History and Creation of the Game

Sid Meier’s Starships, a brand-new technique game for the father of the civilization

The Past master of turn-by-turn approach returns with a brand-new game, extremely spatial, oriented on the management as well as the growth of fleets of ships for impressive battles?

People have made its first jump right into hyperspace, far from our excellent guys of the past, bits of electronic Epinal images. And also since there is, in space, Sid Meier (and even his studio Fir axis) intends to appreciate his far-off galaxies.

The developer of the series of approach games introduced a brand-new title, Starships, which occurs in the universe of Human being: Beyond Planet. As well as given that we don’t alter a winning formula, this Starships will certainly additionally be a turn-by-turn method game. It will undoubtedly contain “a new interstellar adventure,” based upon exploration. And also when we claim expedition precede, we indicate ships. As Sid Meier is the big-eyed kind, it is a fleet that you will need to manage from goals to objectives to safeguard planets as well as their people, to “develop a federation” to achieve a much-awaited heavenly peace.

However, before we have peace, we will need to develop innovations, overcome planets, fight feverish battles, and also develop ships. Gameplay that Sid Meier summarize in a couple of words: “My goal was to produce an experience that concentrates on ship layout and combat in a universe abundant in interstellar experience, between diplomacy and also expedition. “The imaginative development director of Fir axis likewise promises dynamically created maps and objectives. Neither does he neglect the fans of Beyond Planet, that “will certainly take advantage of Cross-Connectivity” between the two video games. Exactly how? It is not yet understood carefully, yet the link is perhaps to be found in Sid Meier’s comment: “When I was working with Starships, the idea involved me in discovering a brand-new phase in the background of Human being: Beyond Earth. What happens after we colonize our new home and also at some point construct spacecraft to take us to the stars? What happened to our long-forgotten siblings as well as a sister on earth? “Starships might then be an extension of the growth of its ‘earth,’ a type of ‘infinity as well as past.’ Sid Meier’s Starships will be released in early 2015 on PC and also Mac, via Heavy Steam (as well as the Mac App Shop) and even on the Application Store, for the iPads.

Forget all the prejudices you have about the video game: we are not going to talk here about a massacre with a rocket launcher or a Pokémon hunt. But a constructive video game and its legendary creator: Sid Meier, a world-renowned genius who has never been accused of abusing the planet. And for a good reason: its flagship title, Civilization, is a real work of digital art that cultivates those who enjoy it. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, played in his student room and still claims to be addicted to the saga: is there a culture of empire-building virtues?

Civilization is a strategy game that has sold 37 million copies since its first release in 1991. He proposes to incarnate a historical political leader who must lead his civilization from the Stone Age to planetary domination and space rockets. When he founded his first city, he also had to think about funding research to make his people evolve. Those who play Civilization must, therefore, juggle the development of cities, mining exploration, the mastery of technology, the art of war, diplomacy, espionage, culture, and religion. All on a map of the world divided into thousands of boxes.

Party after party, at the head of one of the twenty civilizations proposed (Aztec, Greek, Chinese, French), the player can become familiar with the techniques and knowledge related to each period of the story through an explanatory text or video. The underlying mechanisms remain faithful to the real world: you have to discover astronomy to build caravels and send it to explore the world or master the Steam machine to build railways. But the course of a game remains uncertain: if, for example, your opponent Gandhi is passionate about nuclear fission and feels like the soul of a warrior, he can entirely drop an atomic bomb on you, his Sumerian neighbor. Uchronia is, therefore, possible: the game system is faithful to the possibilities offered by history, but not to history itself! You write it down!

We had been trying to interview Sid Meier for ten years, and we finally managed to meet him in London on one of his rare tours in Europe. We discover a six-year-old smile with a slightly thin skull that floods the room with his joie de vivre. The record of this American-Canadian is impressive. In 1997, he was named ” the most influential personality in the history of video games.” In 1999, he was the second to enter the Hall of Fame of video games at the American Academy of Interactive Arts and sciences, just after Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese creator of the famous plumber Mario. In 2008, Sid Meier entered the Guinness Book of records and received the highest number of awards in this field. Despite this, he remains a timid man.

If Sid Meier is so famous, it is because his name appears on all the titles of his games: the real title of Civilization is Sid Meier’s Civilization. The man assures him, it is not his ego that demands it, but a tradition forged in the early 1980s with his partner of then: by attaching the name of Sid to the new games, they hoped to differentiate them from the military simulations that they designed and that were their core business. “Sid Meier’s Pirates! We thought we’d keep putting my name on it, like a label, ” he says. Although the first Sid Meier’s Civilization was supervised by Sid Meier, versions II to VI, for which he was “only” strategic advisor, also bear his signature.