon Hill.

01:07:46: Not not, but hardly was he able to come up with his own games.

01:07:51: So even if we later know Bruce Shelley as someone who works as a designer in

01:07:55: the gaming industry, That may be the wrong picture of what he did.

01:08:00: Not only with Avalon Hill, but also with Michael Broster, we'll get to that in a moment.

01:08:04: The most famous thing he worked on with Avalon Hill is the game 1830,

01:08:09: an railway game from England by Francis Tresham.

01:08:14: He had already published railway games in England and Avalon Hill bought the

01:08:19: rights to publish them in America.

01:08:21: Bruce Shelley, the liaison in America, had a phone call with Francis Tresham about the Atlantic.

01:08:27: So Tresham came up with an American version of his game, the 1830.

01:08:34: And in the interplay between the two, Shelley adapted and prepared it for the US market.

01:08:40: For example, the game was too difficult for him. One of the problems that bothered

01:08:44: them was that in the original version of Tresham you could only build one railway line after the other.

01:08:53: And the adjustment he made, for example, was that from the beginning,

01:08:57: all railway lines are available in the big USA and you can choose which one

01:09:01: you want to build, which makes the game more open and flexible.

01:09:05: From this 1830, which was a super popular game for the conditions of Avalon

01:09:10: Hill, a whole series has been made, which is still running today.

01:09:16: After four or five years, he shifts his focus to the computer games division

01:09:20: of Avalon Hill, because for a long time now DS has been a publisher of computer games.

01:09:25: Avalon Hill publishes both external games as well as licensed or set games,

01:09:30: their own board games, as digital versions.

01:09:33: Bruce Shelley is not particularly enthusiastic about this. On the one hand,

01:09:37: Avalon Hill does not put a lot of effort into the development of computer games.

01:09:40: Most of the time they buy programs from some external people,

01:09:42: which were mostly simply tailored.

01:09:45: Avalon Hill has been around since the late 70s, early 80s, and there is not

01:09:51: so much competition yet, but the more professional this market becomes,

01:09:53: the more they hit the back.

01:09:55: Shelly remembers, for example, a game that Avalon Hill brought out,

01:09:58: called NBA, a basketball game with the official license of the NBA at the time, i.e.

01:10:03: The American League, and Shelly makes the quality assurance for it,

01:10:07: so he notices, for example, that all the statistics The characteristics of the players, i.e.

01:10:11: The original NBA players of this era, do not at all match the strengths of the

01:10:16: players. Shelly is a passionate basketball player. That will play a role in

01:10:19: the story. He knows his way around that. And he finds it pretty ridiculous how that is implemented.

01:10:25: So he wasn't particularly enthusiastic about what Avalon Hilda did.

01:10:29: But what he is enthusiastic about is another player he met at this time.

01:10:33: A friend recommends him to play Pirates.

01:10:37: The game by Sid Meier, by Microprose, which was released in 1987.

01:10:39: And Shelley is impressed by that. And he also knows that Microprose is based

01:10:44: in the same city, in Baltimore, in the north of the city.

01:10:47: Now, Bruce Shelley is not a computer-savvy person at this point.

01:10:52: He was never a programmer, and will never be a programmer. He is someone who

01:10:56: is engaged in design. But he thinks, okay, how could I get a foot in the door?

01:11:00: That seems to be the future for me with these computer games.

01:11:04: And with his methods he then simply tried to develop a computer game-like project.

01:11:09: As I said, he can't program, but he designs a solo war game for Avalon Hill. A solo strategy game.

01:11:17: Patterns Best is what it's called. It came out in 1987 and it's a war game that

01:11:21: you can play alone. As a single player.

01:11:24: It looks like the other Avalon Hill war game with lots of markers and thick

01:11:28: rules and stuff. But he describes it as a finger exercise for computer games,

01:11:32: because he says that most computer games of today are single-player games.

01:11:36: Well, it takes a while for Bruce to get into the door at Microprose & Foose.

01:11:41: He remembers that he tried to be a model for almost a year and to convince them

01:11:45: that they need someone who can really make games.

01:11:47: Well, I can't program, but I know how game rules work. And finally it comes

01:11:52: to the point that he is actually hired, but at a fairly low salary.

01:11:55: So, now we're at Microprose.

01:11:59: As I said, he's almost 40 now, Bruce Shelley. and we are in 1988 when he started

01:12:04: there as a pure designer, because, as I said, he does not have any programming knowledge.

