Sid Meier

INDUCTED IN THE CLASS OF 2002

Notable achievements:

• Co-founded (with Bill Stealey) MicroProse software company (1982)
• Wrote best-selling games “Hellcat Ace,” “Solo Flight,” “F-15 Strike Eagle,” “Silent Service,” “Sid Meier’s Pirates,” “Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon” and “Sid Meier’s Civilization” among many others
• Became the first celebrity programmer
• Co-founded Firaxis Games (1997)

Quotes:
“There’s a whole new generation of gamers who’ve grown up knowing games their entire life. So for those of us who go back far enough to remember a time without games, it’s our origin story. A time when there was no Internet, when everything wasn’t available instantly online. I wanted to put down those memories before they fade into the mists.” (The Independent, Sept. 9 2020)

“I felt that the interactivity of gaming, which was unique versus other forms of entertainment, and the idea of making the player the star or the central focus, was always something that we had as an advantage over other forms of entertainment. Sure, the graphics weren’t as good, the sound wasn’t as good, and you had to have special technology. But there was something to the fundamental gaming experience that you couldn’t get anywhere else. As the graphics got better, the sound and the presentation and everything else improved to start to compete with other forms of entertainment, like movies or television, that uniqueness for what we had to offer would bring us to a broader and broader audience. And that has turned out to be the case. I was actually not really surprised. I thought we had something special and unique, even though in the early days, it was a very limited, nerdy audience that we were speaking to. But I think we could see that as the technology improved, we were riding this wave of technology that was going to lead to some really cool stuff. And gaming would be a big part of that.” (The Gamer, Oct. 18 2020)

Suggested reading:
“Sid Meier’s Memoir! A Life in Computer Games” by Sid Meier (2020)

Learn more:
Firaxis Games “about us” page