#195 Sid Meier (Computer game designer)

What I learned from reading Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it. We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. If my gravestone reads "Sid Meier, creator of Civilization" and nothing else, I'll be fine with that. It's a good game to be known for, and I'm proud of the positive impact it's had on so many players' lives. There was no such thing as a retail computer game, only free bits of code passed between hobbyists, so it would have been difficult for me to harbor secret dreams of becoming a professional computer game designer."I could design a better game in two weeks." “Then do it," he insisted, "If you can do it, I can sell it."At the time it felt like a fun project, but not any sort of life-changing decision. The big moments rarely do, I think, and the danger of retroactive mythologizing is that it makes people want to hold out for something dramatic, rather than throwing themselves into every opportunity. —As soon as the articles were published, Bill began placing calls to hobby stores that were farther than driving distance away."Hello, I'm looking to buy a copy of Hellcat Ace."Hmm, I don't think we carry that one""What?" he would fume. "What kind of computer store are you? Didn't you see the review in Antic?" Then he would hang up in a huff, muttering about taking his business elsewhere. A week later he would call again, pretending to be somebody else. And a third time a week after that. Finally, on the fourth week, he'd use his professional voice. "Good afternoon, I'm a representative from MicroProse Software, and I'd like to show you our latest game, Hellcat Ace." Spurred by the imaginary demand, they would invite him in. —My appetite for making games was growing stronger. I never forgot that moment. My mother had become emotionally invested in this little game, so profoundly that she'd had to abandon it entirely. Games could make you feel. If great literature could wield its power through nothing but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color? The potential for emotional interaction through this medium struck me as both fascinating and enticing. Were there people who got paid for making games? Could I be one of those people? I knew by now that I was a person who would make games, probably for the rest of my life, but it had never occurred to me that it could be a source of income. If that were true, then being a game designer seemed like the ideal job. I was cautious about giving up my steady paycheck, and still not convinced that this dream was going to last. Quality content was the driving force behind it all. All that mattered to me was that I got to make games for a living. I don't think any of us could have imagined back then the kind of cultural domination that gaming would someday achieve. Robin Williams pointed out that all the other entertainment industries promoted their stars by name, so why should gaming be any different? A pirate's career would last about forty years between childhood and old age, and his goal was to accomplish as much as he could in that window-to have an adventurous life with no regrets. Life is not a steady progression of objectively increasing value, and when you fail, you don't just reload the mission again. You knock the wet sand off your breeches and return to the high seas for new adventures. And if you happen to get marooned on a deserted island a few times, well, that makes for a good tavern story, too. I'd always had a distaste for business deals in general, simply because it's not the kind of thing I want to spend my day doing, but I was starting to realize that there was potential danger in them as well. People play games to feel good about themselves. Age and experience may bring wisdom, but sometimes it's useful to be a young person who hasn't learned how to doubt himself yet. Sid Meier makes a pathetic Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he makes a magnificent Sid Meier. Deciding what doesn't go into the game is sometimes more important than deciding what does. Conventional wisdom said a strategy title would never make the big money. (Sid sold 51 million copies)They were interacting with the game as a tool, rather than an experience. Good games don't get made by committee. What I didn't see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality; it only heightens it. The dichotomy between someone else's talent and your own is a cause for celebration, because the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other. This is not to say that my version of Civilization had no outside influences—far from it. Aside from the general "creating not destroying" concept I had first encountered in SimCity, there were two games that I very much respected, and blatantly took ideas from to use for my own purposes. The ideas didn't start with us, and they can't end with us either. Whatever it is you want to be good at, you have to make sure you continue to read, and learn, and seek joy elsewhere, because you never know where inspiration will strike. A full 70 percent of Candy Crush Saga users have never paid a dime for the game yet it still brings in several million dollars a day. So many of our wildest dreams have turned out to be laughably conservative that it's hard to write off anything as impossible. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  A billion hours ago, Neanderthals were making spearheads in a stone age. A billion hours from now, it'll be the year 116,174 A.D. With a billion hours to play with, you could make roughly 13,000 round trips to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light. Or you could spend it all playing Sid Meier's Civilization, so I'm told. One billion hours is the sort of number that is humbling to the point of incomprehensibility, and it is a wildly conservative estimate at that. The game distribution service Steam only began collecting player data in earnest within the last decade, and 1 billion is actually the number of hours played on Civilization

• 0:44David Senra?

  V from its release in 2010 up through 2016. A six-year window into one game in a series that spans 29 years and 12 additions, not to mention the expansion packs. To imagine the hours devoted to all the incarnations of Civilization since 1991 is, well, incomprehensible. I wouldn't want to try. What's more, any fair assessment of Civilization's success would have to include all the other games I've crafted along the way, including titles like Pirates and Railroad Tycoon, which were popular series in their own right, but also overlooked projects that started strong

• 1:28David Senra?

  but fizzled early, because sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. Each game taught me something. Each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it. What follows is a largely chronological examination of all the games I've produced over my lifetime, from the wildly successful to the completely unheard of. Whether they took a billion lines of code or less than 100, there is one thing every game in this book has in common: they are fundamentally comprised, as all games are, of a series of interesting decisions.

• 2:12David Senra?

  We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. Interesting might be subject to personal taste, to some degree, but the gift of agency, that is, the ability of players to exert free will over their surroundings rather than obediently following a narrative, is what sets games apart from other media. Without a player's input, there can be no game. I'm often asked in interviews when I got interested in games, usually with the implied hope that I'll identify a moment in my childhood when I suddenly knew I was a game designer. But from my perspective, there was no turning point. I never made the conscious decision to embrace gaming, because as far as I can tell, gaming

• 2:57David Senra?

  already is the default, straightforward path. Not only does this span a billion hours of history, ancient Sumerians were throwing dice as early as 5,000 B.C., and cruder games almost certainly go back as far as the Neanderthals, but it's a deeply embedded human instinct. Everyone starts out life as a gamer, and I was no different. First, I laughed at peekaboo, then I lined up toy soldiers, then I played board games, then I made fun computer programs. To me, it seems like the most logical progression in the world. The question, "When did you start?", would be better framed as, "Why didn't you stop?" But even then, I won't have a good answer.

• 3:38David Senra?

  I find it mind-boggling that a life spent dedicated to gaming is the exception rather than the rule. If my gravestone reads, Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, and nothing else, I'll be fine with that. It's a good game to be known for, and I'm proud of the positive impact it's had on so many players' lives. But it won't be the whole story. This is the whole story.

• 4:06David Senra?

  That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Sid Meier's Memoir by the creator of Civilization: A Life in Computer Games, and it was written by Sid Meier. And this is another example of a book that I would have never found if it wasn't for you guys. This actually was a recommendation from a misfit named R. Nate Lockwood. And it was absolutely fantastic read. I'm going to read the back because I think there's a blurb that gives you a good insight into what you might get out of reading this book. It says, "If you ever wish you could stay up all night and hear the most amazing stories from one of the most creative people, Sid's memoir is for you. This book is full of incredible technology history and deep insights into what it takes to make a world-class game. But most of all, I loved getting inside Sid's brain and seeing things from his inventive and wise point of view." And that's what I feel like when I get to the end of the book.

• 4:51David Senra?

  Okay, I just had this one-sided conversation with this gifted person. The conversation probably took 10 or 15 hours, where he's just distilling all the main lessons that he learned in his multiple-decade career. Let me read the inside flap, because when I got the recommendation, I checked out the product page on Amazon. This really drew me to it. It says, "Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular video games, including Sid Meier's Civilization," which, this is what blew my mind, "which has sold more than 51 million units and accumulated more than a billion hours of play." We know that number's way, way higher than that. Sid Meier's memoir is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry.

• 5:33David Senra?