01:12:10: This is unusual for Microprose at the time, but not unique. In the office next

01:12:15: to him, for example, is Lawrence Schick.

01:12:17: This is a name that is also known in the gaming industry. He comes from TSR,

01:12:21: the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, and was then briefly at Coleco,

01:12:25: the makers of ColecoVision, a separate console.

01:12:28: He worked for Microprose for many years as a designer and producer.

01:12:32: Later he switched to Bethesda.

01:12:34: But he is also someone who does not come from the background of programming.

01:12:38: What is Bruce Shelley doing at Microprose?

01:12:40: He works as the first project on F-19 Stealth Fighter, a flight simulation,

01:12:45: and makes 3D models and the map.

01:12:49: So he builds the plane models in the editor polygon and on the map,

01:12:54: where an air defense station should be and where an airfield should be, and so on.

01:12:59: This is an unusual task for someone who is hired as a designer.

01:13:03: Sure, we're not yet in the era where 3D graphics have a role of their own,

01:13:08: 3D modellers or something, but shouldn't he be making games now?

01:13:13: And I looked at the other interviews and sources in advance,

01:13:16: what he did with the Microprose Debut Chalet, and it seemed to me that it was

01:13:20: pretty wide-ranging. So sometimes it was research, sometimes documentation,

01:13:23: he wrote manuals, did budget analysis, assisted Sid Meier.

01:13:27: These are all additional tasks. Does he have his own projects?

01:13:31: Does he do something himself with Microprose?

01:13:33: And his answer to that is not really. In the four years he's been at the company,

01:13:39: he works more as a producer than as a designer.

01:13:42: He then added, for example, in the recruitment, he has an externally developed

01:13:45: game called Destroyer Escort, he has taken care of it as a producer.

01:13:48: He did the briefings for sales teams when games had to be presented.

01:13:53: He worked with the layouters of the manuals to create the manuals.

01:13:57: He took care of the quality assurance, initiated game tests,

01:14:01: maintained the bug lists. All kinds of things.

01:14:05: But that's because of the work with Sid Meier,

01:14:09: and you have to say that he's never understaffed,

01:14:13: but works in the developer team of Microprose,

01:14:17: which is called MPS Labs, and there's a boss, a head of it, that's first Steve

01:14:22: Meier and then later, also at the time of Civilization, Ted Markley,

01:14:26: and those are the executives of Bruce Shelley, not Sid Meier.

01:14:30: What we're always interested in is, what did the office look like back then

01:14:35: at Microprose? He guided us through mentally. He had about 100 people at the end of the 80s.

01:14:40: Bruce says, of course, with hierarchies, departments, the department heads and so on.

01:14:44: And that was in Hunt Valley, on the outskirts of Baltimore, a long,

01:14:48: flat, one-story building.

01:14:49: At the beginning, the entrance area with a large conference room.

01:14:54: And then it was divided into two wings. On the left, the management and all

01:14:58: the marketing sales departments.

01:15:01: A warehouse is also part of it, where all the products, packages and so on are

01:15:05: stored and ready for shipping.

01:15:07: And the whole right wing, the development department. The first office there

01:15:11: on the right side, a very large office, that of Sid Meier.

01:15:14: Then a corridor around such an inner courtyard and there are individual offices

01:15:18: lined up. So no large offices. Bruce has a single office in the back corner.

01:15:22: Next to it, as I said, Lawrence Schick sits opposite him.

01:15:27: Offices of two programmers and so all the disciplines in the development department

01:15:31: mix up. Offices for graphic designers, offices for programmers,

01:15:33: offices for designers and so on.

01:15:35: Sid Meier meets Bruce Shelley because they work on the same project.

01:15:39: This F-19 Stealth Fighter is a project on which Sid Meier is the chief designer.

01:15:44: Logically, they meet in meetings and talk. Bruce describes Sid Meier as a quiet

01:15:49: person, a distanced person, who needs a while before he disappears.

01:15:53: But the two get along quite well.

01:15:56: Bruce has described three reasons for this.

01:15:59: On the one hand, they have common interests. Both are very interested in history,

01:16:03: both read a lot, but above all they are very interested in game design,

01:16:06: in the craftsmanship of game design, and they quickly get into the technical aspects of it.

01:16:11: Then there are joint board game nights, where Bruce brings games,

01:16:15: for example his 1830 or the Civilization board game by Avalon Hill,

01:16:20: which already exists at the time, by the way also by Francis Thresham from England.

