March 4, 2010 - At IGN, we're a lot of things. Nerds, douches, Achievement whores, over-raters, under-raters, and so much more, but at our core, we are gamers. Each and every one of us has a brain filled with cherished memories that revolve around our hobby. Unwrapping a Nintendo Entertainment System on Christmas morning, beating Streets of Rage with a pal, desperately trying to get Lara Croft's nude code to work – you get the idea. Before all of us who lived the adventure drift into a senile state and forget, IGN thought it would assemble those stories in an ongoing feature called "Gamer Memories."

Here, an editor will walk you through one of his or her favorite memories involving a controller, some kind of dance pad, or (more generally) a memory that was a defining experience for the editor's time with games. On tap for this installment? Why, it's none other than Steve Butts, executive editor of the PC site and avid mustache grower.


BERJAYA
Though there are plenty of games that I love, there's no game that's meant as much to me as Sid Meier's Civilization. I mean, it's not even close. Who I am today, both in terms of many of my personal interests and most of my professional successes, I owe to the influence of this one game. I was into games before Civ; I grew up playing arcade games and the Atari and moved on to the Apple and NES games, but I never really became a fanatic until Civilization. It kindled a love of PC games and history that have really made me who I am today.

Sid Meier's Civilization is a massive strategy game that uses all of history as a backdrop. While that's ambitious enough as far as it goes, the thing that really made Civilization stand out to me at first was the tremendous sense of choice and possibility. This wasn't a game that you played according to the designer's preconceptions. While Mario was jumping around hitting things with his butt and Tetris blocks were falling in a constant, context-free challenge, I was busy building frigates to explore the coasts of my Roman rivals, researching gunpowder to fend off Gandhi's advancing army of knights, and contemplating whether or not to enact a Communist police state to deal with unrest in my cities.

Long before games like Knights of the Old Republic, Fable and Fallout gave players a chance to express their own nature in an RPG setting, Civilization was a wonderful reflection of your unique priorities and morality. It was this idea that players could choose how they wanted to play that really made this game so captivating. Would I be a benevolent ruler, trusting in my kindness and bankroll to win the goodwill of my neighbors? Would I rely on scientific progress to establish colonies on other planets? Or would I just build a massive army and march out to conquer the world?

BERJAYA
Around the time that Civ first came out, I had started college without any real end in mind. I had made an attempt to enroll in the design school, but the sheer a-holishness of the instructors convinced me it wasn't for me. On a whim, I signed up for Dr. Ruzicka's Survey of Ancient History class simply because it fulfilled a general graduation requirement and I thought it might be fun to know more about the Pyramids and triremes that were dominating so much of my free time.

What I learned was what Civilization had been teaching me all along – that the big, seemingly impersonal events and developments in history are almost always the result of decisions made by human beings who had motivations I could relate to. Fortunately, that Ancient History class emphasized this dimension and made me understand that the game, for me, was representing the same sorts of choices and opportunities faced by rulers from Rameses the Great to Abraham Lincoln.

After taking that class, I declared a history major and began learning all I could about the peoples and cultures that came before me. From Solon to Stalin, from Moses to Mandela, Civilization helped me see history at a human level that isn't always readily apparent. More importantly, it started me on a lifelong love of history that continues to this day and has enriched my life immeasurably.

Ah, young Stevie.
Ah, young Stevie.
It also got me this job. After I graduated from college, I was sitting there looking at a pile of grad school applications when Trent Ward and Tal Blevins called and asked if I'd like to start working at IGN. There were loads of historical strategy games coming out in the late 1990s, and IGN wanted someone who knew the difference between an assegai and a sarissa and could explain how the battles of Sharpsburg and Antietam could actually be the same thing. Without Civilization, I wouldn't have been at all prepared for the job.

Over the years, I've branched out from being the "wargames guy" to appreciate the beauty of other gaming genres, but it all started for me back in 1991 with Sid Meier's classic. Even after nearly 20 years, I'm still a fanboy. Meeting Sid Meier for the first time was one of the rare moments in this job that I've been star struck and I found I just couldn't express how much his game has impacted the direction of my life.

So let me just get it on record here:

Thank you, Sid Meier. I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for your amazing game.

What are your favorite Gamer Memories? Tell us your story in the comments below.