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Alpha Centauri

In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else. At that time, the two men were working for MicroProse Software, for whom they had just completed Civilization II, with Reynolds in the role of primary designer and programmer and Briggs in that of co-designer, producer, and soundtrack composer.

By the spring of 1996, the two-headed beast, which was still publishing games under both the Spectrum Holobyte and MicroProse banners, was teetering on the brink of insolvency, with, in the words of its CEO Stephen M. Race, a “negative tangible net worth.” It would require a last-minute injection of foreign investment capital that June to save it from being de-listed from the NASDAQ stock exchange. As told at length in a novella that Firaxis began publishing in installments on the game’s website more than six months before its release, mishaps and malevolence aboard the colony ship, which bore the sadly ironic name of Unity, led the colonists to split into seven feuding factions, each of whom inflexibly adhere to their own ideology about the best way to organize human society. Brian Reynolds names as one of his biggest regrets his dogged determination to let you design your own units out of the raw materials — chassis, propulsion systems, weapons, armor, and so on — provided by your current state of progression up the tech tree, in the same way that galaxy-spanning 4X games like Master of Orion allowed.

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