  They consider him, he's called the godfather of computing gaming. "Writing with warmth and ironic humor, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio," his company that he founded was Micropros, "which was founded in 1982 after a trip," imagine making, this is another thing that's going to blow your mind about this book, "making computer games in 1982. It's just bananas." "Founded in 1982 after a trip to the Las Vegas Arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games from vintage classics like Pirates and Railroad Tycoon to Civilization and Beyond." Articulating his philosophy that a video game should be a series of interesting decisions, which he was just echoing, or I guess introducing, rather, in the introduction, this idea that that's what he defines a game as. It's a series of interesting decisions, and how he thinks that there's a lot of lessons

• 6:18David Senra?

  that you learn from games that you can apply to life. And none of that to company building. I was listening to the founder of Shopify, Tobey Luque, talk. And he says he learned more, he learned how to build companies by playing Starcraft. On how to, essentially, it's a game of resource allocation is his description of it. So it says Meyer also shares his perspective on the history of the industry, the psychology of gamers, fascinating insights into the creative process, and including his rules of good game design. Okay, so let's start out in 1982. He is 28 at the time. He's working as a systems analyst. And the really interesting part about this whole section is the fact that when he starts

• 6:59David Senra?

  out designing games, he's just designing them for fun, and then eventually realizes, hey, I would love to make a living at this. There was no such thing as a retail computer game when Sid started. So he's at the very, very beginning of this industry. And he says, "I'm not a fan of viewing the past as some inevitable march to destiny." At the time, it didn't feel that way at all. So now he's, you know, he's writing this book as a man in his 60s, looking back at the mindset he had when he was in his late 20s, when he stumbled upon what was going to be his life's work and his greatest passion. She says, "I began my career as a systems analyst, installing networked cash register systems in retail stores. Working with computers was satisfying, and I was grateful to have what amounted to a

• 7:43David Senra?

  very good job for a recent graduate." That's another thing Sid's writing. First of all, it's really fun to read the book. He applies like this game designer philosophy in reading, so it's very simple, it speeds along really rapidly. He has all these fun things where it's like, oh, achievement unlocked, you get to certain parts of the book. But what I liked about Sid is he's got a completely optimistic perspective on life. And I think a lot of his optimism is rooted in gratitude, even before he was, what he calls being a game designer, "the best job in the world." And even before he had the, what he called "the best job in the world," he's like, listen, I just love computers, I was glad to do anything. You know, maybe he wasn't very interested. Listen to his description, "I was installing networked cash register systems in retail stores." Probably not passionate about that, but hey, I'm thankful. I have a job working in computers and able to pay my bills.

• 8:27David Senra?

  And so I think that's a lesson we learned right from the very first chapter. The importance of gratitude and how you can change your perspective on how you look at things. And thus, you can change on your enjoyment or your misery that you get out of life. I wasn't desperate to unleash my creativity on the world or even thinking very hard about the future of the industry. At best, you could call it a state of ignorant bliss. There was no such thing as a retail computer game. Only free bits of code passed between hobbyists. So it would have been difficult for me to harbor secret dreams of becoming a professional computer game designer. There was no such thing at that point. And so he gets into, okay, well, how did I wind up becoming a game designer? So he's working for this company called General Instrument.

• 9:07David Senra?

  They're having like this company-wide, I guess, get-together or seminar in Las Vegas. And so it's a pretty big company. He's sitting down, I think they're at a bar of some sort, and this guy he doesn't know, vaguely kind of familiar to him, but they work for the same company, but they don't work in the same department. And this is going to be his future co-founder. And so the note I left myself on this page is "meeting the perfect co-founder." And I think that's another main lesson in the book. Because Bill, which is going to be his co-founder, is a super-aggressive, former Air Force pilot, like, master salesman. And Sid is an introvert. He's an introvert that likes people, but he prefers, you know, just, he likes working with computers, he likes working alone.

• 9:49David Senra?

  He will be making the, you don't have to motivate him to make the game, so he'll do that on his own. But as far as selling the games, this is where Bill, they just, they go together like chocolate and peanut butter. So it says, "Bill was a reserve Air Force pilot who had fought his way into the program despite wearing glasses. And he was proud of his training, that he, he was so proud of his training, that he printed Fighter Pilot Supreme on his business cards." This guy is a wild dude. So he talks about, they're just, they're just kind of making small talk from two people that don't really know each other. "I managed to offer up the fact that I've been programming an airplane game in my spare time." Bill had said he recently purchased an Atari 800 home computer. He had gotten it to play a new game called Star Raiders. And then he says, a very important sentence in The Life of Sid Meier, "I really want

• 10:34David Senra?

  to get into selling games," he said. "This is the future." Remember, it's 1982. "I told him that I actually just sold my first game to a small publisher named Acorn Software." Again, he didn't, he was just doing this for fun. What he was doing on the side, did not think of it as a career. Oh, suddenly Bill looked very keen. "We should start a business."

• 10:53David Senra?

  So they wind up going around, they're talking the whole night. They go to an arcade and Bill's like, you know, I'm a pilot. They wind up playing a World War I flight simulator. The game is called Red Baron. So Bill goes first. He's like, look how good I am. And then Sid gets on and kind of kicks Bill's ass. So he says, this was my turn to play. Then it was my turn to play. How did you do that? Bill sputtered, staring wide eyed at a final score that was roughly double his own. I'm an actual pilot. How could you have possibly beaten me? I shrugged. While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms. You did what? I'm a programmer, I reminded him. The AI of the enemy planes is very predictable. I could design a better game in two weeks. Then do it, he insisted. If you can do it, I can sell it.

• 11:38David Senra?

  And there's that one sentence completely summarizes their partnership in the very beginning of their business, which is going to be a wildly successful business. If you can do it, I can sell it. And so we began. At the time, it felt more like a fun project. Remember, he started out the section saying, I don't believe in viewing the past as some inevitable march to destiny. His whole thing is that, one, I learned something and it led me to a next experience. I learned something else. I just kept building it over for an extremely long career. And in the introduction, he talks about that. Every game that I made influenced the next game I made. So he sees his career as a series of not only interesting experiences, but interesting decisions and taking what he learned and applying it to the next project.

• 12:21David Senra?

  I think it's a huge part that he's trying to convey to the reader in this book. So he says, at the time, it felt just like a fun project, but not any sort of life-changing decision. The note left myself, I should have read to you earlier, a life-changing moment that doesn't feel that way at the time. The big moments rarely do, I think, and the dangers of retroactive mythologizing is what makes it, oh, this is so important, I underline this twice. What are you about to say here? All right, so he says, "The big moments rarely feel like life-changing at the time." Okay? "And the danger of retroactive mythologizing is that it makes people want to hold out for something dramatic, rather than throwing themselves into every opportunity." So that is what Sid did. He threw himself into every opportunity.

• 13:03David Senra?

  Again, what he wound up dedicating his career to didn't even exist when he was a kid, when he was in college, when you're thinking about, "Hey, what do you all want to do with my life?" He just trusted the fact that, "Hey, if I could throw myself in every opportunity, I'm a lifelong learner." He talks about that over and over again, and then just trusted that the path will reveal itself. "The reality is, I've been fiddling around with game programming for years by then." And then I double underline this next sentence. "The first step is almost always to sit down and start working." And so now he goes into the process. "Okay, well, I just said I could do a better game. Bill helped me to it, said, 'Hey, you do it, I'll sell it.'" And then he talks about really thinking of himself as he's extremely, it's extremely

• 13:45David Senra?

  important to him to build great, to do great work, to build, to use Steve Jobs' word, insanely great products. And so he's looking at all the other fighter, like simulation fighter pilot games at the time. And he says, "There's a pretty big gulf between better and best." Remember, he says, "I could design a better game in two weeks." There's a gulf between better and best. "And I always wanted to be on the far side of it." He wanted to make the very best games, not only for his own personal, his own professional pride, but he wanted other people to think, to say, "Hey, Sid's games are fantastic." And that's another thing, it's gonna be, it's gonna blow your mind, because I didn't, Robin Williams is gonna make a cameo in this book.

• 14:30David Senra?

  But all of Sid's games, almost all of them, are, they start with his name. So his name, he talks about the difference between, "Hey, I'm Sid Meyers a person," but then there's Sid Meyers a brand. And so what winds up happening is he creates such great games. They start putting his name on all the games. So people know, oh, wait, I played Pirates. I like that. I'll play Civilization, or I'll play this game. And so not only, again, he wants professional pride, his work to be admired. Other people, his peers and everybody else say, hey, he's really good at what he does. But then it becomes almost like an obligation because all the games start with his name. So it has to have a certain level of quality. When I finally decided the game was ready as it could be, I handed it over to Bill. And this is an important part, too. And a day later, he returned it to me with a list of bugs and military inaccuracies.

• 15:14David Senra?

