The Double-A Team: A breezy summer fling with Civilization Revolution

I used to be so jealous of people who played Civilization. I'd hear them talk about spending whole days or weekends engrossed in it, and how they wanted cultural victories by building great wonders for their people, about how they wanted to shape their worlds. It sounded like heaven. I wanted to spend all day in my pyjamas playing conqueror. Had I known I actually would be spending all day in my pyjamas in 2020, I might not have minded, but this was 2008. And there was something in the air back then.

It was the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation and for some reason it felt like a new age. I suppose it was to do with games going online into a bold new frontier. Old rules didn't seem to apply any more. New things were possible. And it was with this spirit someone at Firaxis made a wonderful suggestion: What if now was the time to bring Civilization to consoles?

It wouldn't be easy of course. PC players and console players like slightly different things. A menu-heavy, micro-managey desktop game doesn't naturally translate to being played on a controller while slumped on a sofa a few feet away from a TV. To make it work, Civilization, Firaxis would have to redesign it.

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