[Throughout this project, I will be handing over this space to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. Like Dungeon Keeper, this one is by Martin of anaccidentalman]
There is a game called Journey to Alpha Centauri which is played in real time, thereby having a completion time of around three thousand years, after which the player receives the congratulatory message “Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.”. It started as a joke in Terry Pratchett’s 1992 novel Only You Can Save Mankind and a fan, inevitably, went ahead and made it. That game is, mercifully, not the one I am here to discuss today.
It seems entirely possible, however, that both that joke and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri have their roots in Sid Meier’s Civilization. Victory in Civilization is achieved through one of two means; total global conquest, or advancement of technology to the point that your civilisation can leave Earth behind and embark on a journey to Alpha Centauri. Civilization, as has been discussed on this site in the past, was an absolutely brilliant game, but also a deeply problematic one – as Iain put it “The differences between all the different civilizations you can choose to play as are essentially no more than different colours on the map.” Alpha Centauri, in turn, takes the already compelling gameplay of the Civilization series and actually does something to address the glaring issues with its fundamental narrative structure.
The future setting helps, of course – the idea that Aztec culture, left to thrive, would inevitably evolve into a carbon copy of modern western society is a lot more obviously wrong than any hypothetical narrative about where we might go using the present day as a starting point could possibly be. But there’s more than that – while Civilization allowed you to take the names and faces of various Great Men of History, it gave very little sense of who these people actually were. Alpha Centauri‘s seven faction leaders, though, are a credible and genuinely diverse set of characters whose personalities are expertly weaved throughout the game – every new technology you research, every base enhancement you build, is accompanied by a quote, usually from one of the seven leaders themselves, that provides insight into their philosophies and the game’s future society at large. Even before I sat down to play the game again recently, I probably could have recited a reasonable approximation of some of them from memory.
These faction leaders range from the broadly sympathetic – the environmentalist Lady Deirdre, the humanitarian Brother Lal – to the cartoonishly evil – the fundamentalist Sister Miriam, the totalitarian Chairman Yang. All are brought to life and given believable motivations that serve to shape the choices their AI controllers make, in surprisingly immersive ways. As the game progresses, meanwhile, you are occasionally interrupted by short narrative interludes where it is gradually revealed that the indiginous life of the planet you now inhabit has a kind of collective consciousness that speaks to your chosen faction leader in dreams, warning of a coming apocalypse, as it goes through its inevitable cycle of growth into destruction into rebirth. All the while, your technological advisors will keep presenting you with prototypes of their latest death machines, and the game will quietly give you the option to inflict all manner of atrocities on your own citizens, if you so choose, the broadly evocative euphemisms like “punishment spheres” and “nerve stapling” rendered more chilling by their lack of detail.
Like Civilization before it, victory in Alpha Centauri can be nominally achieved through total global conquest, but while I was always happy to aim for this when playing as the Egyptians or the Greeks, it feels fundamentally unsatisfying to do so when playing as the Gaian Stepdaughters or the University of Planet. Fortunately, the game provides several alternatives – one can instead seek to achieve a diplomatic victory by getting at least 75% of the world’s population to unite behind you as Supreme Leader, or an economic victory by accumulating enough wealth to buy the world, both of which, being completely honest, ultimately feel like total global conquest with better PR. Or, in what feels like the True Ending, given the ongoing narrative of the communication with Planet, one can “ascend to transcendence”, leaving their human body behind and merging with the consciousness of the planet in a transhumanist singularity, finally breaking the cycle of violence and destruction that has repeated for millenia.
It’s a rare game that can manage perfection of its genre to such an extent that the creation of any others feels unnecessary, but for me, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is one such game. The fact that it even exists in the first place is something of a happy accident, occurring, in part, due to rights issues that left Meier and his team unable to use the Civilization brand for a while. Ultimately, this was resolved, and the Civilization series has continued to release new entries every few years, but, much as I loved the original, Civilization II and especially Alpha Centauri, I’ve never felt any real desire to play any of the follow ups. I can’t imagine them being anything but disappointing after this. Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.
