Placeholder and Unused Leaderheads

As a change of pace, this page will cover some of the placeholder and unused artwork associated with Civ4's leaderheads, the name used to refer to the portraits for each of the individual leaders. At the time that I joined the pre-release testing group, the list of which leaders and which civilizations were going to make it into the final game had already been locked down. However, I knew from reading some of the older posts archived on the internal Frankenstein forums that there had originally been plans for more leaders and more civs which had to be cut due to lack of development time. One day when I was poking around in some of the files stored on the test group server, I stumbled across a folder that contained tiny pixel artwork for a whole bunch of leaders that didn't make it into the final game, along with larger versions of the placeholder leaderhead artwork that we were still using as the months counted down to release. We'll take a quick look at both of them here, starting with the pre-alpha pixel artwork:

This is the actual artwork, a series of miniature 16 x 16 pixel icons that seem to have been the earliest rendition of these leaders. I tried increasing their size but the base images were so microscopic that they were a blurry mess at anything resembling a normal resolution. My understanding is that these were intended to be little portraits of the leaders which would appear next to their names on the scoreboard located on the bottom-right of Civ4's main screen. I saved a very, very early screenshot from one of Sirian's games that shows this in action:

This concept had been scrapped long before I started taking part in the testing group, probably because the icons were so small that it was impossible to make out any details and they cluttered up the screen which already needed to show details like religious status, Open Borders, war declarations, and so on. What's most interesting about these extremely early icons is that they shed light on parts of Civ4's development that never ended up coming to pass. From what we can see here, it's clear that Civ4 was originally conceived of releasing with 20 civilizations that each had a pair of leaders for 40 of them in total. For some reason Mongolia is listed twice with "Genghis" and "Genghis Khan" appearing as separate leaders but otherwise the pattern was remarkably consistent. Every civ would have two leaders which typically would be separated either temporally from different periods of history or thematically with contrasting personalities. This made a lot more sense than the actual state in which Civ4 launched, which featured 26 leaders across 18 civilizations, where about half of the civs had two leaders while the other half only had one leader.

Almost all of the civs represented here made it into the release game, with only Sumeria and the Sioux failing to make the cut. Both of them would appear in the Civ4 expansions, though the Sioux were unhistorically turned into the "Native Americans" which is something I would have tried to stop if I'd still been working with Firaxis at the time. Many of these leaders also weren't able to be included in the initial release version of Civ4 only to reappear later in Warlords or Beyond the Sword. Pericles, Darius, Augustus Caesar, Sitting Bull, and Gilgamesh were all planned to be part of the gameplay from the start and were forced to wait another year or two before they had their official inclusions. Poor Gilgamesh was the very last leader to be cut from the initial release and very nearly made it before the art team made the decision that there simply wasn't time to include him. (For the curious, it's the need to create all of the fancy art assets that serves as the biggest limitation on what can and can't be included.)

And then there were the leaders that never made it into Civ4 altogether which is perhaps the most fascinating detail. The two Arabian leaders were originally projected as Saladin and, uh, Muhammad? Something tells me that wouldn't have been a good idea; I would have suggested someone like Harun al-Rashid instead. Egypt had good old Hatshepsut along with another pharaoh named Menes, unfortunately for him he would be replaced by Ramesses in the Beyond the Sword expansion. The Incans would have had Manco Capac, Japan would have had Emperor Meiji to presumably be a less-isolationist leader, and Mali would have had Sundjata who I have to confess I don't know anything about. Crazy Horse for the Sioux, Charles V of Spain, and someone named Sargon for Sumeria would have rounded out the set. I wonder what kind of stories would have been told involving these leaders over the past two decades if they had survived to be included as part of Civ4.

More familiar to me was the placeholder artwork used for the various leaders while their animated leaderheads were under development. These concept sketches are really interesting to see and I like a bunch of them better than their official finished versions; I've even used a couple of them on my website at various points in time. The rest of this page will run through the placeholder leaderhead artwork one civ at a time, starting with America:

This is some of the more pedestrian artwork, functional without standing out in any way. Random tidbit: the animated George Washington is one of my favorites from Civ4 and looks much better than this rendition.

By contrast, Saladin looks fantastic in this artwork. He's only upstaged by the next customer in alphabetical order:

This is my favorite concept art of the whole bunch. Montezuma looks both proud and cruel, someone that you absolutely would not want to mess with. Too bad he's such a doofus in the actual gameplay!

Note that this placeholder art predated the infamous mixup of Kublai Khan and Qin Shi Huang. It looks like the concept artist had these leaders correct, then they were accidentally swapped when putting the placeholder artwork into the game's files.

Oh my god, what's wrong with Hatshepsut?! Her artwork was obviously pulled from a completely different source entirely. My best understanding is that the artist who did the sketches of the other leaders didn't bother to create one for Hatty because she was one of the very first leaders to have her animated leaderhead completed. Back when I first joined the testing group, Hatshepsut and Gandhi had completed leader animations and everyone else was using the placeholder stuff (because the pair of them had been featured in an E3 demo). Whatever the story, this placeholder art looks nothing like the rest and clearly came from a different artist. Also there's Menes for the curious, RIP poor guy.

Elizabeth received the same treatment as Hatshepsut though I can attest that she was not one of the early leaders to have their animated version finished quickly. I saw this ugly placeholder image a lot when I was playing; I am very, very glad that this art style didn't make it into the final product.

Louis was another leader who had his finished artwork done at an early stage and I don't recall ever seeing this placeholder image while playing. As for Napoleon, his animated leaderhead is among my least-favorite in Civ4 and I prefer this concept art over what we ended up with.

Bismarck was another member of that strange art group and also someone like Elizabeth who was slow to receive a finished leaderhead.

I like this blonder version of Alexander more than the eventual finished product. Pericles didn't make it into Civ4 until the expansions and the artwork used for his leaderhead was completely different than what's displayed here.

The concept artwork went a little overboard on making Huayna Capac's coloring, ummm, red. The less said on that, the better.

I never saw this placeholder version of Gandhi since his animated leaderhead was done so early. The Asoka one did pop up in my testing games a lot and felt rather bland.

The finished art pretty much exactly matched the concept art for Toku.

And ditto for our boy Mansa Musa.

I really like this version of Genghis Khan Temujin, he looks more noble here than in the animated version. Kublai Khan gives me Marco Polo vibes for whatever reason in this sketch.

We all wish we could have the kind of beard action that Cyrus is rocking in this concept art.

While I like a lot of the concept artwork, these two Roman leaders are both misses for me. Augustus looks like a goofy version of the Disney Hercules movie while Julius Caesar is just... bad. I don't like the animated Julius Caesar much either, all of the art associated with the Romans in this game could have been a lot better.

Both of the Russian leaders look great though and there was a lot of interest in Catherine in particular. The flirty Catherine in this game was a massive contrast to the ugly crone Catherine from Civ3 which had previously been the mental image of this leader for much of the testing group.

Spain

Isabella also looks regal and dignified in her concept artwork, arguably better than her animated version though my opinion may be colored by the religious zealotry that her Civ4 persona is always engaging in.

Sumeria

And Gilgamesh brings up the rear as the final leader to be cut from the release version of Civ4. As with Pericles, when he did make it into the gameplay Gilgamesh used a completely different concept art from what was depicted here. That's all that I have to share on this topic, hopefully it was interesting to read through what might have been if some different decisions had been made.