some of the information<\/a> if not the diaries themselves. As you read the summaries, it becomes clear what one of the big issues with Dinosaurs<\/i> was – uncertainty.<\/p>\nThe idea of controlling a race of dinosaurs is, on its face, intriguing. But I struggle to think of how this gets turned into a game – or at least a game that looks like a Firaxis game. The concept of controlling a race automatically leads one to think Civ<\/i>-like turn based gaming or Age of Dinosaurs<\/i> real time. But you can’t have tech research, can you? Do you use evolution or resource management as expansion and improvement routes?<\/p>\n
By February, the thinking was that the player would control the dinosaurs and try to help them survive in a hostile environment. Does this mean that the giant lizards would become pets of the player? What would “winning” look like?<\/p>\n
After the demise of Dinosaurs<\/i>, Meier showed three different versions to an audience at the Game Developers Conference in 2002. One was turn-based, another real-time and the third – of all things – a card game. He confessed that though each of the game designs had merit, none of them were very fun for very long.<\/p>\n
Dinosaurs<\/i> is a curious object of study because its end was unexpected. There is a certain confidence in the Meier name – that he can make anything fun if given time and the team to do it. And Meier never said that Dinosaurs<\/i> was dead forever – he says that the original design for Civilization<\/i> wasn’t very fun other. But there are no signs of it being revived.<\/p>\n
Dinosaurs<\/i> is, in many ways, testament to the power of the human imagination and how our abilities to translate our imagination into a product or game. All frustrated artists know how this works. The picture on the canvas never matches the one in our heads.<\/p>\n
It’s not that Firaxis didn’t have any ideas of how to make a Dinosaurs<\/i> game. They had lots of ideas. But there wasn’t a single idea that Meier and his team felt worked as a good game.<\/p>\n
Every bad game I have ever played has had some idea why it was supposed to be fun. Even my own personal bete-noire Superpower<\/i> has enough of a glimmer of live to make me think “I know what they are trying to do here.” Firaxis got to the point with Dinosaurs<\/i>, it seems, where they weren’t sure what they were trying to do. They wisely stopped production in mid-2001.<\/p>\n
So it went on the back burner, and we got Sid Meier’s SimGolf<\/i>, Civilization III<\/i> and Pirates!<\/i>. Not a bad trade.<\/p>\n
But a piece of me wants to see Firaxis dare to fail again. Remaking classics has some risks, but the Civ<\/i> franchise is a license to print money. I will buy Civ IV<\/i> the day it comes out. I think I’d rather have a T-Rex in their somewhere.
\n<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the great might-have-beens in gaming history is Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs. Meier has an amazing track record of innovation and creativity, but lately Firaxis has been dipping into the wayback well a bit too much for that reputation to stay golden. But, shortly after Firaxis was formed, Meier and company said that they were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-2a","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}