10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,650 days ago. Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (released February 12, 1999) represents a curious interregnum at developer Firaxis. It was the only turn-based strategy game to come out of the developer before the company regained its Civilization franchise, for one. It’s only the only game that was designed for Firaxis by co-founder and master strategy craftsman Brian Reynolds.
Billed as a “spiritual sequel” to Civilization II—the idea being the story came as a direct result of a Civ technological victory—it doesn’t step an extraordinary distance from the original Sid Meier design. Yet it feels hugely different. Alpha Centauri differs most primarily from Civilization in one particularly interesting way: while Civ presents its power struggle as a battle to dominance by nations, Alpha Centauri is about the struggle between ideologies to best survive as, and transcend, humanity. This makes each game of Alpha Centauri a much more emotional, and unnerving, conflict.
The game’s seven factions bring this to the fore: each one represents a belief structure driven to fundamentalism by the stress of colonizing a new planet. Choosing one is then both a tactical choice and a personality-fueled one—I, for example, disturbed myself by typically choosing either the capitalist plutocratic Morgan Industries or the technocratic University of Planet, the two factions fuelled by purely amoral agendas. Unlike the samey Civ nations, these factions burst with flavor, which bleeds down into tactics—each one will have fundamental differences of belief with several other tribes, which will draw the battle lines unless tended to by a careful player.
And then there’s social engineering, an advancement of the Civ government system that allows players to tweak their mode of governance, type of economy, and social values individually. As each choice has an advantage and a trade-off, it’s yet another place in Alpha Centauri where play style is informed by personality as much as strategy. Then there’s the fact that the planet itself is a character in the game, which…well, that’s a bit more of a straightforward situation, actually. But is sure is weird!
So Alpha’s a bit of an odd duck, then, representing a singular moment in the history of the genre, and its overall influence is small. Considered to be one of the best strategy games ever made by reviewers at the time, its sci-fi setting still ensured that it wasn’t even in throwing distance of Civ II’s sales, so when Firaxis got Civilization back Alpha Centauri was—and still is—shelved. And since its design was itself inspired by Civilization II (Brian Reynolds still had to follow the Civ methodology here, so you didn’t see him really flex his creative muscle until Rise of Nations), it didn’t do much on its own to inspire future work. Though Galactic Civilizations did represent a conscious attempt to fill the sci-fi turn-based strategy hole, its space-faring wars between alien races makes it quite a different beast from the more intimate human struggle of Alpha. So it’s worth going back to, if only because there isn’t a lot quite like it. It’s still a good solid strategy game built on years of iteration on Meier’s rules.
Alpha Centauri was available via GameTap until EA pulled out of the service last year. It’s now all the way out of print, but earlier budget reprints make it an easy find on the secondary market.
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