01:16:25: Sid Meier also takes part in that, he welds them closer together,

01:16:28: and then Bruce says he was also just ready to take on tasks from other people

01:16:32: that they didn't want to do. And he does that with Sid. He is ready to do things

01:16:36: for Sid that he doesn't want to do.

01:16:39: That's how it comes that Sid asks him at some point if he wants to assist him

01:16:42: in his next game. That's Railroad Tycoon.

01:16:45: This is an era where Bruce says he was enthusiastic about this possibility.

01:16:51: He loves the job. He thinks the games are great. He thinks the work with Sid

01:16:55: Meier, who he thinks is a genius, is great.

01:16:57: He is also in love with his future wife. It's going well for him.

01:17:00: He says he would have worked for free at that time.

01:17:05: And Sid and he get along great. They do research trips together to the railway

01:17:10: museum, for example, go to lunch together.

01:17:13: Later, when Bruce gets married, Sid is there too. The two of them get along.

01:17:17: One day they are eating at a steakhouse and actually Sid Meier has to work on

01:17:22: an agent game called Covert Action.

01:17:25: But he would much rather do this railway game he was working on and then obviously

01:17:29: asks Bruce what he thinks about it. And Bruce says, yes, of course,

01:17:32: the railway. What to stop?

01:17:35: Railroad Tycoon is created. This is the first game where they cooperate.

01:17:38: Then comes Covert Action, where they also work together. But that's not a love

01:17:43: project for either of them.

01:17:44: They have to do that because the boss wants it.

01:17:47: Bruce said that all the suggestions he made to make the game better were usually

01:17:52: rejected by Sid. with the hint that the game just has to be finished.

01:17:54: It doesn't necessarily have to get better, it just has to come to an end.

01:17:58: Because they want to make Civilization.

01:18:01: We talked a little bit about this head office. The head office is called Bill

01:18:06: Steele. Bill Steele is the co-founder of Microprose and the co-owner.

01:18:10: He and Sid Meier own the company for 50% and Steele is the manager.

01:18:15: So the one who makes the management announcements in the daily business.

01:18:20: And he's a character, let's say, a former Air Force pilot, a very extroverted, loud person.

01:18:28: And Bruce remembers that leadership went to Michael Bros. because they couldn't deal with Steely.

01:18:35: Steve Meier, for example, his first boss, that's how it was with him.

01:18:39: And there's a very nice anecdote he told, and that kind of adds up to this account

01:18:42: that Steely must have been a difficult person.

01:18:47: And although that sometimes led to tensions in the company.

01:18:51: Because I said before, Bruce Shelley is a passionate basketball player.

01:18:54: At the time he plays several times a week.

01:18:57: He is also a big man, just under 1.90 m. And then he finds out that basketball

01:19:01: is also played at Microprose. In the warehouse, in the company's own warehouse,

01:19:04: there is also a small basketball court and people play there regularly.

01:19:08: Not necessarily from the development department of the nerds,

01:19:12: but rather from the other departments, and above all the managers,

01:19:15: the leaders of the basketball team. And because Bruce participates,

01:19:18: he gets to know the managers.

01:19:20: The other designers in the development department are always wondering why he

01:19:23: is greeted by the marketing people. Hey Bruce, how are you?

01:19:27: How do you know them? But that brings this sport together. And who also plays

01:19:32: with this basketball team is Bill Steele, the manager.

01:19:36: Bruce remembers that he played hard. He was an aggressive player.

01:19:40: But Bruce is against it and in one situation they both chased the ball and in

01:19:44: the process he knocked out Steely.

01:19:46: Not on purpose, but with a hard game.

01:19:52: And when Steely is lying on the floor and obviously running for his life,

01:19:55: Bruce Shelley thinks, now I'm out of a job, I just almost knocked out the manager,

01:20:01: but Steely gets up again and the game continues.

01:20:03: And after the game, when Bruce goes to take a shower and the other managers

01:20:08: of Microprose too, they all clap for him and congratulate him.

01:20:11: He did that very well. So everyone seems to have been happy that someone beat up Bill Steele.

01:20:18: Bruce says, however, that he believes that Bill Steele and Sid Meier,

01:20:22: as far as he has heard, got along well.

01:20:24: At least he never experienced any animosities between the two.

