User Guide

DESIGNER’S NOTES
Although this is our second product as a company, Alpha Centauri has been
around, in some form or another, right from the humble beginnings of FIRAX-
IS Games. Its story has in many ways paralleled the story of our company —
FIRAXIS and Alpha Centauri grew together, both changing and evolving over
two and a half years. Both faced significant setbacks and periods of self-doubt,
but in the end FIRAXIS came together as a company, and as you have hope-
fully discovered, Alpha Centauri came together as one of our best games ever.
In July 1996, the brand new FIRAXIS Games (at the time we were calling it
“FIRAXIS Software”) consisted of four or five people huddled in some bor-
rowed office space in the back of the Absolute Quality building in Hunt Valley,
MD. AQ, a professional game testing company, was also a brand new startup,
so times were exciting, to say the least. Yes, the rumors are true: we did in fact
buy AQ a phone system and bartered it for their spare office space.
CEO Jeff Briggs worked the phones to rustle up some funding and did all the
hard work of actually putting a new company together. Sid Meier and Brian
Reynolds worked to scrape together some playable prototype code, and Jason
Coleman wrote the first lines of JACKAL, the engine which these days pretty
much holds everything together. Office Manager Susan Brookins found us
some office furniture and bought crates of Coke, Sprite and Dr. Pepper to stash
in a mini-fridge Brian had saved from his college days. We remembered that
at some indeterminate point in the past we were considered world class game
designers, but our day-to-day lives weren’t providing us a lot of positive rein-
forcement on that point. So for the first nine months of our existence as a
company, we clunked over the railroad tracks in the morning, played Spy
Hunter in the upstairs kitchen, and declared “work at home” days when AQ
had competitors in the office.
1996, you may recall, was also the “Year Of The Real Time Strategy Game.”
Giants strode the industry and remade it in their image. Indeed, our first offer-
ing as a company, Sid Meier’s Gettysburg, is enthusiastically real time, and if
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