Troy Goodfellow:	Why did you decide to remake Civ? Was there any resistance to the idea?
Brian Reynolds:	That was an interesting set of decisions because at the time the “right answer” of what if anything to do with the Civ franchise was far from obvious. Up to that point, no one had successfully “sequelized” one of Sid’s strategy games (there had been follow-on attempts for both Pirates and Railroad Tycoon which hadn’t panned out). The closest we’d come was with Colonization in 1994 which wasn’t really a sequel but clearly borrowed Civ elements, and was successful enough to encourage us to try for a full sequel; also in terms of my own involvement I think Colonization also helped give management confidence that I could do the work. But, much of the popular thinking at the time was that Civilization really just needed multiplayer support, not any more design or redesign (and to be fair, you can see why in 1991 it might have seemed that Civilization was “the perfect game” why would anyone want to redesign it?)—in fact, a project called CivNet was started around the same time, featuring Civ I gameplay with multiplayer rules. I think most of the company’s management sincerely believed that CivNet was going to be a much more important product than a solo-only sequel and that the so-called “Civilization 2000”, our working title for Civ 2 at the time, was just a weird idea “cooked up by Brian and Jeff” which they let us try partially because Sid thought it was a good idea and partially because they wanted to find something for me to do while I was living in England during my wife’s teaching fellowship. Management doubts about the product continued throughout the entire development cycle—first most of the marketing resources were diverted to CivNet, and then later to other Spectrum Holobyte products like Top Gun. At one point the CEO told us that our lifetime sales projection for the product was something like 38,000 units, which I guess explains why they spent nearly nothing on marketing the game in its first 6 months. In my own mind, I was “hoping for 350,000” which is about what we’d sold of Colonization (profitable for its day). Needless to say even the most optimistic of us weren’t predicting the multimillion breakout hit that we actually got. But all of that “management perspective” is only half the story! The reason the Strategy Group (as we called ourselves internally in those days) was excited about doing a Civ sequel is because it was the game to which we were all (still) addicted and we all had our own ideas about how we’d love to tinker with it. For myself I’d been playing Civ I since my first 2am encounter with it during beta, and before that I’d played and hack-modded Empire all through college, so I was thoroughly steeped in the lore of just-one-more-move 4X games even before I “wrote one” in the form of Colonization. I knew for example that I wanted to tinker with the diplomatic AI and give it more variety, and that we ought to do some things to improve combat (Battleship-killed-by-Phalanx was a classic player complaint about Civ I) but it didn’t become clear until later just what about combat should change. In the end we approached the gameplay in the style Sid had taught us – get it running early, and do lots of playing and prototyping. From a “cold start” in September 1994, we were playing games using a combination of Civ 1 and CivNet art by March 1995, and then most of the real gameplay innovations all happened between March and September 1995. In the core gameplay I think the most significant additions were the combat changes, a completely re-written AI for all levels of the game, more detailed diplomacy, and then of course the addition of new units, buildings, and technologies. I also wanted to work on the interface of the game and make it more GUI-oriented. A lot of people forget this, but the decision to make Civ 2 a “windows game” was a risky move at the time, but paid off big time. It was kind of a labor of love to go above and beyond the minimum of getting the game running under Windows and make it truly a “Windows friendly” game with resizeable subwindows on your desktop and so forth—and for this I owe much inspiration to the CivNet guys who were evangelists of this sort of thing. The fact that Civ 2 came out right after Windows 95 was adopted, and “ran well on anything” is I think a little-appreciated fact in its success. These days the graphics card manufacturers have led us back down the garden path of hardware/driver incompatibilities to the point where many players have such a hard time getting Windows games to run on their systems that they give up and go play console games—but for a brief and shining moment there was Windows 95 which gave PC-owners the closest thing they ever had to a stable gaming platform. I’m certain this played a significant role in Civ 2’s success. Ultimately Civilization II was a very difficult game to “demo” even to someone familiar with the series—they would just look at it and say “but isn’t this just Civ 1 with better graphics”? It was hard to point to one landmark feature and say look here’s the new revolutionary thing—there was just this combination of lots of little small things, and the fact that they all fit together perfectly, and that’s really hard to communicate without someone sitting down and playing the game for a few hours, which is ultimately how the product became successful: word-of-mouth and “viral” marketing. It wasn’t that any one revolutionary feature was the thing that made Civ 2 great; if I absolutely had to pick one thing maybe I’d say being Windows-friendly, because it was truly the first big game to do a good job of that, but really I think it was the fact that Civ 2 was a polished product – a very very polished product in fact.
Troy Goodfellow:	How did working in England affect the development of Civ 2?
Brian Reynolds:	Well first of all I think there’s a strong chance that there’d never have been a Civ 2 if Jill hadn’t gotten the Fullbright. When I told my bosses that my new wife was going to be living in England and one way or the other I was going to go with her, I’m happy to say they didn’t just tell me “well it’s been nice knowing ya”. For whatever reason they thought it was worthwhile to find me a project I could work on semi-independently. I was certainly known as a good solo-programmer at the time, and I’d had some design experience co-designing Colonization with Sid, but I think management was looking for something with enough inherent structure that I wouldn’t be in as much danger of heading completely off into outer space with the design. So the “Civilization 2000” idea turned out to fit that idea nicely, and sounded like a dream project to me, to boot – imagine going off to live in a foreign country for a year, with a license to tinker to your heart’s content with your favorite game of all time? Oh, and with barely any supervision as long as builds were showing up every now and then! That was certainly some “out-of-the-box thinking” on the part of my bosses, though I suppose as a one-programmer-show I wasn’t all that expensive for them to take a flyer on. Truly I think working on the project in England was probably one of the best things that could have happened to the game – because during the week while my wife was at work or preparing for class there was truly nothing to do but tinker endlessly with the game. The telephone never rang, nobody stopped by the office to ask a question about something “important” but distracting, nobody wanted to go to lunch, nobody wanted to goof off and play Magic: The Gathering, nobody wanted to divert me to work on little side projects for other products. There was no internet and just barely any such thing as e-mail. Just me, the computer, and the game. I can remember the very first morning thinking “uh oh, I’d better find somewhere to get started” and I spread graph paper out all over our tiny little living room and spent the morning playing with the tech tree (my single favorite part of Civ when it first came out) to see how much room there was to expand it while keeping the history and pacing straight—I can remember specifically thinking “let’s see if we can connect up all the ‘early-dead-end’ technologies like Horseback Riding”. And from there it was just layer after layer of adding little cool things here and there, until August of 1995 when we came home. From that point we had about 6 months to ship the game, and this was the time when most of the art, multimedia, and other aspects of the game were added.

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