  That was when I knew that this partnership could really go somewhere. What an interesting surprise, right? Some people don't like criticism. We just saw, was it the last episode, two episodes ago? I can't remember. The Arnold Schwarzenegger autobiography that covers the first 30 years of his life, where he's like, no, no, you want to know your weaknesses. Where he went so extreme, he hired a professional photographer to take pictures of him every month and then looked at the pictures with a magnifying glass to find any imperfections. That is very similar mindset that Sid has. In fact, when he talks about the people that he worked best with, where the people even later on, he talks about, hey, I became super famous in this industry. It was hard to find people that gave me honest feedback. They're like, hey, you're great. But essentially, he's saying, you've got to be wary of having a bunch of yes men, right? That he's mentoring all these people, they're supposed to be helping him with the quality

• 15:59David Senra?

  of the game, but they kind of idolize him. Where he works best with people that give him honest feedback. They're not trying to hurt his feelings, they're just saying, hey, this could be better. And so you can think about that the same way that Arnold says, hey, constantly identify your weaknesses and improve them. And so that's what Bill's doing here at the very, they don't even have a company yet. This is the very beginning. That was when I knew the partnership could really go somewhere. Bill wasn't looking to make a quick buck on something he didn't understand. He was as invested in the game quality as I was. And this is the beginning. So with $1,500 in savings, we bought a stack of floppy disks, a package of label stickers, and a box of plastic baggies to put them in. That's how you sold games at this time. This was standard packaging back then, even for professional releases.

• 16:43David Senra?

  No one would have thought to waste an entire cardboard box on just a disk and a half sheet of instructions. So there is a lot of similarities. And the reason I wanted to read this book, too, is because I love video games. I love them so much that I have to stay away from them because I have an addictive personality. And I want to direct all my addictive personality to reading and making podcasts right now. And I know I am, you know, invested in games. I've been playing video games as if I'm like a tiny kid, a little kid. So right now, it was like, they're too addicting. They're too good right now. I have to stay away from them. But the reason I was excited to read this book, too, and apart from my own personal interest, is one of my favorite books that I've read for the podcast. If you want to think about like, what book I've stolen so many ideas from. It's Masters of Doom.

• 17:27David Senra?

  It's about John Romero and John Carmack. It's founder's number 21. If you haven't gone back and not only read the book, because it's fantastic, but listened to that podcast as well. And it's all about, like, they start out making, they're indie game developers, very much like Sid. And in that book, what blew my mind is what he's talking about here, what Sid's talking about here. It's in Masters of Doom, it's called Ziploc Bag Distribution. And here's a line from Masters of Doom about that. It says, "Ken and Roberta Williams," this blew my mind when I read this. And I've read the book, what, two or three years? And I never forgot it. It says, "Ken and Roberta Williams, a young married couple in Northern California, pioneered

• 18:06David Senra?

  the Ziploc distribution method, turning their homemade graphical role-playing games into a $10 million a year company, which they called Sierra Online." So exactly what Ken and Roberta Williams are doing, what John Carmack and John Romero were doing, is exactly what Sid's doing here. It's like, hey, I made a game. He had physical copies of the game in a floppy disk. I put them in a Ziploc bag, and that's how I sell it to you. And I think not only is this book an example of that, but especially Masters of Doom. I think every entrepreneur should, or anybody that wants to do something creative or interesting should read that book, because there's tons of ideas that they wind up using that are applied. Like, I'm taking some of their ideas from video games and trying to apply it to podcasts,

• 18:51David Senra?

  for example. They just have a lot. It's very, very interesting, the trial and error and the way they took ideas from different industries. Because even Doom, for example, right? There was an industry called shareware, where people would essentially release games for free, right? And this is most, not games, sorry. Let me back up. I'm not being clear. Shareware started out as like, business applications for free. Try it, download it. If you like it, send me a check. And they tried to do, they tried to take that idea for games. People would download the game and not send any money. And then they start altering that idea to the point where they would release, like in Doom's case, one of the most famous video games ever. They built it themselves with a relatively small team.

• 19:33David Senra?

  They released it for free online and said, hey, you can play the first 15 levels. If you want the next, let's say, 45 levels or 30 levels, whatever it is, this is how, you know, send us money and you can download the rest. Or I can't, I think it was a download. I can't remember if it was a download or actually a disk. But anyways, less than like, I want to say 1%, 2%, something like that, some number like that, actually, of the people that played the game, wind up buying the rest of the levels. And these guys were in their early twenties at the time, and Doom was bringing in $100,000 a day after the release. And they were, I don't think they had very, very limited expenses because they all lived in a house together, if I remember correctly. Remember, you know, I'm going off memory from several years ago, but they all lived

• 20:17David Senra?

  in a house, and I think there was like six people in the entire company. So again, we see this on a different level, a much smaller level, with Sid's first game in 1982. Now, he's eventually going to build large games, but he says even towards the end of the book that he's at his heart and soul, he still considers, he still prefers indie development. But Civilization, that multiple part, you know, 20, 25, 30-year game, like, they kept adding different, kept extending, rather. You know, that's, he says there might be, he's like, it might not even be an exaggeration, there might be a billion lines of code in there, like, it's a, it's a massive, it winds up turning into a massive endeavor with all kinds of programmers and designers and everything

• 21:00David Senra?

  else because of the popularity, but he does have like a soul of an indie developer. And at the very beginning, they're very happy just to sell a couple hundred games a month, which is what the next section I'm going to read to you. "In the beginning, the sales calls Bill's made were based mostly on convenience. If he had a business trip out of town, he'd walk from the train to the nearest computer store and try to sell a few copies. On weekends, he'd load a box of this, I love this level of entrepreneurship." The fact that they're selling their product out of the trunk of their car. There's a line, there's a song by Nas where he talks about this. There's a lot of, there was a lot of independent musicians and independent rappers especially. And it's not just for, in hip hop, it's all different genres, especially in the South, like Tennessee and everywhere else, where they would sell their music out of the trunk

• 21:45David Senra?

  of their car. And then they would take the proceeds and they'd keep, they'd keep reinvesting in the company. And then eventually they went up being, have mainstream hits, but yet they owned all their masters, they owned their entire music, which is extremely rare, was extremely rare back then, it's becoming more common now. But I just love that level of entrepreneurship. Hey, I'm gonna start out, I have something people want, they're not quitting their jobs. We see this at nighttime in a weekend hustle. And they're like, I'm just gonna sell the back of the trunk of my car. So he says, "On weekends, he'd load a box of discs into the trunk of his car and drive as far as he could, as he could on 985, coming back just in time for Monday morning meetings at his day job. Then, late one evening, my phone rang. Sid, I think we might be onto something here. Bill, where are you? New Jersey. We just sold 50 copies of Hellcat Ace.

• 22:30David Senra?

  Hey, that's great. Yeah, he said. So start copying." And this is what I loved about this book too, because Sid is constantly comparing and contrasting the level of technology in his day when he got started comparing to now. So he literally has to copy them, one at a time. "Each individual sale back then translated to about 60 seconds of boredom in front of my matched pair of floppy drives, making copies of the game one by one." So eventually, their game gets enough attention that it started being reviewed in some of these, like, gaming magazines and publications at the time. And Bill comes up with a really funny and really effective early sales technique. Remember, they're still, this is not really a company, they're just selling a couple hundred

• 23:15David Senra?

  a month, they're just trying to do whatever they can. And so this is what Bill does. "As soon as the articles were published, Bill began placing calls to hobby stores that were farther away than, than he could drive. Hello, I'm looking to buy a copy of Hellcat Ace. Hmm, I don't think we carry that one. What? He would fume. What kind of computer store are you? Didn't you see the review in Antic or any other magazine?" Then he would hang up in a huff, muttering about taking his business elsewhere. A week later, he would call again, pretending to be somebody else. And a third time a week after that. Finally, on the fourth week, he'd use his professional voice. "Good afternoon, I'm a representative for MicroPro Software, and I'd like to show you our latest game, Hellcat Ace."

• 23:56David Senra?

  Spurred by the imaginary demand, they would invite him in. So it's during this year, he starts making several, I think he makes three games during 1982. And during his, he starts to release them, just like his initial beta testers are just his fellow coworkers. And the important part of this section is that if you have like this small initial success or small initial traction, it can really light a fire in you and kind of believe, okay, hey, wait a minute, this actually might be possible. So he says, "Initially, I posted the game to only a few interested coworkers. But within a few days, it seemed like everyone had heard of it. The company network began to drag, and small beeps ricocheted throughout the halls as a sort of work abandonment klaxon of shame.

• 24:39David Senra?

  Eventually, the drain on productivity became too significant to ignore, and I was told to delete the game. My coworkers were understandably disappointed, but I wore that band with pride. It was an objective measure of how good the game must have been. It did leave me with a problem, however. My appetite for making games was growing stronger. But if I couldn't program in the office anymore, where could I do it?" And he had good timing, because not only at the same time his appetite for making games is growing, he gets kicked out of being able to develop in the office. Atari, which way back on Founder's Number 36, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and

• 25:22David Senra?

