According to developer interviews, Civilization 4 went into early development at some point in 2003, roughly two and a half years before its eventual release in October 2005. One of the signs of this was the fact that Firaxis was not the developer of the second Civ3 expansion, Conquests, which was instead handled by BreakAway Games. I was one of the lucky individuals who was able to take part in the beta testing group for Civ3 Conquests for a few months in the summer of 2003, and I can attest from personal experience that we had virtually no interaction with the Firaxis people at the time. I seem to recall that Soren Johnson was pulled in briefly at one point when there was a major issue with the Civ3 AI and that was about it. Clearly Civ4 was already in the early planning stages at this point and Firaxis Games, which was still a small company with about four dozen employees, had shifted its focus over to the next game coming down the pipeline. This worked to the detriment of Civ3, as Conquests wasn't a particularly good expansion, while helping to provide Civ4 with additional time and resources.
Civ4 had a unique development process unlike any other gaming project that I've worked on, and I've taken part in enough alpha and beta tests by this point to have seen quite a few of them. Soren had the key insight to pick out a very small, very select group of the most talented individuals in the Civilization community and bring them on board to become part of the pre-release ("Frankenstein") test group. And for the handful of people who were lucky enough to be part of this group, we were not there solely for public relations or bug hunting purposes, as is the usual case. No, we were legitimately part of the development team for all intents and purposes, with suggestions from the testing group often leading to wholesale reworking of gameplay mechanics or adding new features that otherwise wouldn't have made it into the finished game. The famous short quotes that accompany each new technological discovery in Civ4? Roughly half of them came from the testing group and supplanted less interesting quotes from the Firaxians. The national flags in Civ4? Several of them were reworked at the suggestion of the testing group and greatly improved. The civics system in Civ4? That thing went through a hundred different iterations and would have been a broken mess without the efforts of the testing group. This process yielded immense dividends and made Civ4 an enormously better game, however it required real buy-in on the part of the Firaxians to shepherd a group of several dozen outsiders for long months on end. Other strategy games would greatly benefit from the same process but it's not surprising that few of them are willing to expend the time and effort to do so.
I was able to take part in the Civ4 testing group largely due to my friendship with Sirian, who Soren had wisely picked to serve as the Single Player Group Lead for the Civ4 test group. Sirian and I had crossed paths in the Civ3 succession game forum at CivFanatics, where I think we each recognized a kindred spirit with the same love of writing, gaming, and writing lengthy tracts about gaming. I had spent a great deal of time in 2002 and 2003 taking part in the Civ3 Epics that Sirian created over at Realms Beyond, and once Sirian was sucked into the Civ4 testing project, it was only a matter of time until he tapped me to take part as well. I received my invitation to the testing group in April 2005, a little over six months before release, then had to wait another month for my test CD to arrive in the mail as there had been problems producing the thing. (Yes, back then the files had to be transfered through physical media, heh.)
I would spend the following six months totally absorbed with Civ4, with the game on my mind practically every minute of every day. I was 22 years old and just finishing up with my first year of graduate schooling, not knowing at the time just how many more years would be required before completing my history Ph.D. Once the semester ended in May, I had a completely empty slate for the entirety of the summer before classes began again in the fall, and I was more than happy to fill up that time playing the pre-release test versions of Civ4. I was living in a tiny studio apartment by myself, I didn't have a girlfriend, and all of my fellow grad students had gone home for the summer to leave me alone on a deserted campus. What else was I going to do with my time?
My first experience with Civ4 testing was taking part in the online "Frankenstein" test group. This was a select group of well-known individuals from the Civilization community who had been invited to take part in the testing process prior to release. The Civ4 manual credits about 60 people as filling out the Frankenstein ranks but many of them weren't too involved in the process, which was understandable given that this was an entirely volunteer undertaking. There was a core group of about 25 people who were heavily invested in the testing process and I got to know them very well over the course of the following months. There were a bunch of Single Player folks under the leadership of Sirian, who was creating group tests and staging weekly community events, a couple of modders headed by Isak, and then about 10 people from the Multiplayer ladder who were constantly staging MP games against one another. The Multiplayer testing was led by Friedrich Psitalon and had a gigantic influence on how Civ4 was developed, certainly much more than any other Civilization game in history. Civ4 was fully designed around both Single Player and Multiplayer games and it remains the only Civ game to develop a sizable MP community that didn't require the use of heavy mods to be playable. In particular, the MP testers were responsible for many, many balance changes that improved the Single Player experience.
The Frankenstein test group was highly unusual in the sense that this small group of Civilization fans were given a real chance to make changes to Civ4's gameplay. Most alpha and beta tests where community members are involved turn out to be glorified bug hunts; the developers let some players try the game early but they don't reall care about their opinions on what they find. This was emphatically not the case for Civ4 pre-release testing and I listed above some of the many improvements that the testers provided to the gameplay, far too many than I could ever count. Working with a small group of other Civ-loving fans was an incredible experience and a true joy to behold, probably the single best gaming experience of my entire life. We were taking part in the same group tests, playing against each other in Multiplayer games, and having a total blast while getting to know one another on a personal level. Everyone who loves gaming should be lucky enough to have an opportunity like this.
