Troy Goodfellow:	Game ideas are dropped all the time. Did you ever doubt that Civilization would work?
Bruce Shelley:	No. It was fun and interesting from my very first experience with it. As it started to take shape I remember thinking that it was incredibly cool to be working on this game because we had a strong feeling that it was something really special. I remember being amused by the idea that the leading edge of game development at the time was Hunt Valley, Maryland, but nobody knew but me and a few others. I was convinced that the game would appeal to a wide audience and be a big success. The only major concern was that the president of the company [Microprose] didn’t understand it and had no faith in it. I believe if Sid had been an employee [rather than a partner] it might have been cancelled.
Troy Goodfellow:	Was the scale of the success surprising?
Bruce Shelley:	We felt it was an incredible game and as more and more people were exposed to it in development everyone raved about it. I don’t think at the time I thought it would become recognized as one of the best PC games of all time, that it would turn out to be probably Sid’s best game ever, or that it would live on through multiple revisions, perhaps forever. So in those terms the success was surprising.
Troy Goodfellow:	What was the most important thing you learned in the development of Civ?
Bruce Shelley:	The development of the original Civilization game was the penultimate success of the design by playing process. Sid produced a playable prototype that contained most of the core features of the game. Once he got me involved playtesting it, we would test and review it every day. Then he would redesign and recode, and new version would be sitting on my chair when I got in the next morning. I would play it all morning making notes about what I thought was working and what was not, and we would meet when he got in and start again. Day by day the game took shape. Eventually it was accepted as a real project by the company and we got artists and other people involved. The essence of what makes Civilization great is that it was created by a very small team testing, adjusting, and retesting day after day. We have essentially adopted the same process at Ensemble Studios for the entire Age of Empires series.
Troy Goodfellow:	No game before Civ had that kind of scale. How important is the "epicness" in the appeal of Civ?
Bruce Shelley:	The development of the original Civilization game was the penultimate success of the design by playing process. Sid produced a playable prototype that contained most of the core features of the game. Once he got me involved playtesting it, we would test and review it every day. Then he would redesign and recode, and new version would be sitting on my chair when I got in the next morning. I would play it all morning making notes about what I thought was working and what was not, and we would meet when he got in and start again. Day by day the game took shape. Eventually it was accepted as a real project by the company and we got artists and other people involved. The essence of what makes Civilization great is that it was created by a very small team testing, adjusting, and retesting day after day. We have essentially adopted the same process at Ensemble Studios for the entire Age of Empires series.
Troy Goodfellow:	Sid’s games before Civ were real time (flight sims, [Railroad Tycoon], Covert Action) and he’s moved in real time since. Could Civ work in real time?
Bruce Shelley:	Yes and no. It has been done to some extent already, but the real-time games play quite differently. To me examples of Civilization converted to real time are Empire Earth and Rise of Nations. They are both strategy games that play through the rise of civilization (so maybe yes), but there are some big differences in real-time gameplay (so maybe no). In Civilization you play at your own pace, do lots of economic micromanagement, and combat is perhaps a minor part of play; real-time play is hair-on-fire frantic, much less economic, and really focused on combat. Where Civilization IV takes 6-12 hours to complete a game, the typical RTS game takes one hour or less to complete. The big epic topic is the same but the gameplay is dramatically different. The key difference between turn-based and real-time comes in the number and pace of gameplay decisions. In turn-based play you have all the time you want to make your decisions and you don’t advance the turn until you have completed all you wish to make. In real-time you have a very limited time to make decisions so you must continually rank them in priority. You deal with the most pressing decisions first and let the remainder slide if you can’t get to them. In turn-based you see the results of the other player actions and can ponder them for as long as you like before taking your turn. In real-time game conditions are constantly changing. You have little time to ponder your response.

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