Sid MeierSid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games

As a fan of Sid Meier games, I liked this one. Lots of interesting stories like the unreleased dinosaur game, the non-existent atomic Gandhi bug myth (yes guys, it's not real!), the inspiration Sid had for all his games, based on his real hobbies and interests (golf, history, trains, etc.), and many more. It's a strong recommendation for all the fans.

I grew up with Sid Meier's games and love them to this day. I also love reading about early video game development -- it was quite an interesting industry at the time and I find it fascinating to read about the various small shops that were responsible for some great early games.This is all to say, I am very squarely the target audience for this book, and I really enjoyed it. But, quite frankly, it wasn't a great book. The prose was fine, the insights were fine, the organization of the book was fine. It was a pretty good book about a topic that I am extremely interested in. If you are even modestly interested in Sid Meier or early game development, I think you'll find this a worthwhile read. If those topics don't appeal to you, then you should probably look elsewhere.This is not a great piece of literature. It's not Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. If you don't bring an interest for the topic, I don't think you'll find it as you read the book.

I’ve played far too many hours of Civilization throughout my life. If you haven’t, or you’re not an aspiring game designer, then you may find large sections of Sid Meier’s Memoir! hard to appreciate. But I do love Sid Meier’s games and I do dabble in making games as a hobby. So, I really appreciated this memoir that takes you through Meier’s entire career as well as some of his rules of game design that have made him so successful.This book is not a deep dive. Each chapter, which generally covers a game or two, provides some insight about how a game was developed and why it worked (or did not work) for the player. But the chapters are short, and many of them concentrate on just one aspect of the game or Meier’s philosophy. The two things I found most interesting were the inspiration behind each game, and the gameplay rules that Meier learned over time.It’s not a tell-all, and it doesn’t cover much about the video game business. You won’t get a play-by-play about the development of Civilization VI. Meier says that he left much of the business side to his partners. Instead, this is a book about the creative process.Meier touches on enough of his personal life to give you a general outline of his life and some of the real-life hobbies that led to some of his best games. Again, most of the details are left out, but there’s enough there to be inspiring. The thing I found the most surprising in the entire book, is that despite his high position, Meier continued to be an active participant in the programming of his games (or at least the prototypes) late into his career.In short, Sid Meier’s Memoir! is limited in its scope. It’s mainly about game design and the creative process. But it does that well. You won’t quite feel like you’re in the trenches with the team making Civilization, but you will feel like you have a sense of where their head was at. The lessons about game design and the creative process that Meier provides are drawn from deep experience and most seem self-evidently true. The writing is clear and the insights are real. If you loved his games or you want to make games, you should read this book.

I really enjoyed getting a look inside Sid Meier's head and a first hand recap of his career. His positive outlook has a tendency to minimize the conflicts he encountered along the way, making this more of a warm story of a game designer looking for and finding inspiration than a thrilling climb to prominence in an industry. Given the events that unfold, a different person writing could easily have told the latter story, but that's not Sid Meier's style. I liked the humble telling of remarkable events, and especially the perceptive analysis along the way.Overall I found the book inspiring, and I enjoyed reading both his experiences as well as his insights on game design and life.

While I'm very impressed with the success Sid Meier has achieved as a professional game developer, this book is surprisingly bland. I imagine that if you have an intense affection for one or more of his games, it's cool to go "behind the scenes" about what was happening in Sid Meier's life at the time the game came out, but if you're a professional software developer and/or game developer, there is limited value in these pages.I wish this book contained more stories about the challenges Sid and his co-workers had to overcome in creating certain games, or the tools and/or programming languages he used to build games (and why he picked them). It would be cool too to learn about the challenges in porting games from one platform to another.I don't want to give the impression that this book is poorly written; Sid Meier is clearly a real smart guy who loves building and playing video games. I just wish he gave us more of a "behind the scenes / under the hood" look at game development.

This is a well written and concise book about how game development is this slow and not set creative task where ideas come from books as much as other games. Recommend it.

