Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier's Civilization
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this 2017 GDC classic game postmortem, Civilization creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell the story of how Shelley's background in board game design and Meier's history of sim game development blended together perfectly to create what is perhaps the biggest and longest-running strategy game franchise in the world.
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I wish these gentleman knew what a joy they gave my father when Civ came out. That man played I, II, III religiously for nearly 2 decades. Even after 4 and 5 came out, you could find him at his desk, conquering the world yet again as the Americans in Civ III. He played all the way up to 2 days before he died in 2015. Bless these guys, truly.
Civ for life
your father was great
As a 11 year old playing Civ II, I credit the game for the biggest explosion of my vocabulary in all my life.
These guys made me into a tech geek, this eventually after decades led me in the industry. I'll always remember playing civ as kid, just as formative as diablo
I concur. But, civ 2.
The game that learned me English.
That's a very nice compliment, i was about 16
I learned English playing Leisure Suit Larry, but my history from the civs.
These two guys are 25 year veterans of the game industry; their contributions cannot be overstated! And yet they struggled to get the PC to do what they had planned when this lecture started 😂
Make that 41 years in the industry.
@@cotydaniel2661 yeah I forget that the 80’s were 40 years ago! My mistake 😂
It's strange how I've know the name "Sid Meier" since I was a young child because his name is in the title of everything he makes, but it never really occurred to me that he was an actual person alive today. I thought of him in the same sense I think of historical figures, just a name attached to historical events (or a classic game in this case).
He also looks a lot like my dad... like if he and Teller from Penn and Teller had a common cousin or something. I'm very weirded out right now...
My first game of civ 1, played with my dad and brother over my shoulder. I was so bad at the game I just sent a settler all over the map. Few hundred turns later a bomber tries to take me out in the early days of flight. Settler took out the bomber. Never forget that kill
I love that you played as the Last Nomadic Tribe, or the "undiscovered peoples" that shoot down modern drones :D
I had a choice of buying Civilization or Ultima VII in a store back in 1992 and went with Civilization because my PC didn't have enough RAM to run Ultima. I made the right choice and spent many nights playing the game.
45:51 I loved every bit of the information that Civ 1 gave the player, including the glorious replay feature at the end of the game. They should have kept all of that stuff in every version of Civ that followed...
There was a replay feature in one of the later ones, maybe Civ 4, where it would give you the outline of the world map with coloured blobs of each civ's territory and cities to scroll through.
All that information gave more meaning to your actions. It is quite easy to dismiss building libraries in favor of markets for additional cash (I think that is what they did in the first Civs), but then you look up your civs stats and see the literacy rates being abysmally low. That is when you start questioning your choices.
P.S. All that information was also available in Civ 2 (at least in the Test of Time version).
@@RexIXXXX You are so right. The only game I remember playing before Civ 1 with that kind of feedback was SimCity. Your City/Civ wasn't just good/bad or big/small. It was happy/unhappy, rich/poor, smart/dumb, etc. It made being a mayor or tribal leader much more of a role-playing exercise.
@@Septimus_ii You may be right. I never played all that much of the Civs that followed 2. The magical feeling of the first two just wasn't there as much. Plus, adult life makes more demands on your time...
They have that in Civ 5
Bruce Shelley is such a avid nerd he reflexes to Live long and prosper sign when being casually introduced. :D
That's what I was thinking.
45:51 "Redshirt Demographics" -- another Star Trek reference!
0:10
Played this a lot. I remember one summer when I decided to dig up our old 386 in the morning and found Civilization installed on it. (Pirated of course, I made it up to you later Sid. :)) I started a game and before I knew it my mom was calling me for dinner. I had just played 8 hours of this game in one stretch... :P
I am 40 now and I am so glad to be finally able to listen to the great creators of my favourite videogame ever. During lockdown for covid I tried Civ 1 for fun again after having played the various editions a lot in my childhood/teen years and discovered some new amazing tactics and elements of the game. For example I discovered that customizing the world small it becomes possible to win the game extremely early in 980 BC with just chariots and triremes. It is not possible to do it earlier because before that time if you destroy a civilization it restarts again somewhere else. I was also able to reach the invention of Railroad in 760 BC by using a particular strategy of building very fast a lot of small cities very near to each other. I would have a lot of other stories about CIV 1-2-3-4 etc
I am also 40 and listening to this for the first time and feel similarly. What a pleasure to see and listen to the people behind my (our!) favorite game. On my side of the pond, I've been playing Civilization as my coping mechanism for my work. I work for the President of my country as his spokesperson, and we're one of the only countries to remain COVID-19 free. I think having Civilization as a release-valve for the stress of the Pandemic is part of the reason we've been successful so far.