Making matters even better, the developers at Firaxis were aware that I lived in the state of Maryland and offered me the chance to come work on-site as a quality assurance (QA) tester. I couldn't believe my good fortune: I was going to get to play an unreleased Civilization game, all day, every day, while getting paid for it at the same time?! 
The money was about what you would expect for an entry-level gaming job, roughly $15 per hour (in 2005 dollars), but it was enough to cover my rent during the summer months when I wasn't teaching... and I got to play Civ4 at the same time! This was by far the best summer job that I ever had and I can vividly remember making the drive each day from College Park up to the building in Hunt Valley where Firaxis had its headquarters. Firaxis didn't have its own building at the time and was instead located up on the 8th or 9th floor of a nondescript tower named "Executive Plaza" located just off I-83. I was able to dodge most of the local traffic due to the odd hours that Firaxis maintained, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM with an hour break for lunch, and I even had a temporary ID card that I wish I'd kept afterwards.
Once I arrived for a day of work, I found my seat in the room with the other QA testers that was colloquially known as "the dungeon". This room was located right next to the elevators and it was always kept dark with the lights out for some reason; I asked and never received an answer as to why. This was one of the bigger rooms at Firaxis HQ with space for three rows of PCs and half a dozen of us working in close quarters. Our leader was Quality Assurance Manager Tim McCracken, a bearded guy who was a little older than the rest of us and probably around 30 at the time. Tim was officially in charge but mostly let the rest of us work on whatever interested us at the moment; he was specifically focused on tracking down and reproducing bugs to pass them on to the programmers for fixing. Tim had his own desk in the back and was always present but operated a bit removed from the rest of the QA team due to his position as a manager. He was an extremely easy person to work under and I hope he moved onto bigger and better things afterwards.
Then there were the other testers that I spent most of my time with: Scott, Kevan, Pat, James, and Rex. Scott was the most serious of the bunch, the tester with the most seniority who had a bit of a military look and would later be promoted to Tim's manager job by the time that Civ5 released. Kevan was the wild man of our small group, with the long, unkempt hairstyle of a rock musician who was always spouting off one crazy idea after another. I recall Kevan having all kinds of bizarre conspiracies that he would talk about at length, frequently ranging across various anime shows to other video games to Harry Potter (this was shortly after Half-Blood Prince had been released). Pat was a big black guy with a warm personality who was always laughing about something; Kevan would be spouting off about his latest insane theory which would set off Pat into roars of laughter. He would have made a fantastic Santa Claus and Pat was the person most likely to have been a friend outside of work. James was quieter and I don't remember him as much as the others, not having any personality quirks to make him stand out in my memory. As for Rex, he was the exception to the testing team. Everyone else was college-aged where Rex was a graying man in his 50s who felt highly out of place in this setting. He worked on a lot of the documentation for Civ4 and though he was physically present in the same room Rex had basically nothing to do with the rest of us.
My work on-site at Firaxis largely consisted of playing game after game of Civ4 from start to finish of each day. Sometimes we would get particular direction from Soren or one of the other developers, such as when I spent the month of August doing an extensive test on diplomacy and the United Nations wonder, but much of the time we were left free to explore any area of the gameplay that we thought needed attention. I played a whole bunch of Single Player games as well as dozen and dozens of Multiplayer games against the other testers, especially Free For All or teamer matches with Scott, Kevan, and Pat. I had about 20 full Single Player games and close to 100 Multiplayer games under my belt by the time that Civ4 released. During all that time, I was never beaten in a MP game by any of the other on-site testers - never. There were a bunch of games with no clear winner but I was never decisively defeated even once, and those guys certainly did try by ganging up on me on many occasions! 
It was well known that I was the best Civilization player in the group and the other QA guys kept trying to come up with challenges for me to overcome which was a lot of fun. (I even played out Kevan's "could you win if you never built any workers?!" suggestion years later as a succession game where we never constructed any tile improvements.)
By the end of the summer, I had made enough of a name for myself that I was given access to the innermost sanctum of pre-release testing: the developer-only internal forum for Civ4. I had a direct pipeline to Soren and the other developers (including Civ5 developer Jon Shafer who I also met on-site) though I tried not to bother them unless something popped up that was truly urgent. The Firaxians trusted me enough to write a significant portion of the Civ4 manual and design the tech poster that shipped with the physical copy of the game, stuff that none of the other QA testers were trusted with. For the curious, I did get the chance to meet Sid Meier and shake his hand though he's largely been on the business side of Firaxis since it was created and had little direct involvement in creating Civ4. I spent more time interacting with his son, Ryan Meier, who was in high school at the time and sometimes dropped by the Firaxis offices to hang out with the QA team. Ryan Meier even joined us in the occasional Multiplayer game which means that I can say that yes, I attacked and killed Sid Meier's son in a game of Civ4 before it came out. 