  Chuck E. Cheese, and the mentor of Steve Jobs, he actually hired an 18 or 19-year-old Steve Jobs to work at Atari. His, actually, that book that he wrote, the autobiography, is called Finding the Next Steve Jobs. But Atari makes a game, they just released a computer, rather, that is made so you can make games on. So Sid winds up buying that, and then starts producing a lot of games. He lets his mom play one of these games. And this is something we saw, it was a few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago, in that book about the guy that ran MGM Studios, Louis B. Mayer, I think he was like Founder's Number 173. In that book, it talks about like the very beginning of the movie industry, how it was just black and white and then no sound.

• 26:04David Senra?

  And then they started playing movies with sound. And what Louis B. Mayer realized, because he saw the reaction of the audience, like they would start gasping when they heard sound in a movie theater for the first time. They would cry, they would laugh. In other words, the movies are now evoking emotion. And so Louis B. Mayer went all in. When the other people, the people that are invested in silent movies, I forgot the actual term for them, but the people that were producing the movies that didn't have sound in them were like, oh, no, the sound is just a fad. Don't worry about it. And Louis is like, no, no, no, I'm going all in on this because the fact that our customers are now crying and laughing. If you have a product that evokes emotion, those products win. Right? And Louis understood that 100 years ago. And so we see the same thing.

• 26:49David Senra?

  We see Sid's coming to the same realization here because his mom's flipping out at this game. She's not even a gamer. She starts playing this game and she's getting so tense because suddenly she dropped the controller and turned her face away. She told me she couldn't play anymore. Her heart was racing and it was all too much. I never forgot that moment. My mother had become emotionally invested in this little game so profoundly that she had to abandon it entirely. Games were not just a diversion, I realized. Games could make you feel. And I love how he compares gaming to other things like movies and novels and everything else. And so he says, "If great literature could wield its power through nothing but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color?

• 27:32David Senra?

  The potential for emotional interaction through this medium struck me as both fascinating and enticing." But then he's talking about this, like, I want to do this, but where are the people who got paid for making games? Could I be one of those people? I knew by now that I was a person who could make games, probably for the rest of my life, but it never occurred to me that it could be a source of income. If that were true, then being a game designer seemed like the ideal job. And so he still talks about the fact that, you know, when he's invited to give talks, people always want to talk about the past and he's very thankful for that. But he's like, I still make games today. And it's like, I'm going to do this till I die. And so he talks about the difficulty.

• 28:15David Senra?

  You know, I'll never top Civilization. You know, I sell 50 million copies of whatever game I'm doing now, but I do still like to do this. And I would like your attention on that. So I thought that was interesting that he brings that up. I was neither a boisterous salesman nor a self-promoter. And though I knew it was counter, even though I knew that was counterproductive to my own goals. So another way you can think about that sentence he just said, he's identifying his weaknesses, right? So it's like, okay, I'm not boisterous salesman. I'm not a self-promoter. I'm kind of the guy in the background, just I'm the craftsman in the background, right? I had useful knowledge that others didn't have, and I would have to rely on those who had knowledge of my knowledge, who could be my link to the non-programming world. People like my future partner, Bill.

• 28:58David Senra?

  And again, I just, I know I repeated that, think it's very important, identify the weaknesses. And then, hey, if I can't strengthen those weaknesses, find people that already have that, that your weakness is their strength. Bill is gonna sell, he's a master salesman. Sid is not. Let me just team up with this guy and we can actually build a company together. I'm fast forwarding in this, in the story, but then again, I want to hit on this part that small initial success can cause you to believe it is possible. You can't accomplish anything until you actually think it's possible. That's the first step. And so the fact that he's having these people are playing his games, his mom's freaking out, his coworkers are freaking out, Bill's selling 500 copies a month, he's like, all right, I'm gonna do this. Gaming had its hooks embedded in me. I now believed that I could, that I myself could be a game designer.

• 29:39David Senra?

  According to my short autobiography at the end of Formula One Racing Manual, this is a book that he did, this enterprising 28-year-old with exactly one professional title under his belt had two dreams in life. So now he's going back as a mid-'60s man and looking back what his 28-year-old self wrote in the manual for his first game. One, I want to develop a music composition system, which I eventually did and it flopped. And number two, the other was to write the ultimate strategy game. That is Civilization, that is the one that sells 51 million copies. Okay, so they have some success selling these games. And it says, "Bill and I were almost selling 500 games a month.

• 30:23David Senra?

  I had just churned out my fourth title. The next step, as Bill saw it, was to broaden our audience by porting all of our games onto other systems." Now, at this point, he's going to be working, well, I don't actually need to run over the point, let me just read it to you. "Though we technically doubled our workforce, because they're porting to other systems, MicroPros was still a nights and weekends operation out of our homes." Now, Bill sees the potential before Sid does, that's very fascinating. And he's also, I would say Sid's more cautious, but it was a little wild. "Bill decided it was time for him to leave General Instrument and work full-time at MicroPros. There was no realistic way for him to increase his efforts at the company otherwise. But I was more cautious about giving up my steady paycheck and still not convinced that this dream was going to last.

• 31:07David Senra?

  Our philosophy had always been to avoid loans and venture capital, and it would only take a couple of months of slow sales to drag us under. I decided it would be more prudent for me to go half-time, spending two days a week at the new MicroPros office space and three days a week at my day job." So he finds a way to compromise, to have a safety net, but I can also dedicate more hours of my week to making this company successful. Let me skip ahead to how they wind up, they wind up analyzing the retail game market, which is starting to grow little by little at this time. And they're like, "Okay, well, how can we rapidly accelerate sales? Instead of, you know, I'm just, I'm calling up, I'm doing prank calls to gaming retailers,

• 31:52David Senra?

  I'm selling things out of the trunk of my car, like, how can we speed this up?" And so what they realize is, like, the retail game market at the time, you have to put yourself into a spot where a buyer can notice you. And why is that important? Because the buying of new games was outsourced by the retailers. So it says, "There was no middle ground in the retail market. At the bottom were the mom-and-pop stores, these are the ones they're calling, trying to, you know, go door-to-door essentially sell. And directly above them were the national outlets, so that's the ones they're trying to penetrate. Upward mobility came all at once or not at all." And so this is where they come up with a good idea. The national chains didn't decide for themselves what products to carry. Instead, they leased out their shelf space to professional distributors, who would sign their own contracts with individual game companies.

• 32:36David Senra?

  And he compares this to the music industry, like recording agents looking for the next big act. To get the attention we needed, Bill said we had to get ourselves to CES. This is the Consumer Electronics Show. This is 1984. And he says, you know, it's a big show, but it's like more than twice as big today. So they wind up setting up a booth with a demo. A lot of buyers are there. They wind up signing a couple of distribution deals. Now, this was actually really, really smart. And I'm surprised, I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but it takes a lot of, like, you have to know why you're doing what you're doing to turn down a deal like this, because they don't have a lot of money at this time. So you have distributors that want to say, OK, for a cut, I'm going to put you in a retail store, right?

• 33:18David Senra?

  But then you also have people coming around, other game development companies, and some distributors saying, hey, we're not going to do a royalty-based deal with you. Just sell me the entire game, and then I'll recoup any upside. Essentially, they're saying, I'm going to buy your game, but all the upside is mine. So what Sid and Bill did that was smart is like, they always wanted to maintain ownership. And they realized instinctively that it's a good idea not to cap the upside. And imagine him selling the Civilization series. Maybe you sell for a million dollars, you think you're rich, but he goes on to sell 51 million copies, and all the upside goes to the person that bought it, right? So he wants to avoid that. Partnership was not the same as ownership. And Bill and I had been clear about staying on our side of the equation. Rather than a stake in the company, or rather than a stake in the company, meaning buy

• 34:01David Senra?

  into micropros, our ongoing royalties, however, there's this company called Heesware. Heesware wanted to pay us a flat $250,000 to buy the game in its entirety and then sell it as their own. On one hand, long-term sales of Solo Flight, that's the game, might surpass Heesware's offer, especially now that we had distributor deals on the table. On the other hand, we were still running on a very tight budget, and with me not even able to work full-time. So he turned down this deal, and he's not even working full-time. This is really, really hard to do, but really smart move. A large injection of cash, because they're going to wind up selling hundreds of thousands of copies. A large injection of cash would help us significantly and keep us afloat if the game turned out to be a bust. But I gave Bill the only advice I had to offer.

• 34:45David Senra?

  This is so important. If you believe you have something special, then you should treat it that way. If you believe you have something special, then you should treat it that way. I heard you shouldn't sell the family jewels, I said. It turned out to be the right decision. And so when I got to that section, there's two examples that, one I've already covered on the podcast, one I will cover in the future. Akio Morita, founder of Sony, and Ralph Lauren. Both did the same thing that Sid did here. Akio Morita, his dream is like, I'm going to build a company that not only is Sony going to be world renowned, but it's going to, at the time, Japan had a reputation for making crappy products. And so he put his mission not to make Sony special, Sony, he picked a mission bigger in his company. So it's not like, I don't want to just make Sony successful.

