Civilization I

Sid Meier's Civilization is the first game in the series of the same name, developed by MicroProse and released initially for DOS in December 1991. Designed by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley after the successes of Silent Service, Sid Meier's Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, it is noted for being one of the first examples of the 4X genre. It established the basic mechanics that would define the series such as selecting a civilization from world history, founding cities, researching technological advancements, producing units, and waging warfare. Your civilization wins either by conquering the whole world or being the first to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri.

Followed by Civilization II.

Civilization contains examples of:

• And the Adventure Continues:
  • In the game over screen, archaeologists discover the remains of your civilization with an accompanying epilogue.
    Centuries later, archeologists discover the remains of your ancient civilization. Evidence of thriving towns, [one technology you discovered], roads, and a centralized government amaze the startled scientists. Finally, they come upon a stone tablet, which contains but one mysterious phrase: "[leader's name] will return!"
  • The epilogue also appears in II, but with a first person view of an archaeologist exploring an Egyptian tomb, then discovering the "mysterious phrase" on a nearby wall.
  • The DOS version ends the game over screen with the brief version of your leader's Leitmotif before immediately kicking you back to the DOS prompt.
  • The SNES port, in addition to the game over sequence mentioned above, has a more direct example of this trope. If you win the game via Domination, the goddess that appeared at the start of the game returns to congratulate you. She tells you that your civilization is about to journey to the stars... "But the adventure of space is another tale."
• Anti-Air: Fighters are the only way to attack air units.
• Attract Mode: The opening sequence of the formation of the Earth and development of life that plays when starting a new game in most versions is, instead, an attract mode in the SNES port of I. (A different sequence in which your civ's leader is given a Mission from God plays when starting a new game.)
• Being Good Sucks: Diplomacy is rather useless as, often, the computer will threaten you with demands for free technology or money, even if their military power is non-existent. Without the Great Wall or the U.N., there is a very rare chance that they'll offer a peace treaty with you.
• Blood Knight: There are fourteen civilizations, but only a maximum of seven can appear at once. Each of the seven player colors has two civilizations associated with it. As a result, players often pick certain civs just to be sure they won't ever encounter the more warlike "twin"—especially the Aztecs and Zulus.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: There's a secret rule that compels every civilization with more than one city to betray the player after 1 AD, provided the player has the strongest civ but does not have nuclear weapons. Disabling this rule requires editing the game executable.
• Copy Protection: There are two instances in the early parts of the game where you have to look up a civilization advance in the manual. You're shown a picture of a random one, then given a large set of multiple-choice answers of which two advances are its direct prerequisites. (The in-game justification is that "A usurper claims you are not the rightful king!") If you are wrong, you lost all the military units you have outside of your cities, but can still continue the game. Ironically, all the advances are also documented in the in-game Civilopedia (but you can't check it as you are being asked), and even if you don't read that, the answers can often be worked out logically anyway. It asks you things like "Which advance requires knowledge of Steam Engine and Bridge Building?" (Uh... could it be Railroad? Ya think?) And even the less obvious ones are easy to memorize after you've played the game a few times.
• Creator Provincialism: Koei handled the porting of the SNES version. As a part of this port, they swapped out Shaka and the Zulus with Tokugawa Ieyasu and the Japanese. In addition, the opening sequence—which had been turned into an Attract Mode for this version—centers on Japan as the Earth develops, rather than Africa.
• Crutch Character:
  • The Colossus Wonder. The city that builds it gets double the science output, helping Advancement research tremendously. However, researching Electricity deactivates it, but by that point more than half the tech tree should be researched.
  • The Pyramid Wonder allows the nation that built it to switch to any type of government, even if the respective technology hasn't been researched yet. It's deactivated by Communism, but by that point the player will likely have researched all the government types anyway.
• Dub Name Change: In this case, it's a Port Name Change. Due to space limitations, many of the names for the SNES port were abbreviated or changed completely.
  • Advanced Flight to Flight2
  • Atomic Theory to Atomic
  • Bridge Building to Bridging
  • Bronze Working to Bronze Wrk
  • Ceremonial Burial to Burial
  • Code of Laws to Laws
  • Conscription to Conscript
  • Construction to Construct
  • The Corporation to Corporat'n
  • Electricity to Electric
  • Electronics to Television
  • Engineering to Engin'rng
  • Feudalism to Stirrup
  • Flight to Flight1
  • Fusion Power to Fusion
  • Genetic Engineering to Genetics
  • Horseback Riding to Riding
  • Industrialization to Industrial
  • Iron Working to Iron Work
  • Labor Union to Union
  • Magnetism to Compass
  • Mass Production to Mass Prod
  • Mathematics to Math
  • Nuclear Fission to Fission
  • Nuclear Power to Nuclear
  • Recycling to Solar
  • The Republic to Republic
  • Space Flight to Flight3
  • Steam Engine to Steam Eng
  • Superconductor to Supr Cndct
  • Theory of Gravity to Gravity
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The original game has no worker unit, settlers do that job. Aircraft are units you move around the map — make sure you get them back to a city next turn or they crash! Your civilization has no borders, just cities — that wasn't until III. Zones of control — the game is built to be incredibly picky about where you can put a unit in relation to an enemy.
