We started our game on either side of a vast lake set in a subcontinent, the south-eastern-most part of a Pangean super-continent. The Celtic and Carthaginian empires, 1860 AD. It's easy for beginnings to get lost in the mists of time. Before, however, lies nothing but vast stretches of prehistory, a long dark age illuminated by nothing but the faint and flickering spotlights of our unreliable memories. After that point, our game is fairly well documented. After about 200 turns (and more than two years of playing), we had just entered the 1860s. In the end, the oldest save game we could find dates back to January 2016. I even rifled through ancient emails which mentioned our game in passing in the hopes of pinning down the timeline.
We gathered our save games from several machines, flash drives and Google Drive. My friend and I compared notes, trying to reconstruct what had happened years ago. When I sat down to prepare this article, it felt like historical or archaeological research. But soon our time with the game had to be measured not in months, but in years, and our game of Civilization had become a sort of parallel history to our personal lives. On and off, we kept chipping away at our task, sometimes meeting every few weeks for a couple of hours, sometimes once every couple of months. It was folly, but by the time we realised, it was too late we had become thoroughly invested, the game had taken on a life of its own, and there was nothing else but to see it to its (eventual) end. If we had, we'd probably have played something else instead. We must have embarked on our epic enterprise sometime in late 2013, though neither of us suspected we were about to spend the next five years embroiled in a seemingly never-ending coop hot-seat game of Civilization 5. For the first 5000 years, nothing much happened.
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