'If you fire it up, there's a build of Civilization 1 on there': The '90s PC that Sid Meier used to make the first Civilization has a whopping 16MB of memory and still works
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
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