No, that was a later release. Colonization was a Micropose game in its own right designed by, imho, the real genius behind the series, Brian Reynolds who later designed Alpha Centauri.
Alpha Centauri is the only game of the whole genre I could get into. The SF setting, the faction leaders and their personalities, voiceovers, music, atmosphere... That game is basically my reason for installing wine and playonlinux.
Me too. I plan to try another TBS game in the future but Alpha Centauri was only one. And excellent. I loved all the options of gameplay and strategy that didn't exist in an RTS. Plus, the technology tree was well thought out and even gave me ideas. :)
So who made "Civilization: Call to power"? Or was that just the publisher still owning the civ name at that point, and neither SM nor BR were involved with that?
Call to Power was the result of some fairly convoluted boardroom-slash-courtroom warfare conducted between 1995 and 1998.
In the mid-'90s, legendary boardgame publisher Avalon Hill noticed that MicroProse was doing well with computer games named Civilization, remembered that they had published a board game way back in 1980 with the same name (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_%28board_game%29, https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71/civilization), and observed that their board game and MicroProse's computer games were, at least thematically, similar.
Based on that similarity, AH argued that MicroProse's Civilization games had ripped off their IP. MicroProse and Sid Meier disputed this, with Meier saying he'd never played the board game before designing his Civ, but AH stuck to its guns. Since they'd published the board game, they argued, and since (they asserted) MicroProse's computer game was just a derivative work based on it, all rights to the Civilization name for both board and computer games belonged rightfully to them.
They then licensed the name to Activision to use in developing its own computer Civilization games, to compete directly against MicroProse's in the marketplace. MicroProse responded to this by buying the company owned by the original designer of the board game, Francis Tresham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Tresham_%28game_design...), arguing that if the board game gave anyone claim on the Civilization name it was Tresham, not his publisher AH, and that in acquiring Tresham's company they'd also acquired not just any computer-game rights the board game would confer, but the rights to the board game itself too.
AH was in pretty desperate financial straits by this time, so in 1998 they caved and paid MicroProse $411,000 to settle the dispute, yielding to them all rights to the name and stopping publication of the board game. (See http://home.earthlink.net/~pdr4455/fah.html) MicroProse then gave Activision a limited license to the Civilization name so they could publish their work-in-progress game as Civilization: Call to Power.
Call to Power came out to mediocre-at-best reviews and sank like a stone, ending Activision's dream of taking over the franchise. But MicroProse's victory was short-lived, because their own financial situation by this time wasn't great either; just a couple of months after the Avalon Hill settlement the company was sold to Hasbro, at which point it was more or less dismantled and became just another zombie brand.
This is a severe distortion of what really happened. The co-designer of Civilization was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Shelley, who worked at Avalon Hill for six years before moving to MicroProse. The similarities were not coincidental. Civilization (the board game) was extremely successful and well-known, and is still influential on video games, being the origin of the "tech tree." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_tree
> Call to Power came out to mediocre-at-best reviews and sank like a stone, ending Activision's dream of taking over the franchise.
Eh, it did well enough that Activision made a sequel. What really prevented them from taking over the franchise was that their license was a one-game deal: the sequel was released as simply Call to Power 2, without any reference to Civilization. Of course, they never made a third one because the second game sank (aside from the criticisms of the original, the sequel didn't even have name recognition going for it).
Activision also did something really cool and released the sequel's source when they EOL'd it, too.
> just a couple of months after the Avalon Hill settlement the company was sold to Hasbro, at which point it was more or less dismantled and became just another zombie brand.
Oddly enough, this doesn't go far enough in summarizing the insanity of the acquisitions of that time period. Hasbro actually bought both MicroProse and AH at the same time, and then they turned around and sold off their entire video game business to Infogrames (now Atari) three years later. In fact, it was actually Infogrames/Atari who killed MicroProse: Hasbro was perfectly willing to keep them around as a subsidiary.
Thanks for that, I find these stories of the games industry remarkable in how cut-throat the whole industry seems, but perhaps I just don't see enough of the business level of my own industry to recognise it.
