Great article. About 18 years ago at E3 Sid Meier was running a Q&A and I asked why he hadn’t included regressions (like lost technologies and the like) into Ci

Great article. About 18 years ago at E3 Sid Meier was running a Q&A and I asked why he hadn’t included regressions (like lost technologies and the like) into Civilization, even though history is full of examples of them. I believe the answer was ‘it wouldn’t be fun’. Given the stories that emerged since around Civilization’s hasty development (it was a complete oddball project for Microprose and completed on a tight deadline for Christmas season, and wasn’t anticipated to be much of a success), my sense is that it would have taken a lot more time to explore anything other than a simple progress narrative, and likely would have been infeasible. Civ also came out shortly after Railroad Tycoon, which did a great job simulating the progress of rail in the industrial revolution, and its pretty obvious that the game’s mechanics and gameplay were heavily drawn from RT. Sort of like in many science papers how authors overstate the implications of their findings in the conclusion, Civ took the notion of rail progress and applied it to all of human endeavor throughout history.