@@Viperclarkx01 wtf.
Hello from the bowels of Midwest US.
57:30 Civ 1 saved me when my AP history teacher singled me out with "What is conscription?"
clutch save
I love games that teach you as you play. Empire Total war taught me about tactics (fire by ranks), square formation, different rates of ships and the puckle gun.
Civilisation had a really cool game guide which was like 200 pages long that my dad bought me for Christmas. It had about 50% history in it as well as 50% game mechanics.
Also his other game Sid Meirs Gettysburg they had in the box an actual copy of a "Riflemans Handbook", an exact copy of training material they gave civil war soldiers, brilliant.
i hate teachers like that
Yes, and you could say, it allows you to make rifles
Civ 1 was the game that got me into gaming, I think. Monkey Island, Wolf3d, SimCity, Commander Keen... all important - but civ made me think about it while I was not playing, and taught me so much as a kid. Thanks guys!
Sid Meier, Bruce Shelly, and Will Wright changed my whole life for the better.
Truth is, Bruce Shelley is very underrated, but I’m glad that they mentioned Avalon Hill. Nearly all Sid Meier games are “inspired” by Avalon Hill. Yes, Colonization too (see "Conquistador" from 1976). There was a fight going on between Avalon Hill designers and Microprose - until Shelley switched sides, and Microprose won. Shelley even worked at Avalon Hill on the original board game of Railroad Tycoon (1986), long before Sid Meier made “his” Railroad Tycoon (1990). I highly recommend that you play the Avalon Hill “Civilization” (1980) board game, not only due to the resource and citizen system, but the tech card tree system ;) Kudos to Sid Meier, for obvious reasons, but honor to whom honor is due
I started gaming with avalon hill's "Gettysburg" a wargame on a map...playing as a teenager,,, and other AH games as well later. To me AH was huge in wargaming Those games set me up for Sid Meier's Civilization, my first great computer game addiction. (And there was X-Com also but that is another story!). I remember thinking at the time wouldn't these war games be so much better if they could be done on a computer, but computers were barely into hobby stage.
There _is_ a tiny chance that a spearman could swim out to a battleship, quietly kill the guards, then scupper the ship.
Ships can run aground, magazines can explode, storms can sink, friendly-fire can destroy. There are many examples of advanced militaries suffering losses without any enemy action. I always imagined the spearman watching from shore and laughing at the battleship blowing up on its own.
They can also set fire on the ship etc. - possible. Never had a problem with this one.
Scupper? A scupper lets water flow off the maindeck is a ship....To "scuttle" is to sink the ship.
@@6StimuL84 Scupper means to destroy something such as a boat while scuttle means to deliberately sink. To be fair both words work here.
@@paulosullivan3472 I was a military sailor for 2 decades and I just explained what the terms mean......
Thank you for the video. CIV was the game I learned English with. Printed civilopedia helped a lot with that =) Great game, countless hours spent. I'm glad my dad showed it to me back in the days.
Best thing that can ever happen as a game designer is having someone you can bounce ideas off with. Love the chemistry between these two.
When I was in middle school in 1998, I played THE CRAP out of Civilization 2. Something so addicting about that core gameplay... Can't beat a classic!
Same. I even got one of my teachers to let me install Civ 2 MGE on all of the computers in the classroom. It was glorious.
Huh. I just realized I have never actually seen what Sid Meier looked like before this video.
I just saw Tom Clancy for the first time last week.
@@MarvelousLXVII Indeed, and to take Civ 1 as the example (because it was being discussed in the video), the scientist telling you that you have discovered a technology is in fact Sid.
I was about 16 years old when CIV I came out and I was working at Software Etc! When it did come, I bought it immediately and took it home to play, starting at about 6PM. Next thing I knew, it was 6AM!
No exaggeration either, true story. It was then that I learned the meaning of "just one more turn!"