You might think that I would have grown sick of Civ4 by the end of the summer, however that was surprisingly not the case. I enjoyed Civ4's gameplay so much that it still remained fresh despite all these hours spent playing it. I was spending all day working on-site at Firaxis from 10 to 7, then driving home and grabbing a quick dinner just in time to take part in the Casual Wednesday and Big Game Night Multiplayer games that the Frankenstein group ran starting at 8, some of which lasted until well after midnight. I was eating, sleeping, and breathing Civ4 for months on end. It all had to come to an end eventually though, as university classes started up again at the end of August and I dropped back into the role of a mere online tester. Firaxis offered me a full-time job working with them as a permanent QA tester which I had to decline since I couldn't do that while also simultaneously being a Ph.D. student. I've never regretted that decision even though it certainly would have been a different career path from the one that I ended up taking. I spent the final six weeks before release doing my best to help resolve some final Single Player issues, then drove up to take part in the Civ4 launch party when the game released at the end of October. There was a Civilization trivia contest that night at the launch party and, uh, I won the grand prize which was a set of bookholders shaped like Egyptian cats. They still decorate the bookshelves in our house today:
When the Warlords expansion went into development about six months later, I was invited back again to do some additional testing though not on-site at Firaxis. The Frankenstein group had been expanded with a bunch of new faces, and while I didn't begrudge those individuals getting to take part in the project, we lost the feeling of that tightly-knit group from the earlier period. There were too many new individuals who hadn't been there before and Warlords testing was too rushed to develop a new sense of community. Unfortunately Soren had moved away from the lead developer role for Warlords to be replaced by Alex Mantzaris, better known by his online handle "alexman". Alex was an excellent programmer but it was apparent almost immediately that he lacked the same design vision that Soren possessed. Combine that together with Warlords having less time and fewer resources to ensure the same careful attention that the base game had received, and it was a recipe for an underwhelming testing process.
I spent most of my time during Warlords testing trying to stop Alex from making ill-conceived changes to the combat system and the best thing that I can say is that I was able to prevents a potential disaster from taking place. That wasn't exactly something to boast about and unfortunately the Warlords testing process lacked the same magic of the original testing group. The most fun thing that I got to do was sit in at an on-site developer meeting when I drove up to the Firaxis building to get my testing CD, where all of the various unique buildings were being discussed and Civ4 Producer Jesse Smith kept joking that the Indian unique building should be a call center. That was pretty crude but I did get to sit at the table and pitch some ideas about what buildings should be given to each civ (pre-expansion Civ4 did not have unique buildings) which was a great way to spend an afternoon. I would have come back to help with the Beyond the Sword expansion, however I was never asked and any such opportunity vanished with Soren leaving Firaxis to found his own development studio. If the balance is rough in unmodded Beyond the Sword Civ4, well, don't blame me as it's the only part of Civ4 that I didn't work on.
Twenty years have now passed since Civ4 released, in what feels like the blink of an eye. I held onto the reports that I wrote during the pre-release testing for Civ4 (I can never turn off a historian's instincts) and I always had the intention of posting them publicly on my website eventually. With two full decades having passed, and *THREE* more Civilization games having been released over the intervening span of time, any trade secrets or competitive advantages that rival companies might have gleaned from those pre-release reports have long since evaporated. My plan is to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Civ4's release by posting these reports on my website throughout the month of October: 25 reports in 25 days leading up to the anniversary of release on 25 October. Most of these are Single Player reports for games that I played, however I also have a collection of Multiplayer games done with the online test group and then some articles based on screenshot collections that I saved at the time. Together, these should help provide a unique window into the experience of Civ4 testing and what it felt like to be there with the rest of the Frankenstein group. I've included comments in italics sprinkled through these reports to provide some additional context or explanation; otherwise, everything remains unaltered from what I wrote at the time. It's been a weird experience to go back and read through so much of what my past self wrote, the 43 year old version of myself coming into contact with the 23 year old version. Apparently I liked to include a lot more smiley faces at the time, heh.
Civ4 is an old game at this point, practically ancient by the standards of many gamers. The fact that it still has a community of dedicated fans is a true testament to its enduring popularity; amazingly, I can still get 200-300 viewers watching live when I stream our AI Survivor games. My intention is for these old testing reports to be a celebration of Civ4 and the Civilization series in general, both a gift to its fans and a way of giving thanks to the team at Firaxis who made it all possible. No game has touched my life as much as Civ4 and I doubt I'll ever come across anything that takes over my life to the same degree again. I was in the right place at the right time and I'll never forget the experience - thank you so much to everyone involved! 
