This article tells part of the story of the Civilization series.
In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.
At that time, the two men were working for MicroProse Software, for whom they had just completed Civilization II, with Reynolds in the role of primary designer and programmer and Briggs in that of co-designer, producer, and soundtrack composer. They had brought the project in for well under $1 million, all that their bosses were willing to shell out for what they considered to be a game with only limited commercial potential. And yet the early sales were very strong indeed, proof that the pent-up demand for a modestly modernized successor to Sid Meier’s masterstroke that Reynolds and Briggs had identified had been very, very real. Which is not to say that they were being given much credit for having proved their managers wrong.
MicroProse’s executives were really Spectrum Holobyte’s executives, ever the since latter company had acquired the former in December of 1993, in a deal lubricated by oodles of heedless venture capital and unsustainable levels of debt. Everything about the transaction seemed off-kilter; while MicroProse had a long and rich history and product portfolio, Spectrum Holobyte was known for the Falcon series of ultra-realistic combat flight simulators, for the first version of Tetris to run on Western personal computers, and for not a whole lot else. Seeing the writing on the wall, “Wild Bill” Stealey, the partner in crime with whom Sid Meier had founded MicroProse back in 1982, walked out the door soon after the shark swallowed the whale. The conjoined company went on to lose a staggering $57.8 million in two years, despite such well-received, well-remembered, and reasonably if not extraordinarily popular games as XCOM, Transport Tycoon, and Colonization. By the spring of 1996, the two-headed beast, which was still publishing games under both the Spectrum Holobyte and MicroProse banners, was teetering on the brink of insolvency, with, in the words of its CEO Stephen M. Race, a “negative tangible net worth.” It would require a last-minute injection of foreign investment capital that June to save it from being de-listed from the NASDAQ stock exchange.
The unexpectedly strong sales of Civilization II — the game would eventually sell 3 million copies, enough to make it MicroProse’s best seller ever by a factor of three — were a rare smudge of black in this sea of red ink. Yet Reynolds and Briggs had no confidence in their managers’ ability to build on their success. They thought it was high time to get off the sinking ship, time to get away from a company that was no longer much fun to work at. They wanted to start their own little studio, to make the games they wanted to make their way.
But that, of course, was easier said than done. They had a proven track record inside the industry, but neither Brian Reynolds nor David Briggs was a household name, even among hardcore gamers. Most of the latter still believed that Civilization II was the work of Sid Meier — an easy mistake to make, given how prominently Meier’s name was emblazoned on the box. Reynolds and Briggs needed investors, plus a publisher who would be willing to take a chance on them. Thankfully, the solution to their dilemma was quite literally staring them in the face every time they looked at that Civilization II box: they asked Sid Meier to abandon ship with them. After agonizing for a while about the prospect of leaving the company he had co-founded in the formative days of the American games industry, Meier agreed, largely for the same reason that Reynolds and Briggs had made their proposal to him in the first place: it just wasn’t any fun to be here anymore.
So, a delicate process of disentanglement began. Keenly aware of the legal peril in which their plans placed them, the three partners did everything in their power to make their departure as amicable and non-dramatic as possible. For instance, they staggered their resignations so as not to present an overly united front: Briggs left in May of 1996, Reynolds in June, and Meier in July. Even after officially resigning, Meier agreed to continue at MicroProse for some months more as a part-time consultant, long enough to see through his computerized version of the ultra-popular Magic: The Gathering collectible-card game. He didn’t even complain when, in an ironic reversal of the usual practice of putting Sid Meier’s name on things that he didn’t actually design, his old bosses made it clear that they intended to scrub him from the credits of this game, which he had spent the better part of two years of his life working on. In return for all of this and for a firm promise to stay in his own lane once he was gone, he was allowed to take with him all of the code he had written during the past decade and a half at MicroProse. “They didn’t want to be making detailed strategy titles any more than we wanted to be making Top Gun flight simulators,” writes Meier in his memoir. On the face of it, this was a strange attitude for his former employer to have, given that Civilization II was selling so much better than any of its other games. But Brian Reynolds, Jeff Briggs, and Sid Meier were certainly not inclined to look the gift horse in the mouth.
They decided to call their new company Firaxis Games, a name that had its origin in a piece of music that Briggs had been tinkering with, which he had dubbed “Fiery Axis.” Jason Coleman, a MicroProse programmer who had coded on Civilization II, quit his job there as well and joined them. Sid Meier’s current girlfriend and future second wife Susan Brookins became their office manager.
The first office she was given to manage was a cramped space at the back of Absolute Quality, a game-testing service located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, just a stone’s throw away from Microprose’s offices. Their landlords/flatmates were, if nothing else, a daily reminder of the need to test, test, test when making games. Brian Reynolds (who writes of himself here in the third person):
CEO Jeff Briggs worked the phones to rustle up some funding and did all the hard work of actually putting a new company together. Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds worked to scrape together some playable prototype code, and Jason Coleman wrote the first lines of JACKAL, the engine which these days pretty much holds everything together. Office-manager Susan Brookins found us some office furniture and bought crates of Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper to stash in a mini-fridge Brian had saved from his college days. We remembered that at some indeterminate point in the past we were considered world-class game designers, but our day-to-day lives weren’t providing us with a lot of positive reinforcement on that point. So, for the first nine months of our existence as a company, we clunked over railroad tracks in the morning, played Spy Hunter in the upstairs kitchen, and declared “work at home” days when Absolute Quality had competitors in the office.
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