I have been a fan of MicroProse Games and Sid Meier for a long time, and never realized a lot of the MicroProse games were really written by Sid Meier. There is a lot to the history and timelines of the games and Sid's life that I never would have known. In addition, the writing is engaging. Just like his games make me want to play one more turn, the book makes me want to read one more chapter. It is a really fun, enjoyable book.

I loved Sid's games as a child in the 80s and was very happy to have read the book. He comes across as being a really lovely guy. If you ever spent hours and hours and hours building (or trying to build) an Earth-conquering civilization, then you'll enjoy this.

Sid Meier's name is legend to many of us who grew up playing his games. I wasn't sure what to expect from Memoir! but my enjoyment of the book exceeded what I thought I would experience. The book's laid out in chronological order, detailing the games he worked on year-by-year and the surrounding circumstances. There's small deviations in the book around the culture of gaming, development, marketing, and a lot more, but the book never gets preachy or boring. Nor, to Sid's credit, is this a "here's my life, ain't I great" story. There's an underlying humility throughout the book that reflects a man having fun doing what he loves to do.But Sid has always been like that, I suspect. I remember talking to him at several conventions many years ago, and he was engaging and humble then, too. (I was writing articles for a number of computer magazines at the time, and had also published several games [none that anyone would know!]), and it was with trepidation I approached "the legend" (even back then) only to find him fun to talk to, and knowledgeable about the game world in general. This book reflects that story, as well as the journey he took through MicroProse and Firaxis, and the great games he produced along the way. In today's 100-person game development studio world, it's also fun to remember when one developer, and maybe another one or two people, could write a fun game. And that's what gaming is all about, as Sid reminds us many times in Memoir!...it's the fun that matters. This book is fun. If you're into gaming, or were, this is a trip down memory lane. A nice trip.

Fajnie przeczytać historię życia kogoś kto przez lata był synonimem świetnej, pozytywnej rozgrywki w budowanie, przeżywanie przygód i poznawanie świata przedstawionego. Do tego prawie zawsze w nieco innej konwencji, świeżej tematyce, zawsze wykonane ze smakiem i solidnością. Książka pozwala poznać całkiem sporo o życiu prywatnym i młodości Sida, zrozumieć dlaczego tworzył takie a nie inne gry, a także wiele zabawnych faktów i historii. Pokrzepiający dowód na to że gry wideo to wspaniałe hobby dla każdego.

He descubierto que Sid Meier había hecho más juegos de los que yo pensaba y a los que también había jugado hace décadas. Un relato inspirador y un vistazo desde dentro a los primeros días del mundo del desarrollo de lo que ahora llamaríamos juegos indies.

Ich habe dieses Buch spontan ca. 1 Monat vor dem Erscheinungsdatum gekauft, und es nach der Lieferung in zwei - sehr kurzweilig empfundenen - Etappen innerhalb von 24 h ausgelesen. Für alle, die selbst Computerspiele (vielleicht sogar von Microprose) ab dem Beginn der 80er Jahre gespielt haben oder damit zu tun hatten, werden hier viele Erinnerungen an bekannte Spiele-Titel und Namen von damals aus der Branche aufkommen.Das Buch ist in relativ einfachem Englisch geschrieben, so daß auch nicht so geübte damit gut zurecht kommen sollten. Der Autor erzählt auf angenehm unterhaltsame Weise seine und die Geschichte von Microprose, beginnend mit ersten Programmierversuchen zur Schul-/Studienzeit, bis später zu den großen Hits wie Civilization.Ohne jemals in langweilige oder langwierige Belanglosigkeiten abzuschweifen erfährt der Leser hier sehr viel an Hintergrundwissen und bislang schon bekannte Details werden noch ein wenig mehr mit Anekdoten, persönlichen Erinnerungen und Geschichten von 'damals' ergänzt.Für mich ein empfehlenswertes Buch für alle, die schon die 80er Jahre am Computer miterlebt haben, oder die ein wenig mehr von den Anfängen der Spiele-Industrie und über eine der damals prägenden großen Firmen erfahren wollen.