From Pong to Civilization: How I made “one more turn” work on consoles
Enlarge / Be still our hearts with this 8-bit cover art.
Today, legendary game developer Sid Meier's first memoir arrives at bookstores and digital platforms, complete with the appropriately goofy name, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games. It's everything you might expect from the brain responsible for PC gaming series like Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Alpha Centauri: comprehensive, thoughtful, detailed, and with just enough humor and heart to pace out the dry, technical bits.
In good news, instead of us telling you what we think of the book (TL;DR: thumbs-up), we thought we'd let Meier himself regale you with an exclusive Ars Technica reprint of a chapter. Most of the book's chapters combine Meier's personal stories with a focus on a specific game, and this one, about 2008's Civilization Revolution, is as much an explanation of its PC-to-console transition as it is a lesson on game-industry history and on game design.
My own first exposure to video games was, like most people my age, the venerable black-and-white tennis match known as Pong. There was a small restaurant down the street from General Instrument where some of us would hang out and have dinner after work, and at some point they installed this weird little table in the lounge with a television screen facing upward underneath the plexiglass surface. The idea was you could set your drinks and bar snacks on it while you played, but it seemed irreverent to eat on the surface of a TV, so most evenings we would just wander over to play a few rounds before returning to our normal, wooden tables. The most memorable thing about it was that one side of the cabinet had somehow ended up wired backwards, sending the little white line to the left side of the screen when the player turned the knob to the right. So we had always agreed that whoever was more skilled had to sit on the broken side to compensate-perhaps my earliest experience in balancing gameplay.
Rotating dial controls were sometimes called spinners" in arcade hardware terminology, and truly inveterate nerds recognized them as either potentiometers or rheostats, depending on their function. But to the general public, they were incongruously known as paddles," due to their original table tennis associations. A year after Pong's release, the first four-way gaming joystick-a word which, oddly enough, had its roots in early airplane controls-made its debut in the arcade game Astro Race. It caught on quickly, and by 1977, the Atari 2600 home console offered a standardized plug that could support a potentially limitless number of third-party controllers, in addition to the five different styles produced by Atari themselves.
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