• Fisher King: Changing a government resulted in entirely different advisors—and if you're seeing this from another civilization, diplomacy screens as well. They appear to have originally been intended to correspond with specific civilizations; the devs for the SNES and Playstation ports seemed to take note of that. In most versions however, civs running Despotism in the early game have ancient Mongolian aesthetics. A civilization with an early game Monarchy will have ancient Egyptian ministers, but in the late game will look like early modern European royalty (with Shakespeare as your domestic advisor, and Leonardo daVinci as your science advisor). Early game Republics and Democracies have Greco-Roman aesthetics (with Plato as a science advisor) but in the late game will have American aesthetics (with Theodore Roosevelt as your defense minister, Mark Twain as your domestic advisor, Benjamin Franklin as your foreign minister, and Thomas Edison as your science advisor). Under Communism, all your advisors look like a little like Mikhail Gorbachev in different outfits.
• Foreign Re-Score: The SNES, Super Famicom, Playstation, and Saturn versions weren't developed by MicroProse, but by the Japanese companies Koei for the SNES, and Asmik Ace for all the others. These versions of the game have entirely different soundtracks not just from the original DOS version, but also from each other. They also, unlike the original version, have background music for different eras of the game (changing at 4000 BC, 1 AD, 1000 AD, and 2000 AD). Also of note is that the Atari ST version changed some of the music as well. The title music and music for the opening cutscene have an entirely different feel, sounding more like the soundtrack of E.V.O., at least the original PC-98 version.
• The Foreign Subtitle: Asmik Ace, the developer of most console versions, titled their releases as Civilization: Seven Great Civilizations of the World (シヴィライゼーション 世界七大文明).
• Game-Breaking Bug: The PC build suffers from one of these at very high levels of advancement. Dubbed "popup pollution", once an indeterminate trigger condition is reached the player is inundated by pollution squares appearing randomly in their territory. The pollution appears even if the pollution levels of all cities are at zero. The effect starts as a minor annoyance and then grows, reaching upwards of twenty-five polluted squares per turn. This can initially be fought with roving bands of Settlers acting as cleanup teams, but by the end the pollution is forming so quickly that it can trigger Global Warming before the player's turn comes up again. The only solution is to launch one's spacecraft and end the game.
  • Popup Pollution can even form in the arctic and antarctic regions. These areas are typically not built up due to their lack of food production. Without comprehensive rail infrastructure, settlers can't be dispatched quickly enough to clean up the mess, which can then bring about Global Warming even sooner.
  • The insidious part of Popup Pollution is that it tends to only affect those players trying to go for a High Score achievement by increasing their population and tech levels as they run out the clock towards the end of the game. Polluted squares come with a point penalty and global warming can degrade land which limits population growth so the bug attacks the one thing that the player is still focused on.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The game takes a looong time to build worlds. The "In the beginning..." sequence was included to help disguise this.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: The box art depicts a giant sarcophagus-like carving buried under a modern city.
• Mission from God: In the SNES port, new games don't start with the intro showing the formation of Earth and development of life—that's instead the port's Attract Mode. Instead, a goddess appears before the young leader of your chosen civilization. She explicitly gives your leader a mission to "build great cities, and cause civilization to flourish throughout the Earth." She teaches you irrigation, road-building, and mining, then bids that you "discover the rest for yourself".
• Painting the Medium: Some versions of I, when engaging in diplomacy with other civilizations, have specific fonts for the leader's dialogue.
  • For example, in the DOS version Frederick,◊ Elizabeth◊, Napoleon,◊ Lincoln,◊ and Stalin◊ all use the same serif font. Ghandi,◊ Hammurabi,◊ Montezuma,◊ and Genghis Khan◊ use a curlier font. Alexander,◊ Caesar,◊ Shaka,◊ and Mao◊ use a font that's evocative of ancient Greek.
  • The Windows and Macintosh versions of I lean even harder on the use of Foreign Looking Fonts. Frederick◊ simply uses a Blackletter font, but Stalin's font◊ goes ham with the The Backwards Я. Alexander and Mao similarly had fonts strongly meant to invoke their civilization's writing system. (Many other leaders, however, simply opted for a more plain but unique font. You can see the whole gamut in this video.)
  • The FMV cutscenes that play upon building a Wonder in II have text at the end which explains the name of the Wonder and what it does. Most of these vary depending on the age to which the Wonder belongs. Ancient/Classical wonders have a font reminiscent of unical script; Medieval/Renaissance Wonders use a font similar to Schwabacher blackletter typfaces; Early Modern Wonders have a calligraphic script similar to Ronde or roundhand; Late Modern Wonders use a serif font; Space Age/Future Wonders use a font similar to the kind used for magnetic ink character recognition like Westminster. The one Wonder which bucks these trends is Leonardo's Workshop, which uses a handwritten font unlike the others.
• Random Event: A number of random disasters can strike your cities. Some of them can't be prevented, such as earthquakes which destroy a random improvement. Others, however, can be prevented if a certain improvement existed in the city. City walls prevent floods, barracks prevent pirates from stealing food and halting production, aqueducts prevent fires destroying other improvements or plagues causing population loss, and temples prevent volcanoes.
• Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: The player can watch an animation at the end, showing the rival empires spreading across the world map. While it probably only counts as a disaster for the player if they lost, seeing one color expand at the expense of another almost certainly means someone's day was ruined.
• The Topic of Cancer: Developing a cure for cancer gave you one happy citizen in every single city, no strings attached.
• Video Game Remake: I is a remake, and also a loose adaptation, of the original board game. The board game had a fixed map, with predefined city locations and resources (and was an accounting nightmare as each city had to have resources collected and recorded manually). The computer adaption allowed for map generation, free city placement, and to have the computer do the bookkeeping for you.
• We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: One of the Wonders is the Cure for Cancer, a monument that bestows +1 happiness.