It's like game as social commentary.Anyone who’s finished a game of Civilization I or II by winning the Space Race is familiar with the tense final turns leading up to humanity’s arrival in Alpha Centauri.
For me that's been one of the more fun parts of doing Alpha Centauri because I haven't done that before. For instance, is it worth trying to develop the technology to terreform Mars or Venus? It's not so much the technology that prevents us from doing it, it's the willpower to undertake a project that takes 500 years to finish. I think Alpha Centauri kind of points the way to what some of those long term projects could be and why they would be important. That's not something you see much of anymore. Nonetheless it seemed like something that was important. A lot of the great cathedrals in Europe, for instance, were built over 500 years, which means if you were working on one of these or were the architect, you were never going to see the end of the project. In the past, civilizations would undertake huge multigenerational projects. What is the human race going to do in the future? That's sort of a theme of Alpha Centauri. In the manual, you allude to a deeper purpose in Alpha Centauri.
It wasn't like we were thinking, "Well we've got to make a politically correct game." The idea is if you sent the United Nations to explore a planet in a hundred years, that would be a fairly multicultural thing. It felt like it captures the feel of how the space program is already moving, and at the same time gives more depth and personality to the characters. People from Japan and Europe are always going on the Space Shuttle. One of the fun things you can do with the future that you can't do with a history game is explore future philosophies, future society, future economics, and things like that - then have the player come up with his or her vision and see how that vision plays out.Īlpha Centauri has a multicultural feel with Asian, black and Latina characters. We tried to kind of start with some near future stuff that was pretty plausible - things that make you think, "Oh yeah, we could do that in 80 years or a hundred years," and then work gradually into the far future where things get a little more speculative.Īnd not just future science.
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