Sid Meier's Memoir!
2020
- recreation
- personal memoirs
- video game designers
- biography
- video games
- history
- design
- video gamers
- psychology
- sports & recreation / general
The story
"The life and career of the legendary developer celebrated as the "godfather of computer gaming," and creator of Civilization. Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular video games, including Sid Meier's Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier's Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry. Writing with warmth and ironic humor, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio, MicroProse, founded in 1982 after a trip to a Las Vegas arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games, from vintage classics like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, to Civilization and beyond. Articulating his philosophy that a video game should be "a series of interesting decisions," Meier also shares his perspective on the history of the industry, the psychology of gamers, and fascinating insights into the creative process, including his rules of good game design"--
What it’s like
Warm, wry and conversational, with the feel of a late-evening chat with a friend who happens to have spent forty years thinking about why people play. The prose is plainspoken and self-deprecating, full of small anecdotes about early arcades, cramped studio rooms and the stubborn experiments that became landmark strategy games, so it reads like a cluster of notebook pages more than a polished literary account. Its mood is cozy and reflective, with an undercurrent of delight at systems and decisions; the pace moves briskly from chapter to chapter, each one a self-contained story with a clear lesson about design. Nothing here is violent, frightening or sexual, and the sharpest moments are dry jokes and candid admissions of failure. It suits a slow weekend morning with coffee, a long train ride, or an evening spent flipping back and forth between memory and game-design theory. It is especially for readers who love the history of gaming, anyone curious how strategy games are built, and people who enjoy memoirs that treat a working life as a puzzle worth turning over.
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