He started out writing code for department store cash registers and went on to engineer a strategy franchise that sold over 73 million copies. This episode traces Sid Meier, born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1954, from a University of Michigan computer science degree paired with deep history study, to an Atari 800 in 1981, to founding MicroProse with Bill Stealey in 1982 and single-handedly designing, coding, drawing, and scoring flight simulators like F-15 Strike Eagle until 1985.

We explore his rule of finding the fun part and ruthlessly discarding everything else, his refusal to include blood and gore, Robin Williams' dinner-table advice that put his name on the box for Sid Meier's Pirates, the leap to Railroad Tycoon and Civilization's technology tree, the arcade-market dispute that led him to sell his half of MicroProse in 1990 and stay on as ...