User Guide

A NEW SUN
APPENDIX 5
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made the acquaintance of Derek “Del” Cotter, a British fan who proved so help-
ful in setting us straight on astronomy, biology and interstellar travel that we
sent him a contract and hired him to do some research. Del provided the tech-
nical design for our starship, the U.N.S. Unity; designed planets and solar sys-
tem consistent with current knowledge of the Alpha Centauri system; figured
out Planet’s vital statistics; and fleshed out our biosphere. Del’s interstellar trav-
el research was particularly useful for our web story, which Mike Ely wrote and
which appeared in installments on our website during the final months of
development. Del even provided some biochemical theories about how the fun-
gus and mind worms might work and generally made it possible for us to do a
near future space colonization game without sounding like idiots.
Now skip ahead to late 1997. Alpha Centauri was still plodding along, but the
schedule was starting to slip and most who played it at the time agreed that
it lacked that certain je ne sais quoi which makes a game stand out as a clas-
sic. Enter Bing Gordon, an industry veteran who co-founded Electronic Arts
way back when your humble game designer was just starting high school (you
mean he’s one of the guys who brought out Archon?! Cool!) and who lately
serves as its Chief Creative Officer. A long time fan of, um, that other game we
wrote, he was excited about working with us on our new project. He saw in
Alpha Centauri a masterpiece struggling to get out. Bing helped us figure out
what was needed to make this the cool thing we all knew it could be. In addi-
tion to the fact that we didn’t throw the whole game out the window in dis-
gust, you can thank Bing for the Planetary Council and all the extra time we
spent making the diplomacy cool. Bing also convinced us to take multiplayer
seriously as a design challenge as well as a technical hurdle.
A few months before the 1998 E3, the gaming industry’s biggest trade show, it
was time to get our marketing plan up to speed. Lindsay Riehl, our one-woman
marketing department, quickly got this under control, kept the press interested
in our progress, and generally helped spread the good news. It was Lindsay who
talked us into including Explore/Discover/Build/Conquer in the game as well as
the ad campaign, so that what began as a cool marketing tie-in ended up
becoming a way to refocus our “Governor” automation (which had previously