• 35:27David Senra?

  I want to make the reputation for Japanese products better. And so he winds up at the, in the early days of Sony, I forgot what, what, what product it was, but one of the early products, he meets with like a large department store. They say, we love it, we'll take 100,000 units. And Akio Morita could not believe it. He's like, oh my God, millions and millions of dollars that his company did not have. But the, the, the catch was, we're not going to sell it for Sony with the Sony name, we're going to put our name. So essentially you're going to be our house brand, right? And Akio Morita says, no, like, I'm not doing that. And then he gets chastised by the buyer. He's like, how dare you say no to us? We're a company that's been around for decades. We have a well-known brand.

• 36:11David Senra?

  You're just a, you know, fly by the nothing. And Akio Morita's like, yeah, but I won't be forever. And one day my company will be as well-known as your company. And so he turned down that huge offer. Same thing. I haven't done the biography of Ralph Lauren yet, but I will in the future. But he, in very early in his career, he knew he wanted to have the Ralph Lauren brand. I think one of the first things he sold was ties. And it was like a Bloomingdale's kind of store. And they're like, we love your ties, Ralph. We're going to buy them. Here's the catch. You're going to make them, we're going to put our name on them. And he didn't have a lot of money, had no, there was no Ralph Lauren to speak of. And he said, no, I'm not here to make your brand better. I'm making my brand. And so even when he didn't have money, just like Akio Morita, just like Sid, he turned that down because he knew why he was doing what he was doing.

• 36:56David Senra?

  And so this pays off. They wind up selling a boatload of solo flight. And it says, "A few months after signing the solo flight deal, Bill said the words I've been waiting to hear: Sid, we're making enough money. You can quit your day job." "What started out as a labor of love, now finally qualified as a legitimate labor that we all happen to love." Remember, this is something me and you have been talking about over and over again. Find work that feels like play. Work that feels like play. No one can compete with you if what you're doing today feels like play to you and it feels like work to them. And this is the most important part of this entire section. Quality. Quality content, in this case, his games. Quality was the driving force behind it all.

• 37:39David Senra?

  A few pages later, this one sentence, this is what I call a one-sentence story. And again, another illustration of that idea, find work that feels like play. "All that mattered to me was that I got to make games for a living." So I want to go back and reference Masters of Doom, podcast number 21. How do you have two partners, a small company, making tons of money? Two partners are running it, it's John Romero, John Carmack. They wind up breaking up. Why are they breaking up? Because Sid, John Carmack, was very similar to what Sid says here. What did Sid say? "All that mattered to me was that I got to make good games for a living." There's a quote from Masters of Doom that I never forgot. As Carmack put it shortly after their breakup, Romero wants an empire.

• 38:22David Senra?

  "I just want to make good programs." Because Carmack found work that felt like play. Sid just wants to make video games? Carmack just wants to make video games. I don't need to have an empire. And in that case, I mean, it's almost like you have a mini empire because the games are so profitable. Doom was making so much money. So that book, there's a lot. Again, I just highly recommend everybody read that book because there's just a lot of lessons on how to make a product, how to market it. There's lessons on distribution, on pricing, but also what happens? We see this over and over again. Having a co-founder is like being married. And most marriages end in divorce. Same thing with co-founders. And you see, they had an empire and they broke apart. So again, if you could read that and kind of learn from their experiences, maybe you can avoid those pitfalls in the future. I think that's where the value is.

• 39:07David Senra?

  This was something interesting, reminds me of Claude Hopkins. I think this is Founder's Number 170. I don't have it in front of me. Claude Hopkins may be the greatest copywriter of all time. He wound up working from home, just with a typewriter, and made like the equivalent of like $4 million a year because his words induced people to buy the products of his clients, right? And one of the two things I learned from Claude Hopkins, that he influenced other people like David Ogilvie later on, but the more you tell, the more you sell, right? And number two, start with service. And there's just two quick sentences, and it's about, you really see Sid's love for what he's doing. So it says, "One of the things that Micropro's was famous was for our game manuals, which

• 39:48David Senra?

  over time became as long and informative as textbooks." The manual for the game, the more he sells, the more he tells. He's putting all kinds of information of the game. Again, some people won't read it, maybe a lot of people won't read it, but the people that do read it will have a fundamentally deeper appreciation for your game. Just like with me, when I, as I started reading these biographies and autobiographies of people, like if their company is still around, I find myself more likely to spend money at their company. I've been, ever since I did Trader Joe's, I've always shot the Trader Joe's, but now I don't know if I've been to another grocery store since I've done that book, because I'm like, wow, this guy really loved what he did. And reading that book, spending 10 or 15 hours having a one-sided conversation with

• 40:31David Senra?

  him, now I'm going to go to Trader Joe's, I'm like, wow, I can really appreciate his philosophy and all the work. It took him, what, two decades to finally, or a decade and a half, to finally figure out what his company was supposed to be. And so I think what Sid's doing here is really smart. He's like, listen, I'm pouring all these game manuals, yeah, you might not read it, but what Claude said, the more you tell, the more you sell. You see this guy clearly cares, and then start with service. And he said, I'm like, you know, people are like, why are you doing this? And one sentence here, "We just wanted to be helpful." Okay, so I'm fast forwarding the story. Obviously, if you want the whole story, you've got to read the book. But there is-- he's making more games, and they're selling very, very well. So the game went over to sell over 250,000 copies.

• 41:15David Senra?

  I wish we could-- he's talking about he had to fix the game in the development process. But I'm going to-- what he's saying here is going to sound very similar to what we just learned from Johnny Ive a few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago, in his biography. "I wish I could sum up how we fixed it, but the math is long, complicated, and boring. The important thing to note is that it wasn't a lightning bolt solution. But dozens of incremental-- this is so important-- not a lightning bolt, dozens of incremental changes, many of which we couldn't take credit for. We had to find ways to do our job better, but we also had to take advantage of other people who were doing their jobs better. New technology, new compression algorithms, new ways to implement standard subroutines. Gaming is a collaborative effort, and it is silly to think that any one person can

• 42:00David Senra?

  claim all the glory." And so from the Johnny Ive biography, they talk about innovation a lot, like, how are you making innovative products? And I can't remember if it was a direct quote or if this is the author, but it says, innovation-- I'm pretty sure it's a direct quote-- "Innovation is rarely about a big idea. More usually, it's a series of small ideas brought together in new and better ways." So let's use that definition of innovation one more time. "Innovation is rarely about a big idea. More usually, it's a series of small ideas brought together in new and better way." That is exactly what Sid just said in that paragraph. And the fact that he was able to bring up a series of small ideas together in a new and better way winds up leading to one game, and they're making several games, that sold

• 42:41David Senra?

  250,000 copies before the internet. That's insane. Another common theme that we see over and over again in these biographies, you're going to be misunderstood by the outside world. When he starts doing this, gaming, if you say, "I'm going to be a game designer today," it's like, "Oh, that makes plenty of sense. That makes a lot of sense, right? Massive industry, growing rapidly. It's insane." But it says, "But at Sid's time, it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't that gaming was looked down on by the rest of the world necessarily, but it was sometimes glanced at sideways in confusion. I don't think any of us could have imagined back then the kind of cultural domination that gaming would someday achieve."

• 43:20David Senra?

  Okay, so let's go to why he names his games like he does. Even, so there's the Sid Meier, which is normal, but then there's Sid Meier that's italicized with an exclamation point at the end. That's how the title of this book, title of all his games. And Robin Williams is why that, this is another surprising thing, Robin Williams is why that happened. Why Sid's games started out using his name in the title. So it says, he's at a meeting, there's that some kind of SPA event, I'm not sure what that is, but Bill happens to be there and says, Robin Williams pointed, Robin Williams was, he loved games. In fact, he named one of his daughters Zelda, which I also didn't know that. But Robin Williams pointed out that all other entertainment industries promoted their stars by name.

• 44:05David Senra?

  Why should gaming be any different? So he says, hey, you know it's a Robin Williams movie, you know it's a Stephen King novel, why don't I know it's a Sid Meier game? And so Sid was a little reluctant to do that, but then he says, Robin Williams told me to do it. It's a pretty good defense for almost anything. So I thought that was really interesting. Then he talks about, you know, the beginning of industry is not like a lot, there's not like best practices. And so how do I make these decisions? And this is something we've seen over and over again, just start with the customer, work backwards. All I could do was keep asking myself, would I want to play this game? As long as the answer was yes, the idea stayed in. He always put himself in the role of his customer, in the role of the player, not just saying, hey, I can design a game because it's easier for me.

