PC LEGEND COMPILATION – feat. Civilization I & II + SimCity | Kim Justice


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3 more hours of classic Kim Justice vids from the archive, this time concentrating on classic PC games! This compilation features …

44 replies
  1. Paul Wratt
    Paul Wratt says:

    I spent years playing the demo version of Civ on AtariST, the world map, got good enough to reach 1% by Year Zero – did you ever finish the "other Civilization video(s)" ? (I dont remember seeing it when you originally released these)

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  2. K84
    K84 says:

    2:45:24 – I played Sim Tower as a kid and really enjoyed it. You could name the individual occupants and I had two people called Mulder and Scully that I would follow around the tower.

    Reply
  3. JW Wild Bill Stealey
    JW Wild Bill Stealey says:

    Thanks mostly correct. Lots of other stories during the time. I was always a supporter of Sid's games, and we were partners till 1989, 7 full years, before we he asked to be an independent developer at his request. We were getting too big for Sid to be comfortable. We were working on funding and getting ready to go Public. The UK office was quite a success. No idea you did not think it was. Games in the UK were selling at 2.95 pounds when we arrived, and our sims were selling for over 25 pounds when I left the company. Civ was not successful at first. We brought it back in and added the Military, Political, and other Advisors into the game and reshipped the game successfully. Times were not bad at MicroProse until I left on a sabbatical after our public offering in Oct 1991, sending Spectrum Holybyte $500,000 on a handshake two days before Christmas. MPS had 6 games due on Oct 1, 1992. I came back to the company in September 1992. All the games were behind as my incentive plan was discorded by the new management. MPS only got 1 game out, F-15 Strike Eagle III, on Dec 15th.

    Do not know where you got that we did not support Sid??? Sid was always priority. I never heard anything about Sid wanting to leave the company. We gave immerse support to all of Sid's efforts. Not sure who was not giving Civ support? You got all the Civilization stuff wrong on Eric Dott. I never said anything about giving Avalon Hill any royalties in the lunch we had discussing the Civ Board Game. Thanks for your efforts. About 80% correct. Best, Wild Bill Stealey, Co-Founder and former CEO, MicroProse Software.

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  4. Tim Trzepacz
    Tim Trzepacz says:

    The console games from MicroProse didn't exactly fail. They just didn't have the money to manufacture expensive cartridges.
    The Sega Genesis/Megadrive version of "Pirates'! Gold" that I worked on sold out completely, all 50k copies that they printed. They never printed more. I think the UK developed "F15 Strike Eagle" for Sega also sold out, although there were a great many returns. (We called them "Walmart rentals"… Walmart had such a liberal return policy that people would just buy the game and return it to Walmart if they finished it or didn't like it, treating it as a rental service. When we tested the returned games, all but a handful were in perfectly working condition, and many of Pirates' had full save slots!)
    We had completed versions of "Ancient Art of War in the Skies" and "Impossible Mission 2025" that were shelved due to lack of funds and lack of enthusiasm from Sega for the games (they gave us a score of how well they thought the games would do.) I think maybe AAWS made it to the Sega Channel game streaming service at some point.
    There was also a completed SNES version of Sid's old "Airborne Ranger" game that they were trying very hard to slap a GI Joe license on. They didn't manage to do that, but that probably made the contacts that led to them being acquired by Hasbro years later.
    There was also a nifty platformer called "TinHead" that was developed for the Sega Genesis/Megadrive by MicroProse UK that they didn't ship. I think they swapped the graphics out and licensed it to Ballistix where it was eventually released. We also looked at releasing "The Chaos Engine" in the US, but passed on it.
    The arcade division of MicroProse did deliver one other arcade game, "B.O.T.S.S. Battle of the Solar System" a giant robot fighting simulator. For the time, it was interesting (anything with smooth 3d was interesting), but not a hit.
    The UK version of MicroProse was sort of interesting. They felt like they were a profitable company, although the parent in the US felt that was entirely on the backs of the US IP. They had their own development and licensing and actually did some interesting stuff that was kinda outside of the US MicroProse military sim mold, although I'm not sure how much of that came from the Rainbird , but I know that "Tinhead" and "X-Com" came from the UK, and that that they published "Rick Dangerous"and "Midwinter" at some point.
    There was also a whole adventure games division (where Brian Reynolds started at MicroProse) that actually put out 5 Sierra-style games before they were shut down. MicroProse spent a LOT of money on the tail of Civilization's success, trying to diversify into many different areas, but not quite having the quality of product or the investment to really make a go of it. It didn't help that upper management (Bill) didn't really believe in anything but the military sims.

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  5. Eric Barlow
    Eric Barlow says:

    Did you know the city skyline on the box of Civilization and Civilization II is Charlotte, NC? The Rameses II exhibition was at the Mint Museum in 1987. Not sure if that’s the reason, but it’s a nice bit of trivia to have my home city immortalized on the box of two games.

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  6. rgerber
    rgerber says:

    this content is another level. Longago i've watched a lot of Matt Barton videos, i even bought his book. But this is a whole other level of documentary style videos on all the old, classic PC (CD Rom) Games. Impressive

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  7. Hash-Slinging Slasher
    Hash-Slinging Slasher says:

    Wow! Kim keeps pushing out some of the best gaming content on this platform and is somehow still under 100k subs?
    The amount of work put into this video is incredible. It really sucks "the algorithm" doesn't reward this kind of info packed, long form, documentary style content. It is criminal this isnt one of the biggest gaming channels on youtube. Seriously.

    Reply
  8. Peter
    Peter says:

    The screenshot of the civilisation review shows the 1991 price is £35! That’s equivalent to £72 in 2022 prices!! The ‘big box’ games were expensive! 😮

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  9. Matt James
    Matt James says:

    That was really interesting, I'd definitely seen some of it before but it was good to see it together. An interesting one was Sm Tower that I didn't know about. A guy called Gamerzakh does lots of videos about new and upcoming city builders and one of the 'In' themes seems to be Side on city builders. Some specifically about bulding upwards so it's nice to maybe see where the inspiration probably came from.

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  10. モレナウエル
    モレナウエル says:

    I remember playing a cracked and hacked version of Civ1 which would give your settlers infinite actions and it made the game so much more interesting. Not to mention the trick (build improvement, select, clear, rinse and repeat) that the game enabled so that you could build anything in 1 turn, terrible design mistake.
    Civ 2 was cool when I played it on Windows back in the day; I remember the ski troops. But I always gravitate towards the first, original one. On Pc.

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  11. Gaming Tonight
    Gaming Tonight says:

    Last Civ I bought was Civ III. But mostly I play Civ II, the best Civ of all time! And I ABSOLUTELY LOVE Covert Action! I had no downsides for me at all. And even today, it seems "up to date" in terms of it's gameworld.

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  12. AudieHolland
    AudieHolland says:

    Here's why Nuke Spies and Fundamentalist units were very effective:
    – building a spy unit cost almost nothing, less than an infantry unit I believe;
    – same goes for a fundamentalist unit although they were just militia, not as good incombat;

    The obvious advantage of smuggling in a dirty bomb by spy over nuking an enemy city with an ICBM:
    building the latter would literally take ages.
    Also, once the enemy had developed its anti-nuke umbrella system, ICBMs became even less cost effective.
    For less than the price and time to build an ICBM, you could send four spies with dirty bombs on a transport to devastate and annihillate enemy cities.

    Though I never used fundamentalist units, being just a militia unit under a different name, you could have these guard your cities, while the actual trained infantry units could be sent to invade enemy territory.

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