01:20:29: But he already had the impression that Bill Steele rather indulges Sid Meier,

01:20:33: because he makes lucrative games, but for the businessman Bill Steele,

01:20:39: Sid Meier is rather unpredictable.

01:20:41: He wants to do his own thing and he can only hope that the genius Sid Meier will write another hit.

01:20:47: So we are at Civilization, actually one of those games that starts as a Sid

01:20:53: Meier marauder. By the way, Sid Meier is no longer a partner of the company,

01:20:58: Bill Steele bought his shares from him, but no one knows that at this point in time.

01:21:02: So Sid Meier then works on Civilization and again takes the same division of labor as with...

01:21:10: Because it already worked out well, with Bruce Shelley as his assistant, so to speak.

01:21:17: How did the idea for Civilization come about? The railway anecdote that Sid

01:21:22: Meier likes to tell about,

01:21:23: that he got the idea in a train, we now have to make a game about world history,

01:21:28: Bruce Shelley can't remember it, but he says that the influences that have had

01:21:32: an impact on him at that time, other games in particular, They all went in this direction.

01:21:37: That's the board game Civilization by Avalon Hill, SimCity at the time,

01:21:42: Empire, a war game that also has such a world-encompassing dimension.

01:21:46: All of this would have been more or less appropriate to lead to Civilization,

01:21:50: to this idea, and Sid Meier always built such small prototypes at the time.

01:21:54: The Russian teacher remembers a prototype where you were on the road in bloodstream from a human body,

01:22:00: another prototype where a family inhabited the American West,

01:22:05: and has children and then a seemingly generation-long settlement game comes

01:22:10: out of it. All just finger exercises.

01:22:14: And in May 1990, Sid Meier gives Bruce Shelley a floppy disk in his hand.

01:22:19: And on it is a prototype of Civilization.

01:22:22: Still far away from what the game will become. Here still more in the city and in real time and so on.

01:22:28: But with that the idea is in the world and Bruce Shelley thinks it's great.

01:22:32: So he is directly convinced that there is a lot of potential in the game.

01:22:37: By the way, he picked up this floppy disk, which was important to him to tell,

01:22:40: because he didn't pick up the first prototype of Railroad Tycoon at the time,

01:22:43: and he didn't want to make this mistake again with Sif.

01:22:46: And he told me that later he wanted to donate it to a museum,

01:22:50: probably the Strong Museum of Play in the USA, but then asked Sid Meier if it

01:22:57: was okay for him to give it to him.

01:22:59: And Sid then said, I'd rather send it back to me.

01:23:04: And so it went to Firaxis, Sid Meier's company today.

01:23:09: And there it was then successful for Sid Meier's team to produce this version

01:23:14: again, so that this original version of the first prototype of Civilization

01:23:18: obviously exists today.

01:23:21: In any case, Bruce Shelley describes the collaboration between Sid Meier and him

01:23:26: With Civilization, which was again as similar as with Railroad Tycoon,

01:23:30: Fitt Meier makes the game, programs it, designs it and every day he gives Bruce

01:23:36: Shelley the latest version in the evening.

01:23:39: He plays it, and the next morning, when Sid Meier comes in, the two of them

01:23:44: sit together in his office and discuss the game experience.

01:23:47: What could be improved, what worked, what didn't.

01:23:52: Then Sid Meier starts programming for the rest of the day, the next version

01:23:56: is finished in the evening, and the game starts from scratch.

01:23:58: So it's a constant cycle of prototype, assessment, prototype,

01:24:02: assessment between the two of them.

01:24:06: First of all, only between the two of them. For a long time,

01:24:10: Sid Meier has kept the game secret otherwise.

01:24:14: Why Bruce, on the one hand, because they have already worked well together at

01:24:18: Relative Coon, on the other hand, Bruce thinks that Sid Meier has seen a kind of every man in him.

01:24:26: So someone who is close to the target group, who can reflect well what the target group wants.

01:24:33: And if Bruce Shelley says, I think that's good, and I think that's less good

01:24:36: that Sid Meier would have accepted it, then most people out there will feel the same way.

01:24:40: I was a bit skeptical about Bruce Shelley putting his light under the shuffle.

01:24:46: Prompt, good feedback, high-quality feedback is super relevant,

01:24:50: but the point is here at this point, that was already clear in the conversation.

01:24:55: Bruce didn't design the game, he didn't co-design it in this sense,

01:24:58: but he was involved in this feedback cycle, where Sid Meier does the things

01:25:04: and Bruce Shelley then judges them and gives feedback.