• 44:48David Senra?

  No, would the customer, would the player actually like what I'm doing? So one of his most popular games was Sid Meier's Pirates. And I'm just going to read, I'm going to skip over all the development, I just want to hit some, like what he realized, his, like his key insight. And what I wrote, the note I left myself on this page is, holy shit. This applies for real life, not just the design of a pirate game. A pirate's career would last about 40 years between childhood and old age, just like ours, right? And his goal, this is so important, and his goal was to accomplish as much as he could in that window, to have an adventurous life with no regrets.

• 45:29David Senra?

  Let's go back to that. And we're going to substitute pirate's career. Your career. Your career will last about 40 years between childhood and old age. And your goal was to accomplish as much as you could in that window. To have an adventurous life with no regrets. As in real life, success could only be measured as a combination of your exploits and how much value you put on those particular exploits yourself in your scorecard. Idea you and I've talked about over and over again. Life is not a steady progression of objectively increasing value. And when you fail, you don't just reload the mission again. You knock the wet sand off your breeches and return to the high seas for new adventures. And if you happen to get marooned on a desert island a few times, well, that makes for

• 46:14David Senra?

  a good story, too. And I just love that we can summarize that whole section there. Have an adventurous life with no regrets. So now they're having success. We're in the late 80s. And Tom Clancy, the very successful writer, winds up, Sid winds up doing an adaptation of The Hunt for Red October. It was either The Hunt for Red October or Red Storm Rising. Nope, Red Storm Rising. It was a submarine simulation they were building. So this was really, I wrote, "Ugh, this is never as surprising as it should be." And then a quote from Jay-Z, I'll tell you about in a minute. It says, "Tom Clancy was a very down-to-earth guy. The Hunt for Red October had been a huge success.

• 46:57David Senra?

  But as a debut author, he hadn't been able to command the greatest deal with his publisher, and he was still working at his day job selling insurance even as Red Storm Rising was flying off the shelves." Okay, so let me unpack that a little bit. Tom sold his first book, The Hunt for Red October, which is a hugely successful novel, turned into a movie, turned into all kinds of stuff. He sold it for $5,000. So that's why I mean, "Ugh, this is never be as surprising as it should be." He eventually makes more, but he winds up selling 100 million books before he dies. And he dies in like his 60s. 100 million books, Tom Clancy, it's wild. But at this point, it's selling, he's got to go back and renegotiate and get more money for him. But he's still having to sell insurance. Tell how crazy is that?

• 47:40David Senra?

  He's got two wildly successful books, and he's still having to work a day job. And so when I got to that section, I thought of this quote from Jay-Z. I've told you about this album before, his album 444. It's, yeah, it's about his life, but really, it's an album about entrepreneurship. And you have a hugely successful person that came from the projects, Marcy Projects. And I think he's like a billionaire today, has been successful in so many different domains. And even there, he talks about, he's like, there's a line on the album where he's talking about, you can think it's bougie, it's fine, but I'm just trying to give you a million dollars worth of game for $9.99. He's talking about, you know, why are you rapping about investments? Why are you rapping about collecting art? Why are you rapping about building companies? And his whole point is just like, the reference there is, you know, CDs, albums you used

• 48:25David Senra?

  to call 999, before we streamed, you usually buy them for $9.99. So he's like, I'm for $10, for buying this album for $10. If you actually listen to what I'm saying, it's going to be worth over a million dollars to you in your life, a million dollars worth of game for $9.99. But in that album, and something he's renowned for, and he was decades, decades ahead of this, is over and over again, you see executives, record companies, take advantage of the people that are actually producing the work, right? Making the album, making the music, whatever the case is. And in that case, he talks about how Prince, the famous music artist, you know, they sold his masters. Somebody, I forgot who he referenced in the album, they wind up, after Prince died,

• 49:08David Senra?

  they sold tickets so you could walk through his house. And he calls them greedy bastards in there. And the reason I say Jay-Z's way ahead of that is because no one would sign him when he was 26 years old, back in the 90s. And so he just signed himself. He's like, okay, well, I'll just make my own record label. And that was very, very, like, it was almost unheard of back then. Now you're seeing a lot, there's actually a lot, I think, modern day entrepreneurs can learn from independent music artists now. And I've mentioned this a few times on the podcast, but if you actually study them and listen to what they're saying, like, they maintain ownership, they wind up using the latest technology, they're making tons of money, and they're not getting taken advantage of it. There are still people getting taken advantage of. So when I got to this Tom Clancy part, where it's like, you know, Tom is a very, very

• 49:53David Senra?

  successful, but he's still having to work insurance. And there's a line on that album where Jay-Z says, y'all are still signing deals? Still, after all they done stole, for real.

• 50:04David Senra?

  And his point is like, you're, I understand you're young and you want to break into the music industry, but you're ignoring decades of history, of very important history in the music industry, of how they're ripping you off over and over and over again. He talks about, okay, we'll talk when you're behind on your taxes. And again, I think that's why, I think musicians especially, they are the most efficient storytellers in the world, because in a few minutes, or sometimes in a line or two, they can just tell entire stories, where it's like, you're still signing deals, still, after all they've done, still, for real. Now, in Tom Clancy's case, winds up working out, but that's only because he was able to keep producing bestselling novels. So just this idea that you're going to sell The Hunt for Red October for $5,000. And then it might also be obvious when we got

• 50:47David Senra?

  to that part, like, that is also something that Sid avoided. And he was offered, he was offered a lot more than $5,000. They were going to give him a quarter million dollars for one game, and he was able to make multiple games in a year. He's like, no, I'm capturing the upside. All right, so he talks about sitting down and essentially, they're going to have a conversation, him and, I skipped ahead, but they're, they built a friendship of some sorts, or at least a relationship. And really, the whole summary of this section, this conversation that Tom Clancy and Sid Meyer are about to have, is maintain control so you can avoid shady business deals. Business is full of shady, scummy, terrible people. I always think the best way to describe this is when, it's a quote from Charlie Munger.

• 51:30David Senra?

  He says, "Wise people want to avoid other people who are just total rat poison." And there are a lot of them. So business is full of them. One way to avoid people taking advantage of you is to maintain control. It says, "That night, we sat up late together, expounding on the nature of art, sources of inspiration." Remember, he's a writer, Clancy's a writer, and in some ways Sid is as well. "Sources of inspiration and the inevitable connection we develop with our creations." He revealed that in the intervening months, he had been kind to him, that the intervening months had been kind to him financially, but not so kind emotionally, as he was forced to adapt to fame and the complications that come along with it. "Tom was especially troubled by ongoing contractual issues with his first book, and the fear that he might never again own the rights to his own character."

• 52:14David Senra?

  Again, this is what Sid avoided, right? And later on, When he says make civilization, I skipped over a lot of this part, but there's a lot of weird-- other people buy Sid's creations, too, because it's owned under corporate umbrella. It's really, really confusing. There's more details in the book, but he does eventually get back all control. The conversation was eye-opening for me, first in discovering a kindred creative spirit underneath that alpha male persona that Tom Clancy had, and also in the revelation that even someone of his stature could be taken advantage of through poor business arrangements. So they took advantage of Tom Clancy, who was super famous, took advantage of Prince. The history of business, especially in the entertainment industry, is people being taken advantage of. I'd always had a distaste for business deals in general, simply because it's not the kind

• 52:59David Senra?

  of thing I want to spend my day doing. And I was starting to realize that there was potential danger in them as well. And I think that's another thing about Sid that you see, if you read the book, over and over again. He's smart enough to learn from the experience of others. It's like, all right, I'm going to avoid-- I don't want to have to just learn through my own experience, right? That's too expensive. I'm going to learn from other people's experiences. This conversation I had with Tom, I'm not going to forget it. Make sure I don't get taken advantage of like this. I'm going to bring you up to state of the business in 1990. As a company, we were now releasing three or four games a year and generating around 15 million in revenue. So over and over again in the book, Sid talks about being inspired by the success and the work of others. He'll quote authors, musicians, fellow game designers, and this is an example of SimCity. This is a game I played when I was a kid.

• 53:43David Senra?

