Sid Meier's Memoir!

Sid Meier is a genius. Pirates! remains a masterpiece and I've lost chunks of my life to his strategy games and even his flight sims. All that being said, Meier's Memoir is a bit like the common of experience of Civ:
- enthralling early game with nostalgia inducing looks at the other side of the games that shaped your youth and the industry.
- bit of lost momentum in the middle where you start wondering if Meier will expand more on conflict in his career given what you know about things coming to a head at Microprose, etc. (he doesn't)
- a slog of an endgame where you realize even his attempt at answering critiques of the genre he defined (the whig history baked into Civ) is completely unsatisfying.

Sid Meier's games remain great. His perspective on his career and any meaningful conflict in his field is surprisingly shallow. For someone who acknowledges his own myth as being built around creating interesting decisions, his retrospective doesn't touch on any issue being within his control. Reflections on momentous decisions like splitting with Bill Stealey or consideration of the effects of “the crunch” on developers' lives just float by like a cloud on the Spanish Main. This book is just such a disturbingly uncritical look at Meier's “Greatest Hits” that you're left wondering why a mind capable of such great and creative analysis couldn't apply the same scrutiny to his own career?