01:25:09: But that's a job that Bruce Shelly enjoys. He really enjoys it.

01:25:13: He finds the fascinating design work, the two works out, what are fun decisions,

01:25:18: what works in this constant play, test, play, test process.

01:25:22: And he told me that later, when the two of them made it more open,

01:25:26: so as well the rest of the company noticed that, the colleague who was sitting

01:25:31: next to him in the office,

01:25:33: and Sid Meier, so over the course of the game, that I told him later that if

01:25:38: you and Sid sit together and talk about Civilization, then I can't work anymore.

01:25:41: Then I either have to close my door or I have to listen to you,

01:25:45: because what you are discussing is so exciting .

01:25:48: Incidentally, it is quite interesting, because Bruce Shelley said that as long

01:25:53: as it is only between the two of them, that he was the only one who gave feedback

01:25:56: to the game, he does not he didn't like it that much in retrospect.

01:26:01: Because the fact that only he saw it over a long period of time meant that there

01:26:06: was no time to test the game for other people.

01:26:09: And he pushed the fact that there were mistakes or not-so-cheap decisions in

01:26:14: the first Civilization, including the fact that only one person saw and judged

01:26:19: it over a long period of time.

01:26:21: And that's an insight that he took with him for the next big project he worked

01:26:27: on, Age of Empires, at Ensemble Studios.

01:26:31: And that one important point at Ensemble was that the whole company and also

01:26:37: external people start playing and testing their game pretty early,

01:26:41: so that you get broad feedback instead of sharp feedback.

01:26:46: Now, as Civilization is also shared in the company, it proves to be super popular,

01:26:50: everyone loves it and that's actually a pretty good omen.

01:26:54: The only problem is that Sid Meier is not the head of the development department

01:26:58: and a game like Civilization needs graphics, music, and so on at some point.

01:27:03: But the head of the development department, Ted Markley, is not paid for Sid

01:27:07: Meier's projects at this point. That's why it was very difficult to get support from him.

01:27:12: So the game officially has to reach the status where it comes into production,

01:27:16: gets green light and then resources from the development department go on top

01:27:20: of it. And that would have taken a lot longer than it should have.

01:27:25: Bruce Shelly is still a bit angry about it, because in the end the game actually was delayed.

01:27:31: Civilization broke its original deadline and that was because,

01:27:35: according to Bruce Shelly, they got the support from the development department too late.

01:27:42: But for that, he and the others were shorted the bonus. So a monetary disadvantage

01:27:46: for something they actually wouldn't have owed. Bruce Shelley tells me.

01:27:50: It was important for me to talk to him about the topic of graphics,

01:27:54: because I'm a big fan of Civilization's graphics and I believe that it also

01:27:57: has a significant share in the success. And I asked him, how was that actually?

01:28:01: We had made the decisions about how much graphics would be included and what kind of graphics.

01:28:05: And Bruce didn't remember much about this whole story. I already knew that graphics

01:28:10: weren't that important to him. He said that in a GDC talk.

01:28:13: This has also come true here.

01:28:17: He specifically, and he is also suspected to be Sid Meier, did not think so

01:28:19: much about the graphic representation.

01:28:22: There was an art director at Microprose, Michael Herr, and he did a great job according to Bruce.

01:28:30: He took on that, he made the design decisions, and the visual design of Civilization

01:28:36: happened with Michael Herr and his team of graphic designers died.

01:28:42: The interface design and the readability of Civilization are also very good.

01:28:47: Bruce has no recollection of him participating in the development.

01:28:50: He thinks it was all Sid Meier's doing.

01:28:53: I wanted to know how a Civilization without Bruce Shelley would look like.

01:28:58: And he said, well, probably very similar to what Civilization looks like today.

01:29:06: Although, you have to be a little restrictive. He was also a little restrictive.

01:29:11: He assumes that if Sid Meier had chosen another designer at Microprose as a partner,

01:29:17: there were others, then it could be that they might have pushed their ideas

01:29:22: more, that they would have been more convinced of it, that they have good ideas

01:29:24: that they have to go in with.

01:29:26: And Bruce Shelley describes the underlying between the lines,

01:29:31: describes himself in a role that gives the feedback unkindly.

01:29:35: And says, okay, watch out, that's what I mean, but it's your thing to make a

01:29:40: decision about it. If you are of the opinion, no, my proposal is not good,

01:29:43: then okay, it doesn't matter, it's your game.