The old games had those wonderful pedias and I learned so damned much,
Been playing civ since its creation in 1990s as a kid with my father. Still playing and now have past legacy to my son. Great game. Kept me out of trouble as a youngster. Thank u Sid Meier and staff.
Today I learned that Sid Meier can speak without opening his mouth.
I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking this
A turn-based game that lasts 30 minutes actually sounds rather perfect, in hindsight.
It's the length of Civ games that have made them continually inaccessible to me. I don't have two months to do a session.
Check out Into The Breach, it’s a rogue-like turn based tactics game
In the most humble and sincere way possible;
You CAN play a 30 minute game of Civ. it is possible to do, just really hard - the “one more turn” phenomenon is real my friend! You’ll get so immersed in your game and so focused on achieving that next goal that you won’t notice you’ve been playing for 6 hours :)
Honestly: give Civ a try, friend! If you want a 30 minute session, you can play it for 30 minutes (I do it myself!), you’ll probably find yourself lost in the game for hours on end - but you can end it whenever you want :)
Never got bored with CIV, such a good game/series.
Been playing Civ1 for 30 years straight. I wonder is there a scene for this or something, or a forum? Never talked to somebody else playing this and I think it would be fun to talk mad strats and stuff.
Have you thought about making videos? Playthroughs/Special Strategies/ect.? While they might fly under the radar for a while, I think there would be a audience for them. And that audience might be exactly the scene you are looking for.
Reddit has a forum also steam i thunk
Oh for civ 1 hmmm
Just google it. There is one for civ/colonization. But they also have civ 2, 3,4,5,6
Yeah, it's called civfanatics and it has not just 1-6, but beyond earth, revolutions, alpha centauri, and more. :-)
I constantly realize how Civilization and Age of Empires gave me some understanding of history in a fun way. Sure me playing the Mongolians and actually being the ones to build the great wall of China only to have zulus take over half my empire may not be accurate, but the info of wonders and civilizations was amazing. History books were not engaging enough.
Civilization I, is one of the best games ever made.
Civ3 to me is the pinnacle of the series. I loved it & still own it.
Bring back random maps again in the gaming industry!!! So many times I love a game ie Battlefield 5 but you are playing the same maps over and over again.
I understand first person shooters requires awesome graphics so makes it hard but strategy games, especially old style hex games should as a norm have map generators. Age of Empires series had it, Civilisation series had it early Combat Mission games had it.
Please bring it back. I have also seen world maps ie Command Operations and Hearts of Iron 4 type maps and that is cool to because the one map is so huge.
CMO - Command Military Operations.
You guys are geniuses. Thank you for creating such a wonderful game, I grew up with it, and still play it, and I've learnt a lot from it.
I still love this game, god knows how many hours I sunk into it when I was a kid. I still play it from time to time. Still the best of the series IMO
Took me 45 min to realize this wasn't penn and teller
IM SO GLAD I SAW THIS COMMENT 2 MINS INTO VIDEO. I WAS CONFUSED
shit these two got more tricks than those bozos
lel
I wish you wouldn't of typed that. I cant unsee it now
@@nextlifeonearth He isn't actually talking. That's why the dub looks so strange.
as a 9 year old playing the first civ 1 back in the 90s. I can say Sid Meiers Civ 1-2 were my favorites of all time
I thought there where articles about Ghandi in Civ1.
Something like he was aggressive 1 and democracy reduces aggessivness by 1 or 2 and you have an negative overflow,
so his aggresivness becomes 255.
I don't believe Sid Meier programmed the game, so there's a chance he may not know why the bug exists or may have just glossed over it.
That's the idea.
Yes he had the lowest agression value and certain stuff could lower agression a bit sending Gandhi all the way to the other spectrum. Since then Warmonger Gandhi has become a running gag that the creators themself sneak in in various ways.
Yes, the joys of unsigned integers.
It was Aggressiveness 255 out of 10... And because it happened in Modern Era, it looked like Gandhi was peaceful until he got his hands on nuclear weapons and went mad with power.
Warmed to the two speakers about half way in. Good talk. Interesting project/game.
Awesome talk from two great man. much thanks to GDC for realeasing awesome conferences like this one for free.
