Game Pile: Civilisation 1
In 1991, Sid Meier released Civilisation, starting off a habit that didn’t really get kicked at any point after that. It’s kind of hard to underestimate the legacy of Civilisation as a game, as a genre. It isn’t that no game of its ilk happened before, that’s not how history works. We rarely are given hard ‘starts’ for some thing, so instead we have to kind of point to places where specific, defined, observed events. There were probably videogames about running countries before that point, possibly games with even more elaborate structures and systems and different ideological perspectives. The thing is, most of them didn’t succeed to the degree that Civilisation did as a commercial product, and the upshot of that is, we now think of that point as the ‘start’ of these games.
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