01:29:48: And I think that makes it easy for Sid Meier, because he doesn't have to fight

01:29:51: against resistance or feel obliged to build something, but can sort of pick out the raisins.

01:29:55: At least that's Bruce's interpretation.

01:29:58: But Bruce also said, with certainty, civilization was more important to me and

01:30:02: my life and my later career than I was important to civilization.

01:30:08: The difference between Civilization and the work on it in Bruce's life will come later.

01:30:14: At the moment, that doesn't affect Microprose. It will take a while until it

01:30:19: becomes clear that Civilization is a success, when it is released at the end of 1990.

01:30:24: Sid Meier and Microprose are busy with new versions of the game,

01:30:28: there are bugs to be fixed, balancing problems.

01:30:31: That has to happen in the next few months. I asked him if he could tell that

01:30:37: the success of Civilization led to a change of mind about what games are successful

01:30:41: and what can be done at Microprose.

01:30:44: He had to think about it a bit and said, well, maybe the developers should pursue other ideas.

01:30:51: But it didn't seem to be very tangible.

01:30:54: The problem is that Bruce likes his job, as we said, but it's financially difficult.

01:30:59: He gets a relatively low salary. She knows that by comparing herself to other

01:31:04: designers and her wife is currently at home without work.

01:31:08: She is a successful bank manager, but has taken a year of sabbatical,

01:31:13: so to speak, a break while she is looking for a new job.

01:31:16: And finally she gets an offer from a bank in Chicago as a manager and earns

01:31:22: three times what Bruce gets at Microprose as a starting salary.

01:31:27: And that is ultimately the decisive factor, because although Bruce Shelley got

01:31:31: salary increases from Michael Burrs, it doesn't get him where he wants to go,

01:31:36: not at the level of other designers.

01:31:37: The work is no longer the same. Sid Meier is burned out after Civilization.

01:31:42: He works with Bruce Shelley on a war game about the American Civil War, but ...

01:31:50: It's not a project that has the same drive, the same spirit as Railroad Tycoon or Civilization.

01:31:58: Bruce is also not sure how it should go with Microprose.

01:32:02: The company also seems to be in trouble. There was this arcade game adventure

01:32:06: by Bill Steely that was expensive and ultimately a flop. So all signs are that

01:32:11: it may be time to move on. And above all, that's the crucial point.

01:32:15: He said, we could live on the salary of my wife alone, but not on my salary

01:32:19: at Microprose alone. And so they decide to move to Chicago and Bruce stops at Microprose.

01:32:27: I found that a bit strange. Not from the perspective of Bruce Shelley.

01:32:32: Completely understandable the decision.

01:32:34: I found it strange from the perspective of Sid Meier. Why does someone like

01:32:39: Sid Meier let someone like Bruce Shelley go? They had this cool cooperation.

01:32:44: Why does Sid Meier, even if he's no longer involved in the company,

01:32:49: still have something to say, that has a weight to it? Why doesn't he make an

01:32:54: effort to get Bruce Shelley a better salary, for example?

01:32:58: And Bruce, apart from the fact that Sid Meier, I think, was struggling with

01:33:01: his own problems at the time, says, Bruce, well, we never talked about it.

01:33:08: He told me that it was not a big deal, but I imagine that he just never talked

01:33:15: about his financial situation with Sid.

01:33:18: And Sid Meier probably didn't even know how Bruce Shelley actually felt about it.

01:33:23: Well, in any case, the colleagues throw him a chic farewell party with dress

01:33:26: code and everything, and then he moves on to Chicago.

01:33:29: He doesn't have an answer shop, but he finds one and writes solution books,

01:33:33: strategy guides for the next few years, among other things for the colonization

01:33:37: of Microprose, i.e. for the game that will be based on Civilization.

01:33:43: And then he finally joins the ensemble and works on Age of Empires and thus

01:33:48: lands the second big hit of his career.

01:33:54: That was the conversation with Bruce Shelley, those were the main insights from

01:33:57: it and my summary. As I said, I was very happy to talk to him.

01:34:01: Bruce Shelley is a modest, very polite, very friendly person.

01:34:06: And I am very happy not only that he worked in Civilization,

01:34:09: in Age of Empires, but that we had the opportunity to talk to him.

01:34:13: At this point, thanks again to Bruce and thanks to you for listening. See you next time.