THE GREATEST INFLUENCER

PC gaming would look very different without CIVILIZATION.

- Fraser Brown

I have no idea where we’d be without Sid Meier’s Civilization. Its influence has been an overwhelming constant for decades, defining generations of strategy games and developers. If Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley hadn’t decided to let Napoleon, Montezuma and Alexander the Great duke it out, swallowing up the world and dropping nukes on each other, a huge chunk of gaming history would never have happened.

Turn-based strategy existed long before Civ, but it’s Civ’s brand of turn-based strategy that became the model that most of the genre ended up following. It’s not just 4X games that owe almost everything to Civ. You can’t help but stumble across its DNA everywhere, whether you’re playing Crusader Kings, Total War, or Age of Empires, which dreamed of being a real-time Civ.

It just kept setting the standard, over and over, with each new release. Wherever you are in the gaming timeline, there’s a good Civ to play. Throughout almost my entire life,