Civilization II CheckPoint contains something modern game wikis can never recreate: players arguing about what Civilization III should contain before Civilization III existed.
Visit Civilization II CheckPoint
Juan Soulié’s site carries a copyright date of October 22, 1997 and organizes its Civilization II material with names borrowed from the game itself. Maps live under Marco Polo’s Embassy. Scenarios are filed under Darwin’s Voyage. Strategies go to Sun Tzu’s War Academy. Downloads sit beneath the Statue of Liberty.
It is exactly the sort of themed navigation that became unfashionable once every website began sharing the same menu bar.
The site preserved maps, scenarios, strategies, files, links, collaborations, guestbook material, and a section called “Cure for Cancer” devoted to suggestions for the next Civilization game.
That last section is the historical jackpot.
Players wanted multiplayer. More civilizations. Bigger maps. Better diplomacy. Supply lines. Railroads that did not teleport entire armies. Strategic bombing. Borders. Economic warfare. Better artificial intelligence. More units, more technologies, more wonders, and in several cases simply more of everything.
Some suggestions are remarkably close to directions the series eventually took. Others are elaborate wish lists from people imagining what a strategy game might become once computers and networks got stronger.
Before the roadmap belonged to the publisher
Game communities now conduct this kind of discussion on Reddit, Discord, Steam, YouTube, wikis, developer forums, and social networks. The discussion is enormous but fragmented.
A 1997 fan site could make itself the filing cabinet.
Soulié did not merely review Civilization II. He built a place where players could contribute material and collectively think about the game. Even the multilingual entrance reflects the international audience that strategy games were already gathering on the early Web.
The Civilization III suggestion page is especially useful because it preserves expectations rather than hindsight. Nobody on it could compare their ideas against a finished sequel. They were reasoning outward from Civilization II and imagining what better hardware, networking, and design might permit.
That makes the page a small primary source for game-design history.
It also preserves the texture of late-1990s fandom. A fan site did not need permission, a content-management system, a monetization plan, or an official community program. Somebody liked a game enough to make a directory, solicit material, and keep adding pages.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps sites like this in circulation because the interesting part is not merely that Civilization II is old. The interesting part is seeing its players frozen between the game they had and the sequel they were trying to imagine.
The future is much easier to predict after it happens.
This page caught people doing it beforehand.