Civ and AoE was the reason that i become to like history. Think i passed half of my playtime Reading the civilopedia and the Help&histórical tips. 👍👍👍
I've played so much Civ in mylife time, even though never the first one, and I'm just grateful to this two guys for giving me this wonderful experience.
45:11 I like how Bruce puts that - the computer was having the fun.
When Bruce high-fived Sid around 38:30 I was reminded of their discussion of the warrior vs. the battleship for some reason.
I learned quite a lot from Civ. Civ 2 is still my favorite for that reason.
I have to agree with the guy about the end game replay. After such an epic play, you want to see it to get a full sense of story and completion. Definitely a huge missing
In the PC DOS version, you could put a settler on a ship and build a railroadbridge from t.e.x. Australia to South America :P And send units. They changed that in a later version.
Civ V is my Mother's most played game by a huge margin. She fell right into the aesthetic, role-play, and refining her play. I owe this series one more adherent to the church of gamesfolk.
Ever since i watched my dad play Civ III as a kid ive been playing it on and off for years
playing this on my 486...still fun
On the amiga , not that fun. T
At the endgame every turn took like a minute
@@Micke12312 the good old days
22:29 Bruce Shelley has forgotten more interesting anecdotes and observations than most people can come up with a lifetime!
My ideal weekend in middle school was Civilization IV Golden and a cup of Aztec hot cocoa
If you tell the truth, have a foot in the stirrup - Turkish Proverb
One of my fav things to do is to play a one-city scenerio.
No settlers.
The city grows pretty fast; but you run the risk of being conquered by a neighboring civ early on.
But it does make for an exciting and challenging game.
I can play CK2 for hours, and it's semi-realtime. Just giving the player the ability to take their time on any given action is what makes these complex history sim games work, I think.
I mean...yes and no. CK2 and Civilization are superficially similar, but they're going for _very_ different experiences. Civilization's more quantized units of time (and arguably space) make it easier for players to grok how long it will take to finish the various things they're building and doing across their civilization, to meaningfully grasp how X improvement would make Y action easier. (And, of course, there's the "one more turn" phenomenon they cultivated in later entries.)
Crusader Kings 2 doesn't have that, doesn't have a dozen countdowns across your kingdom for a New Thing being built; it tries to immerse the player in the story of individual kings and lords, in the world they inhabit. Breaking the game into discrete units of time would make it feel less like a world and more like, well, a board game.
Giving the player time to think about their actions is important, but saying _just_ makes it sound like that's the _only_ thing you need to worry about when pacing your gameplay loop, and that's just not true.
I think the Palladium tabletop RPG games did the Spearman vs Battleship thing correctly.
They had two separate damage types: Standard and Mega. 100 Standard Damage = 1 Mega Damage. Humans, animals and the like had Standard Hit Points. The big stuff like Tanks, Battleships, Robots (from Robotech/Macross) had Mega Hit Points, so unless your Infantry unit could do at least 100 Standard Damage in a single shot then it effectively dealt 0 Mega Damage and could sit there all day pinging at a Tank and not do a thing at all.
so these are the men responsible for my lost childhood, thanks guys
These guys cost me thousands of hours of productivity and I love them for it!
I can't think of any name more evocative of the strategy game genre than Sid Meier.
33:27, this is a common myth about the stirrup. It was an important invention, but did nothing to help with lance charges. The implication is that it allowed people to keep their feet planted, so the body doesn't rotate back when the lance pushes back against them. But, the stirrup hangs from the saddle and can swing back and forth -- so it does nothing to prevent feet from moving forward at all. However, it DID allow people to stand in the saddle, making horse archers much more effective.
It's been a while since I've ridden a horse, but I seem to remember using the stirrup to step onto the horse, so it must not rotate that much.
Right, the stirrup keeps you steady vertically, helping with mounting or standing while riding. But, it hangs from the saddle, freely moving back and forth with horizontal forces, like the push-back from a lance strike.
@@evilbob840 I don't believe it moves that easily, but OK.
Indeed! For lance charges they used special high-backed saddles to keep the rider from getting knocked off.
The stirrup is important because it actually gives the rider some anchorage while also essentially inventing the mechanical notion of suspension. This method of distributing mass for more efficient transportation was later applied to the chassis/body system of coaches and carriages which gave rise to modern car design...
