A lot of video games get produced in a year's time. Some will be awful, most will be decent but forgettable, and a few will be excellent. Every year, though, there are a few titles that manage to rise above the mile-high mass of shrink-wrapped boxes to become one of the Top 10 Games of the Year. This year, our top honor went to Firaxis Studios for its brilliant updating of Sid Meier's classic Civilization franchise. Civilization IV was everything a Game of the Year should be, broadly appealing, incredibly addictive, and insanely fun.

For those who haven't played the game, Civilization IV is a strategy title that lets players take a stone age tribe and manage their evolution into a mighty, world-spanning empire that might either conquer the globe or expand its reach into space. That simple description, though, doesn't even begin to hint at the depths that await players who dive into Sid's world. Managing an entire civilization's technological growth, economic expansion, and military conquests is an amazingly compelling experience. Even better, if fighting against computer controlled civilizations gets old, Civilization IV multiplayer portion provides endless replayability against live opponents. You may be hot stuff against the computer AI, but there are players out there who make Genghis Khan look like Chaka Khan, and they're waiting for you to join them.

We recently got the opportunity to sit down with two of the people responsible for our Game of The Year -- Barry Caudill, senior producer, and the game's lead designer, Soren Johnson -- after they returned from a well-deserved vacation. We discussed the team's reaction to the praise heaped on the game, some elements of the development process, and the problems the game has experienced since launch. We also talked a little bit about where the Civilization franchise is, and where it's going.




GameSpy: . Civilization IV was well represented not only in GameSpy's Game of the Year awards, but also many other sites and print magazines. Now that you've had a chance to reflect on that, what were your, and the team's, reactions to the praise?
Soren Johnson: We learned so much from Civilization III's development that we knew we were in a position to take the franchise to another level, if we could just execute correctly. That's why it's very rewarding to see that the game has been so well-received. Sometimes, it can be a very thin line between a good game and a great one, and if people feel that Civ IV belongs in the latter category, we are honored. Certainly, that difference is the reason we worked many late nights and put in the extra effort to get a feature just right.
GameSpy: Looking back on the development process, was there a moment when you knew that you were on to something special, that you were doing something right?
Johnson: One moment that certainly stands out in my mind was a press event we held a few months before release. A number of journalists from around the world (including GameSpy's Fargo) flew into Baltimore to give Civ IV multiplayer a try. A few of them, of course, couldn't help but be skeptical given the multiplayer track record of previous Civilization games. We had scheduled the event so that there would be a couple of hours to play, and then an hour when they could interview Sid. Well, that hour never came -- nobody seemed to want to stop playing, even for a coveted Sid interview! Needless to say, that was a pretty good sign.