Troy Goodfellow:	What role did scenarios have in Civ 2’s development and longevity?
Brian Reynolds:	The funny story about scenarios in Civ 2 is that one month before we were supposed to ship my supervisor told me “Stop working on the scenario stuff, we need to just cut that feature. You don’t have any scenarios done, there isn’t enough time, and it’s not an important-enough feature for you to spend time on at this point.” Well, he was right about us not having any scenarios done, but although we’d left it toward the end this was one of the things I wanted most of all for Civ2 to have. I had actually been doing a lot of work on the Map Editor for Civ2 for my own enjoyment, and I really wanted to put the editor to use and give players some templates to build from. Also all of my games had always had a lot of user-moddable data (you know, the rules.txt and later rules.xml stuff), because coming from a hacker tradition myself I knew how much players wanted to tweak around with the game rules (for years Sid called me “the guy who put Cheat on the main menu”, which I always wore as a badge of honor). So I’ll come clean and admit that in this case I did the exact opposite of what I was told—for the next two weeks I quietly worked on practically nothing but the scenario feature. I designed the WW2 scenario myself as a prototype, and then talked someone (I think it was Mick Uhl) into making the Rome scenario. That gave us enough scenarios to ship with a viable feature, and although the editor work was necessarily hurried we were able to get the basic concepts in. I’m actually quite proud of those two scenarios (and the map editor) because the subsequent history of the franchise was made possible in significant part by the mod-ability and scenario-ability of the initial release. Much of the “viral marketing” we got for Civ2 in the first year came from the power of the scenario & mod community. The mods & scenarios also made the Civ2 expansion packs possible, and these in turn kept the franchise going strong for the full five years until the release of Civ3 – you could still find Civ2 selling for a strong price in any game store right up until Civ3 shipped. Indeed, scenarios and modability are now cornerstones of the whole franchise – every Civ generation gets multiple X-packs and the modability just becomes more and more detailed. So truly I think the scenarios and modabilty have proven key not just to Civ2 specifically but to the whole Civ franchise (and I’ll happily take credit for defiantly taking the first step against orders, one of my last great feats of “commando programming”!)
Troy Goodfellow:	How would you evaluate the success of Civ 2 MP?
Brian Reynolds:	My opinion? Multiplayer has always been somewhat of an albatross around the neck for the Civ franchise – it’s vocally demanded by a small but influential group of players, but it appeals only to that same small group and is immensely expensive to create (in relation to what it costs to create the rest of the product). Even real time strategy games generally have many more solo players than online players, and that’s a game system that’s designed at its heart to work well in a multiplayer environment. Civ was from the beginning a game which was designed as the “ultimate solo game experience”; it had lots and lots of detail, interesting AI, and unending different choices to be made. But nothing about it was ever designed to work well in multiplayer (and my own experiences playing Empire hotseat-multiplayer in college didn’t give me great confidence in how manageable a multiplayer game of Civ would be). Ultimately though lots of effort was expended in welding multiplayer onto the Civ design – the first CivNet in 1995 using the Civ 1 core gameplay, but when players started voting with their wallets it quickly became clear that what they wanted was an improved solo game design (Civ 2), not a multiplayer addition to Civ 1. We did actually have significant multiplayer code running in Civ 2 towards the end of the project, but it was clear we didn’t have time to get it done during our schedule (and in this case I did follow orders to stop working on it ?), but following our core-team’s departure to found Firaxis the full multiplayer code for Civ 2 was destined to wait for another couple years. I don’t know how much was spent on developing the MP capability, so I couldn’t really say if it was a “success” or not, but I’m kind of guessing that it mostly made a good way to get a modest number of hardcore players to re-purchase the already-planned gold edition. In other words I suspect that most people who bought the MP Gold Edition were players who didn’t already have Civ 2 and were just buying it to get the complete product, but that having the MP capability also got some hardcore players to “re-buy”. On my own team’s next product, Alpha Centauri, we also put multiplayer in at great expense of time and energy, but I really don’t think it did much for the ultimate success of the product, and if I had it to do over again I’d have spent all of that time making the solo play a lot better. I know the story of multiplayer-in-Civ-games has continued in Civ3 and Civ4 so obviously there are still some true believers out there, and I’ll leave others to tell how they think that’s playing out; for myself I love multiplayer games and ultimately that’s why I decided to try my hand at an RTS!

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