Before stirrups cavalry had to literally clutch the back of the horse between their legs to stay on, use a stool or a slave to even mount the horse, and the horses suffered terminal injury earlier in their lives due to bearing the entire undistributed weight and shock of the rider...
Great talk, are the slides available anywhere?
Wait, the Civilization devs used children's history books to research for the game? I get their logic, but...that must have been quite a sight to see. Especially if they were checking them out from a local library like I'm imagining.
"More kid's history books?"
"It's for a game we're developing."
"Ah, those weirdos."
more like "911? I think I know somebody who kidnapped a child"
@@2sdd … kidnapped them and is trying to educate them in history. :-)
@@2sdd Just say you're an low grade school teacher/elementary teacher. Pretty much the only logical excuse one can have :D
i completely disagree. the "for kids" label isn't bad per se. i e.g. really enjoyed the "a little history of the world" by ernst gombrich (which is called "...for young readers" in the german original) because it gives a broad overview and a sense of overall context. specific history gets dull fast if its too detailled. i guess most people can use a broader view before getting to the nitty gritty of anything in that realm. perhaps "for kids" is a label people use if they don't dare to admit its meant for the average joe like me and want to avoid being called too simplistic for adults.
That's an interesting viewpoint, but not one I can relate to. I find specific, detailed accounts of historical societies _fascinating._ I could(/have) spend _hours_ reading about the social and economic institutions binding farmers to their lords, or how Greek poleis defined themselves culturally, or the differences between rice- and wheat-cultivating regions. History books marketed to children only seem to cover the parts of history I was taught as a child, without much additional depth or detail added. There's only so much you can learn from another shallow skim across entire fields of study.
I would absolutely love to hear one of these talks concentrating on Sid Meier's Pirates! I still am in marvel with the simulation aspects underlying that game. I really want to hear some of the secrets of that design because to this day, nobody has done a game quite like Pirates! There are some that take some good aspects from it, but never as a whole.
I still consider Sid to be one of the best simulation designers in the world. Definitely in the top 3 if not the best. He makes certain simulations, that would make a developer's head spin, look easy.
Civilization, Railroad Tycoon and Pirates! are paradigmatic games.
"Kind of grease your path" -- With the Mongol Horde strategy, I had mechanized infantry in 50 AD once.
WOuld have been a beter cut to, split the screen horizontal or put Sid & Bruce down in a corner and keep the presentation on screen. :/ You did better on other re-caps (John Romero talking about Doom/Iid or Diablo 1 or Diablo III development etc).
Love that those guys talked about testing (:
Alpha Centauri was Sid's greatest work. I still play the crap out of it.
Absolutely agree
We all need a Bruce.
we love king day and castle were the best things in civ and then they've removed it
I still remember getting Civ2.
My brother had the original, but Civ2 was mine!
Heck I still have the manual for that. Sadly lost the tech tree poster...
I managed to flood the kitchen playing one more turn when filling the sink to do the dishes, 20 minutes later "what is that splashing noise.."
Man, Sid Meier, that name is legendary, probably mostly because it's in the name of all the Civ games.
Also Railroads, Alpha Centauri, Locomotion, and Simcity among others. It's really quite impressive
Empire Deluxe - I was SO addicted to that :)
I loved the early civs, wasted many hours on this series, still playing today, but what really gave me fun were the fights between my advisors back in the day!
And then the paradox grand strategy games said: not complex enough. Great talk.
I love Civ1 and Civ3, the whole concept, details.. everything. On other hand these games have some conceptual problems like AI is "cheating
" with research
(esp. in Civ3) which leads into crazy spiral and the player have no chance enjoy individual historical periods
because it's faster and faster
. Also player is forced to play in "pro style"
instead of "enjoying the game
", otherwise AI will have tanks and civilization with extreme amount of bonuses from wonders and you will run with a Horsemens and manage
poor cities :)
Sid isn't the most modest guy of the universe but I found him nice in this exposition. And Bruce is simply amazing, with his casual posture and little mistakes! I didn't get what they said about Mao at 52:55, could someone explain?
Mao and Stalin killed many millions of their own people, and yet the game has them as the representatives of their civilizations. It's like making Hitler the leader of the Germans.
Twitter and the Internet would blow up over the issue nowadays. The world has changed a lot since 1991...
