Sid Meier Names Gaming's Three Most Important Innovations -- Part Of A Lunchtime Chat At The Algonquin Hotel

(Below is part of my latest GameFile column. For the full thing, check out MTVNews.com)

...No one else wanted to talk about Bach. I didn't even know the proper Bach-related follow-up. There were reporters from Maxim, Popular Mechanics, AOL and other outlets around the table. (Sid only said, "Oh, cool!" when it was mentioned there was someone there from MTV News).

Someone asked him what the most important innovations in gaming history were. Meier should know, since he'd been making games for about two decades. I think the question came from a public-relations guy who was otherwise asking questions that somehow kept involving mentions of "Civilization: Revolutions." This one question, though, elicited a good response.

Meier stopped to think of three innovations more important than anything else in gaming history. The first he mentioned was IBM making a personal computer. Another was the development of "Sim City" and other games that encouraged construction, rather than just destruction. The third, Meier said, was Nintendo's Official Seal of Quality, a 1980s stamp of gaming quality that he said helped counter the flow of bad games that had drowned so many previous video game consoles.

For more on my lunch with Meier -- a lunch desgined to emulate the literary conversations once held at the Algonquin Hotel by Dorothy Parker -- check out MTVNews.com