Against a wall in the lobby of the Firaxis office, there are two objects: An old leather desk chair, and an equally aged PC and CRT monitor in beautiful ’90s beige. These obviously aren’t just any old bits of retro junk. They’re the kinds of relics game history archivists dream of, given how much has been lost over the years to bankruptcies, acquisitions, and carelessness.
Over 30 years ago, Sid Meier sat in that very chair and used that PC to create 1991’s Civilization, the first game in a grand strategy series that’s getting its 7th numbered release in February. The computer is a Compaq Deskpro 386 which, according to Firaxis learning and development manager Pete Murray, cost $10,000 when it was purchased. That’s somewhere over $23,000 in today’s dollars.
It was money well spent given the millions of copies the Civilization series has sold, and it was no lemon, either: Apparently, the old fella still boots.
So, what’s inside this bad boy? Firaxis didn’t have a full spec list to share, but we have a few details. It would’ve had 640 KB of useable RAM, because that was an architectural limitation of IBM-like PCs at the time (and the amount Bill Gates famously denies saying “ought to be enough for anybody”). There would’ve been expanded memory on top of that, and Murray said that the machine contains “16 MB of memory,” which seems to be the upper limit for the model. It’s unclear how large the hard drive is. The PC also contains a Sound Blaster audio card, which is just the kind of high tech hardware you’d expect in a $10K PC from the early ’90s.
With the help of some parts from Ebay and “creative salvage,” Firaxis’s IT department got the PC to boot as recently as last year.
“The hard drive is nearing the end of its life,” said Murray, “but if you fire it up, there’s a build of Civilization 1 on there that is just before the release version of Civ, and it is playable on that machine.”
As for the leather chair, that was apparently the idea of one of Sid Meier’s business partners, Bill Stealey. The first Civilization was not developed and published by Firaxis, which didn’t exist yet, but by MicroProse, which Meier founded with Stealey in 1982.
“As I recall, Bill Stealey wanted a cool executive chair and he decided I should have one too—apparently ergonomics was not yet a thing,” says Meier, via a description of the objects printed on the wall above them.
Meier left MicroProse and formed Firaxis with two others in 1996. It’s common for development artifacts to be lost in that sort of transition, so it’s nice to see a bit of PC gaming history in such good condition.
I also strolled past Meier’s closed, but not unused, office on my visit to Firaxis’s building earlier this month. The Civilization creator still comes in and works on game prototypes, I’m told—he just happened to be on vacation when I stopped by.
2K Games of course didn’t fly a bunch of press to Maryland just to look at Sid’s old PC: We were there to play Civilization 7, which you can read all about in my hands-on preview.
