What I learned from reading Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier.
A billion hours ago, neanderthals were making spearheads in the stone Age.
A billion hours from now, it'll be the year 116,174 AD.
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.
1 billion hour 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 five from its release in 2010 up through 2016, a six year window into one game in a series that spans 29 years and twelve editions, 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 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.
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.