User Guide

A NEW SUN
APPENDIX 5
237
you like real time games at all and haven’t tried it yet you owe it to yourself to
go and find a copy — Sid considers it one of the two best games he’s ever
designed, and the rest of us are inclined to agree. But we were also convinced
that in spite of the industry’s headlong rush to get on the real time bandwag-
on, a strong market still existed for turn-based strategy games. Gamers wanted
a new, sweeping epic of a turn-based game, and they wanted us to design it.
At that time, science fiction games were definitely not the first thing that
came to mind when you thought about our team. We were known for histo-
ry-based games. We knew a lot about history and historical games and pretty
much left the science fiction and fantasy to everyone else. But we’d just done
an epic game based on all of human history up to present times and needed
a fresh topic, so at some point someone said “well, how about a future histo-
ry” — human history from the near to the distant future. Kind of a way to
bring our strength with historical games to bear on a science fiction game.
From the beginning, Alpha Centauri set out to capture the whole sweep of
humanity’s future. Not just technology and futuristic warfare, but social and
economic development, the future of the human condition, spirituality and
philosophy. One challenge we quickly discovered is that whereas most people
are at least roughly familiar with the major events of human history, and can
easily relate to archetypes like “fire,” “nomadic hordes” and “the wheel,” they
haven’t got the foggiest notion of what “Polymorphic Software” might be,
since we just made the name up five minutes ago. It takes a lot of work to
weave a tapestry of future history which both coheres and makes the future
accessible to players.
Since it is, after all, the future we’re talking about, we’ve tried to be extraordi-
narily flexible in allowing many different possible strategies and different kinds
of victory. Whereas we can, for instance, look back on the past and say “well
obviously that system of government worked and that one didn’t,” it’s a lot
harder to make cogent predictions about future society. We don’t even know
what future governments will be like, let alone whether or not they will work.
So in our Social Engineering section we’ve tried to challenge players to imag-