  I love this game. It was actually-- SimCity was the inspiration behind Sid's game Railroad Tycoon, which winds up being one of his most successful games ever. And the Railroad Tycoon title inspired like all kinds of-- like there was like a whole genre of tycoon. You know, you could build all kinds of things. They were not made by Sid, but they were inspired by-- in turn, inspired by Sid. So Sid, fellow designer Will Wright, released his magnum opus, SimCity. The idea had come to him while working on a different title, after he realized that he enjoyed designing the levels more than bombing them. Not entirely surprising for a game designer to feel that way, but he came to the radical conclusion that others might agree with him. Will had spent years trying to convince publishers that his city-building simulator--

• 54:27David Senra?

  this is the problem with gatekeepers. Look at this. "He spent years trying to convince publishers that his city-building simulator was a game at all, until finally he and a partner formed their own company to release it themselves in February 1989." So he said SimCity was either the kick I needed to see what was right in front of me, or else maybe the reassurance that my intuition was feasible after all. And from then on, I knew this wasn't a distracting little side project. We were making a railroad game. So instead of the idea that you have to kill people, something Sid-- I don't think Sid has any violence in his games. It's like one of his philosophies, that you have to blow things up, or he's like, no, why don't-- people just might be interested in just constantly building and making progress. And so what he's learning from SimCity on Railroad Tycoon, he then will also apply

• 55:12David Senra?

  to Civilization, this idea of just perpetual progress and not just the destruction of things. And before I get into this conversation where they realize, okay, now's the time to build Civilization, one sentence for you: Never forget the why. Never forget why people are using your product. People play games to feel good about themselves. So I just listened to a talk that Sid did like six years ago. In about an hour and a half, he lays out all his gaming philosophy. It's on YouTube if you want to watch it. He talks about it over and over again, like, people play games to feel good about themselves. So don't make decisions as a game designer that go against why they're playing your particular game. So this is where he realizes it's time for Civilization. "That was a pretty fun game to make," Bruce said. "It was," I agreed. "We should do another one, something bigger."

• 55:56David Senra?

  What's bigger than the history of railroads? The entire history of human civilization. We laughed at the absurd truth of that statement, but as soon as it was said out loud, I don't think either of us could have settled for anything less. We were not the type to turn down an interesting challenge. At the age of 28, I had declared in my very first instruction manual that I would one day write the ultimate strategy game. Now, at 36, I figured I was ready. Age and experience may bring wisdom, but sometimes it's useful to be a young person who hasn't learned how to doubt himself yet. So you have an idea as to why is he saying that. Age and experience may bring wisdom, sometimes it's useful-- however, sometimes it's useful for a young person who hasn't learned how to doubt himself yet.

• 56:38David Senra?

  He did not know how hard making Civilization was going to be, and he's going to wind up putting everything into it. And it's fantastic that it was successful, but it burns him out for an extremely long period of time. And again, I just think that's something that's mentioned over and over again, where people are looking back, hey, if I knew how hard that was going to be, when I started it, I wouldn't have done it. So there is some kind of benefit to ignorant bliss, or naivete, or whatever you want to call it. This is Sid really saying, you need to know your edge. "We simply can't compete with the panorama of a movie, or the length of a novel, or the acoustics of an album. And prioritizing these features over gameplay," which is his edge, "will always lead to disappointments.

• 57:20David Senra?

  The time has come for us to outgrow Hollywood envy." I think this is another game designer or game publisher. It says, "As Chris Crawford once wrote, 'The time has come for us to outgrow Hollywood envy.'" Sid Meier makes a pathetic Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he makes a magnificent Sid Meier. Okay, so I'm going to pull out a couple more interesting things about while he's making games. In one game, he winds up making like a-- he has one game, but has multiple games inside the game. And what he realizes, really why I'm bringing this paragraph to your attention is because it reminds me a lot of Steve Jobs. Steve, one of his greatest philosophies is the fact that the further you go away from one, the more complexity you're inviting in.

• 58:03David Senra?

  And then another thing it reminded me of, Steve Jobs says that focus is saying no. So it says, "Combining two great games had somehow left me with zero good ones. The notion that one good game is better than two great games was such a revelation that it became known in my mind as the covert action rule." That's the game he was making that he learned this. "Many of the designers I mentor now weren't even born when that game came out. So we're more likely to talk about the issue in terms of where a game's center of gravity is. But the lesson holds, and I've never stopped citing the truth of it to myself or others. If anything, it's grown in relevance since back then, when we at least had limited computing resources to restrain us.

• 58:44David Senra?

  These days, the easiest thing in the world to do is more. And if we're not careful, we can end up with three or four games all jammed into one. Deciding what doesn't go into the game is sometimes more important than deciding what does."

• 59:01David Senra?

  And then he's got some advice on how to make progress faster. It's like a series of iterations. Don't just essentially sit around and overthink things. Just make a demo, see how it goes, and if it doesn't work back, roll it back. So he also has this idea, it's like you need to double what you're doing or cut it in half. So let me just read this to you and hopefully it makes sense. "Mistakes are a given, and the important thing is to catch as many as you can, as fast as you can. Ideally, you'll reevaluate your creation every single day. And each iteration is an opportunity not to pat yourself on the back, but to figure out where you've already gone wrong. Efficiency is the goal, and one of my big rules has always been, double it or cut it in half. Don't waste your time adjusting something by 5%, then another 5%, then another 5%.

• 59:44David Senra?

  Just double it and see if it even had the effect you thought it was going to have. You just saved yourself a dozen iterations inching up 5% at a time. Less than a month before-- and then you can move in the other direction, too. "Less than a month before Civilization was published, I cut the size of the map in half. It turned out that the size wasn't as important as the sense of relentless progress. With a smaller map, the game moved faster, and that in turn made the map feel more epic than when it was twice as big. The point is, there are bad things in my games, at least until I manage to pin them down. But I don't let the possibility of mistakes hold me back. I won't ponder for hours whether a feature would be a good idea. I just throw it in the game and find out for sure.

• 1:00:29David Senra?

  If it's clunky, I cut it back out again. There is no map before you've explored the wilderness and no overriding artistic vision on day one. There's just the hard, consistent work of making something a little better each day and being as efficient as possible in your discovery of what it's going to turn out to be." So after a lot of time and effort, he winds up finishing Civilization, and conventional wisdom winds up being wrong again. Civilization starts resonating with players. So this conventional wisdom said a strategy title would never make big money. So the company even-- and I've skipped over a bunch of like the weird-- People leave, ownership changes, all this other stuff.

• 1:01:11David Senra?

  But they didn't put a lot of marketing dollars at the beginning behind Civilization. Because they said, you know, conventional wisdom says you're not going to make big money. So why would we make a huge investment in marketing? They hadn't put a big marketing push behind it. So like most of my recent games, it started as a slow burn. Then they realized, okay, we've resonated with something. When the first fan letters trickled in a few weeks after the game's release, they had a decidedly different tone than we were used to. Some of the letters were several pages long and included phone numbers in the hopes that we could discuss things in greater depth. We had gotten players' thinking on a deeper level. They were interacting with the game as a tool rather than an experience. And what happens is it's a slow burn, but it starts spreading by word amount.

• 1:01:55David Senra?

  So even years later, he's saying, this is like two or three years after the game was released, new fans were discovering the game every day. I had poured everything I had into Civilization, and I was honestly ready to think about something else for a while. So now he's completely burned out. And it says, "Achievement unlocked." This is the gamification of the book. It says, "Midlife crisis." Woo-hoo, we're halfway there. And so he takes a break for a while. He starts working on other, completely different games. He makes that music composer game he wanted. It winds up flopping. Later on, he says Civilization, the titles were, there was always different lead designers. Because you have to, that's something you have to do when you're young and full of energy. Because it's just so comprehensive, it's such a large project.

• 1:02:39David Senra?

  I do want to pull out one sentence here that's Sid's realization. That is going to be something that we've seen over and over again in this book. It says, "Good games don't get made by committee." So good products don't get made by committee. That's something Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, George Lucas, David Ogilvie, Charles Ketering, they are all agreeing with Sid here. That's something that pops up over and over again. Good products don't get made by committee. You need that formidable individual that's leading it. So this is interesting. He talks about where he made mistakes. Civilization has this huge modding community that's sustained it for multiple decades. They'll actually change the game and reskin it and change things about it that, to make it more, essentially customizing it to their own liking, right?

• 1:03:24David Senra?

  And he thought, this is a terrible idea. And so one of the, one of the next Civilization designers is actually the one that pushed him in this direction. He's like, "Brian, you're insane. You shouldn't be doing this." And then he talks about the realization he has when he comes, when he figures out he was wrong, I thought it was valuable, so I'm gonna read the two in a minute. Brian unlocked the backend even further. He made it possible for players to alter graphics, replace sound effects, modify rules, and basically create an entirely new game from themselves around the skeleton of our code. I could not be convinced this was a good idea. This idea of handling everything over to the players was just baffling. They would probably be terrible at it, I thought, and blame us for their uninspired creations. And if by chance they did happen to be good at it, then all we were doing was putting ourselves out of a job.