I spent so many hours on Civ 1. Great game.
46:20 Actually Civ3 and Civ4 had demographics. I always enjoyed that screen. Surprised they missed that. :)
You covered exploits without discussing the "settlers build over and over and over and complete it in one turn" exploit... and the "set to build a peaceful unit and pay to complete it and THEN switch it to a war unit" exploit? :)
If you could sue a guy for stealing time - Sid Meier would be the one of Earths most in dept persons!
if you think about it the truth is it was the best money spent since you got so much fun for so cheap less than a penny an hour even if you bought the most expensive version possible . contrast that to games you've mastered in a day ot two at most.
I said one more turn 6 hours ago and its now 3AM while I listen to their talk.
Sid Meier seems like the most wholesome man on the planet
This game is on the Super Nintendo and actually runs well surprisingly
That moment when a pike man kills my tank on deity mode. Good times.
I killed a helicopter with one of my leftover warriors playing civ 4 as a kid, the pop off was real
I played this game for like 10 years
I play this game, like, today. :)
I think the most annoying thing in Civ 1 is that you can't force units belonging to friendly civs to leave your territory. It's a shame it wasn't brought up.
One thing they never got working very well was the trading side of the game.
"Spearman vs. Battleship"
Isn't this the premise of damn near every single-player action game to begin with?
civ 3!!! the only problem is that eventually one move takes 6 hours and you forget what you were planning to do...
Nearly failed high school because of Civ 3. Thanks Sid
Is Sid a ventriloquist? His mouth barely moves.
It only appears that way because his mouth moves at a nearly precise frequency of 30 times per second so it matches up with the video almost exactly.
He mus' be English.
He's learned to encrypt his speech in such a way as to effectively disguise it from contemporary and future lip reading software.
Thank you, Sid. You're considered by many one of the geniuses of this ... er... cvilization!
Love Sid's accent, kinda sounds like Fred Rogers
I had the original game on Amiga. It was great! So much better than the PC version!
Simon McDowell How so?
Better graphics!
The 500 ? It took forever to play on that
@@amigabang6157 oh wow I had no idea my comment had replies. Well from what I remember I enjoyed the sound effects and even music better on the Amiga. I mean at least the music may be just me though.
this game changed my life
My god, remember Microprose?
one of the best of the best, Pirates!, Sword of the Samurai, Darklands, Bloodnet, X-Com, phew, you name it!
Still have my SX-64 and all their old classics...Red Storm Rising, M1 Tank Platoon, Covert Action, Apache, Pirates.....
dont forget Transport Tycoon
Let's not forget Master of Orion and Master of Magic!
@@kto9490 yep, and Railroad Tycoon before that
I wonder how many % of players actually keep replaying, and thus if the 'every time you play it, it's different because of random maps' argument holds up. I'd argue that because of the randomized maps everyone that plays it actually has a similar experience of unique wonder. There is no outragious speed play/optimization possible, you need to strategize at least parts for every game.
Never bought anything as good in value as Civ so many hours of fun even at top dollar that game was a steal :D
thank you Sid
"U cant play a real time game for 20 hours" stellaris coming forth from the shadows: "or can u"
Still miss the beauty of city view in CIV 1.
I play once a year, and just roleplay like crazy lol; make it a 2-3 day long thing where I wind down.
End of Game Replay always seemed "core" to me.
Legendary Cities is another feature that is a loss for the franchise.
That said, I agree that the balance of complexity has gotten much better. In early iterations of Civ, I'd always get to a point where the game was won but the sheer tedium of cycling through my cities led me to abandon my games.
Civilization 4 is the peak of the entire series; perfect in every way. It’s been downhill since.
Ah u ettee deb du duette
Not in every way, no. Easily the best in series and up there among strategy games though.
Tottally agree!!! Civ 5- 6 is crappy no stacking. Civ 4 was where it was at and it even had a mod or mode where random events would happen like diplomatic incidents occured. I also remember more war being involved. The latest civs the wars are boring.
I like 5 and 6, but 4 is definitely a classic - the pinnacle of the earlier (non-hex) Civ games. There is not much stacking, but in my last Civ 6 game I had 7 Giant Death Robots. War was kind of fun :)
It’s like the opposite of penn and teller