Sword of the Samurai (haven't played it) looks like an adaptation of Samurai an Avalon Hill (actually bought from another game company whose name escapes me) which itself was essentially Kingmaker reskinned for feudal Japan. Civilization was clearly inspired by Civilization. Pirates! was -- as far as I know -- pretty original (and my favorite of the lot). Covert Action looks awful but I've never played it and hadn't heard of it before looking at the wikipedia list.
Before 1991 (the year the first Civ came out), it's nearly all flight sims, with some original IP (Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Covert Action, Sword of the Samurai) near the end of that run, as he began to grow away from his partner Bill Stealey's focus on flight sims into a designer in his own right.
I remember I gained a ton of interest in medieval Japan from Shogun Total War. No clue how historically accurate it was, but there are a lot of ‘period piece’ games that could really set the tone for a history course (Rome Total War, there’s a bunch for WW2, etc).
Which one? There are at least two different ones, with the same name, based on the computer game franchise. (And, of course, the Avalon Hill game predating the computer game, but that doesn’t seem relevant.)
Call to Power was the result of some fairly convoluted boardroom-slash-courtroom warfare conducted between 1995 and 1998.
In the mid-'90s, legendary boardgame publisher Avalon Hill noticed that MicroProse was doing well with computer games named Civilization, remembered that they had published a board game way back in 1980 with the same name (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_%28board_game%29, https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71/civilization), and observed that their board game and MicroProse's computer games were, at least thematically, similar.
Based on that similarity, AH argued that MicroProse's Civilization games had ripped off their IP. MicroProse and Sid Meier disputed this, with Meier saying he'd never played the board game before designing his Civ, but AH stuck to its guns. Since they'd published the board game, they argued, and since (they asserted) MicroProse's computer game was just a derivative work based on it, all rights to the Civilization name for both board and computer games belonged rightfully to them.
They then licensed the name to Activision to use in developing its own computer Civilization games, to compete directly against MicroProse's in the marketplace. MicroProse responded to this by buying the company owned by the original designer of the board game, Francis Tresham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Tresham_%28game_design...), arguing that if the board game gave anyone claim on the Civilization name it was Tresham, not his publisher AH, and that in acquiring Tresham's company they'd also acquired not just any computer-game rights the board game would confer, but the rights to the board game itself too.
AH was in pretty desperate financial straits by this time, so in 1998 they caved and paid MicroProse $411,000 to settle the dispute, yielding to them all rights to the name and stopping publication of the board game. (See http://home.earthlink.net/~pdr4455/fah.html) MicroProse then gave Activision a limited license to the Civilization name so they could publish their work-in-progress game as Civilization: Call to Power.
Call to Power came out to mediocre-at-best reviews and sank like a stone, ending Activision's dream of taking over the franchise. But MicroProse's victory was short-lived, because their own financial situation by this time wasn't great either; just a couple of months after the Avalon Hill settlement the company was sold to Hasbro, at which point it was more or less dismantled and became just another zombie brand.
Hey Walter, did Sid Meier ever consult you while developing the Civilization series? I recognized a lot of similarities between Civ and Classic Empire when I went back and played the older games in the series.
I've been told by various people that Civilization was inspired by Empire (the first computer god game as far as I know), but I'd like to ask Sid if that is true!
(There's also the older Hammurabi game, but that one has no map.)
I know everyone goes on and on about Civilization but all the simulators from F15/Gunship/etc were my first introduction to his games. I still think Pirates was the real breakthrough. It was an almost sand box game and of course Railroad Tycoon.
Oddly its perhaps my playing of traditional board games usually with others that kept Civilization from taking over my computer gaming at the time
Looks interesting! Also, I like how the RPS review[1] ends with "it actually doesn't have a strong one-more-turn factor, and maybe that's a good thing", because that is actually what has been keeping me away from these games for years now
Sword of the Samurai (haven't played it) looks like an adaptation of Samurai an Avalon Hill (actually bought from another game company whose name escapes me) which itself was essentially Kingmaker reskinned for feudal Japan. Civilization was clearly inspired by Civilization. Pirates! was -- as far as I know -- pretty original (and my favorite of the lot). Covert Action looks awful but I've never played it and hadn't heard of it before looking at the wikipedia list.
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