• 1:04:09David Senra?

  Either way, I knew that modding was a great way to ensure that Civilization never saw a third installment. I was so wrong, on all counts. The strength of the modding community is, instead, the very reason this series survived at all. Our audience had been clamoring to modify the game since the first fan letter. What I didn't see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality, it only heightens it. So, the next two paragraphs, I'm gonna read that, I'm gonna start that again. The next two paragraphs are really his key insight here, and the reason I'm reading this whole section two, because I think it applies to other things. Very, very wise of him. What I didn't see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality, it only heightens it. Just like a fantasy can awaken you to new possibilities in the real world, letting the

• 1:04:54David Senra?

  fans play in the sandbox with us only brought them closer to the universe we had created, the one that had made their fantasy possible. I thought they were tearing the house down, when in fact, they were only remodeling because they liked the neighborhood and wanted to stay. Fortunately, Brian had the wisdom to give away the construction materials. To say fans ran with it would be an understatement.

• 1:05:20David Senra?

  So, to some degree, he becomes like a, like a, what is it, a prisoner of your own success? And this is, again, we're just gonna echo, he just wants to make games. Like, it doesn't have to be complicated, right? We love to overcomplicate things, just like John Cormack just wanted to make games. I was frustrated. I didn't like doing licenses and I didn't like the corporate structure that had been slowly but surely building up around me for years. I just wanted to make games. Many other early folks had moved on as well and it was time for me to do the same. So, once the company grows big and unwieldly, has its own momentum of itself, he winds up leaving, starting a tiny, well, I shouldn't say tiny, but it starts out small, but it's gonna grow too, just another design studio. Where he's like, "Okay, I'm gonna start, it's just gonna be us three and then we'll

• 1:06:05David Senra?

  build up from there." And this is how, tied into his decision about wanting to go back to the basics, to a smaller team, is this is Sid describing how he likes to work. "Separately is probably how I work best with everyone. I'm an introvert who likes people. I wanna collaborate on the whole, but I wanna do my part individually. There are so many things in the world to be good at and I get a thrill every time I come across someone who excels in their field. The dichotomy between someone else's talent and your own is a cause for celebration, because the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other. The further apart you are, the more you can offer each other." So, he's talking about, hey, at the beginning, he did everything. He's making the game, he's designing the game, he's doing the audio for the game. Slowly but surely, he's got people who say, "Hey, I can design for you."

• 1:06:49David Senra?

  So, he's like, "Oh, I don't know, maybe you can." Then he looks at the designs, like, "Oh, they're better than me. So, okay, I'm gonna grab that guy. I can do audio for you. He does the audio better than me, so I'm gonna grab that person." So, that's what he's talking about. It's like, yeah, stick to what is your edge and then find the people that can fill in the gaps. Same thing with Bill, his first partner. You know, Bill can sell, I don't wanna sell. So, the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other. "I know where my own talents are and I find that sharing those duties usually falls somewhere between inefficient and frustrating. I want to combine other people's unique expertise with mine and create something that none of us could have made alone, not compromise on the same task."

• 1:07:28David Senra?

  He's going to bring up the idea that everybody's constantly building on the work of others all the time. That is not to say my version of civilization had no outside influences, far from it. Aside from the general creating-not-destroying concept I'd first encountered in SimCity, there were two games that I very much respected and blatantly took ideas from to use for my own purposes. So this game called Seven Cities of Gold, and it says, "The game was a cloud-parting, shackle-removing, mind-blowing masterpiece for me, and there were elements of it in nearly every game I made thereafter." And he's got a great line to summarize this section. "The ideas didn't start with us, and they can't end with us either." So he talks about, you know, I was influenced by

• 1:08:12David Senra?

  tons of people, and so when I see somebody doing, influenced by a game like Pirates, or Railroad Tycoon, or Civilization, like, I love that. I love seeing further improvements. "The ideas didn't start with us, and they can't end with us either." So he's talking about game design in this next section, but again, there's so many things where he talks about game design, I feel applies to real life, too. He's talking about how to, like, the beginning of, what do you want your game to be? Let's say, okay, what do you want your life to be? Who's having the most fun? That's who you want your player to be. The person with the most power, living the most exciting life. In the history of civilization, it's the king. On the Spanish main, meaning the pirates, it's the captain of the pirate ship. In war, it's the general, and in the transportation industry, it's

• 1:08:52David Senra?

  the tycoon. So just think about that, not who's your player, not like, your life, right? Who is having the most fun? That's who you want your player to be. That really echoes an idea from a long time ago, when I did that three-part series on Elon Musk. Tim Urban of Wait But Why did an Elon Musk blog series. You can read it for free online by going to his website, but I bought the ebook, or the Kindle version, rather, and it's like 60,000 pages. But anyways, that whole idea about treating your life as like you're playing a video game, one of the metaphors that Tim uses, Tim Urban uses to describe Elon Musk's approach to life is grand theft life. That section is worth reading and rereading over and over again, because it's very fascinating. So few people use that, that, I guess, metaphor,

• 1:09:37David Senra?

  that philosophy. This is Sid talking about the benefit of being obsessive. I think having a slightly obsessive personality is a useful thing. It keeps me focused on the quality of my work. It provides critical sources of outside inspiration, which often contribute in surprising ways. Whatever it is you want to be good at, you have to make sure you continue to read and learn and seek joy elsewhere, because you never know where inspiration will strike. As you can imagine, there's tons of people wanting to break into the industry, younger people that ask Sid for advice. So this is Sid's advice on how to get started. The best way to prove your idea is a good one is to prove it, not with words, but with actions. Sit in the programmer chair until you have something playable.

• 1:10:21David Senra?

  Then sit in the artist's chair until you have something crudely recognizable. Then sit in the tester chair and be honest with yourself about what's fun and what's not. You don't need to be perfect at any one job. You just need to be good enough to prove your point and inspire others to join you. So then he talks about the pricing model of games and how it's changed over time. And I think this is really where studying the gaming industry is really beneficial, because it's also mentioned a lot in the Masters of Doom book. So he's talking about, this is now in the modern era, right? We had to decide whether to charge a one upfront premium for the game, as was traditional, or try out the trendy new model of downloadable content, in which a limited version of the

• 1:11:04David Senra?

  game would be given away for free, and then subsequent levels would have to be individually purchased. So a lot of mobile games are using this, obviously, I mean, computer games are using it, not just mobile games, but he's going to reference a mobile game here. But this is also the Doom model, the model that they came up with, I think, in the early 90s. If you were asked a group of gamers their opinion on these so-called microtransactions, most would probably respond with a string of rude words. But their revenues tell a different story. NEXON, the company that invented the notion of small purchases within a free game, first used it as a hail mary pass for an online server that was about to be shut down for lack of subscribers. Membership predictably skyrocketed once the game was free. But more importantly, the new microtransactions dwarfed previous subscription sales, not

• 1:11:48David Senra?

  only saving the game, but increasing the total corporate revenue by 16% in one year. So he's going to talk about the, really what he's referencing here. Is the difference between stated and revealed preference. They state they don't like it, but they wind up spending a lot more money the other way, right? A full 70% of Candy Crush users have never paid a dime for the game, yet it still brings in several million dollars a day. When we say, we say we hate it, but the balance sheet proves otherwise. I do think the idea of a free demo with the option to purchase the entire game is a fair one. And he talks about it's also not a new idea, and coin operated arcades were engaging in microtransactions long

• 1:12:32David Senra?

  before their current wave of popularity. And finally, I'll close on it with a few parting words of wisdom from Sid. So many of our wildest dreams have turned out to be laughably conservative that it's hard to write off anything as impossible. Making games is simply the best job in the world. And I think that in life, as in game design, you have to find the fun. There is joy out there waiting to be discovered, but it might not be where you expected. You can't decide what something's going to be before you embark on it. And you shouldn't stick with a bad idea just because you're fond of it. Take action as quickly and repeatedly as possible. Take advantage of what you already know and take liberties with tradition. But most importantly, take the time to

• 1:13:17David Senra?

  appreciate the possibilities and make sure all of your decisions are interesting ones. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. I highly, highly recommend reading the book. And I think this book actually pairs nicely. If you have not also listened to, or excuse me, read Masters of Doom, highly recommend you buy that book as well. So buy the book using the link that's in, if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. I think that's 195 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.