Sid Meier
Sid Meier is a Canadian-American video game designer and programmer who co-founded MicroProse and created the Civilization series.
Civilization: A turn-based strategy game series in which players build civilizations from ancient times into the future. The series most closely associated with Meier, beginning with the 1991 game he designed.
Game design: The practice of defining a game's rules, systems, goals, and player experiences. Meier’s career is centered on designing the rules and decisions that shape play.
MicroProse: An American video game company co-founded by Sid Meier and Bill Stealey in 1982. Meier developed many of his early influential games at the company he helped establish.
Civilization (video game series): A strategy game franchise about building societies from early history through technological development. Meier’s 1991 game launched a long-running franchise that shaped the strategy-game market.
Will Wright: An American video game designer known for creating SimCity and The Sims. Wright’s sandbox simulations emphasize systems and player expression more than Meier’s strategic campaigns.
Sid Meier's Pirates!: A historical action-adventure game series about sailing, trading, fighting, and exploring in the Caribbean. This 1987 game established Meier’s interest in open-ended play and player choice.
Procedural generation: The use of algorithms to create content rather than specifying every element by hand. Randomly generated maps helped make each Civilization campaign distinct.
Bill Stealey: An American entrepreneur and former Air Force officer who co-founded MicroProse with Sid Meier. Stealey provided the business partnership behind Meier’s first major game studio.
4X: A strategy-game genre organized around exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. Civilization helped popularize the 4X style of large-scale empire-building games.
Chris Crawford: An American game designer and writer known for strategy games and theories of interactive storytelling. Crawford’s design writing offers a distinct account of games as interactive systems.