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Every week we bring you an article from our archive, either for you to read again or discover for the first time. We went to see Firaxis recently, so we thought we'd take another look at the man in charge. There is an invisible line running through the middle of the 20th century - it makes landfall somewhere towards the mid-1950s, I think - and it separates two generations of American (and Canadian) teenagers. On one side - the older side - are the teens who think everything is neat. Neat rollerskates! Neat baseball mitt! Wow, that's a neat subscription to Popular Mechanics you've got going on there! On the other side are the cool kids.
Sid Meier, it turns out, is one of these - if only just. Ask him about his early platformer, Floyd of the Jungle, and he'll laugh accommodatingly and admit it was a cool time to get into games. Ask why he stopped making simulations, and he'll shrug accommodatingly and tell you he put all of his really cool ideas into the last one he worked on. The basic challenge of a designer is about being cool, too: "It's about finding what's cool and making sure it stays in and finding what isn't, and making sure that gets left out." Sid Meier, accommodating to the end, makes it all seem to simple. Making things seem simple - much like making things seem cool - is kind of his gig. In truth, though, it isn't really simple at all, is it? What's he been up to all these years?
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