User Guide

been intended mainly for advanced players) as a useful learning tool for begin-
ners. Later, Lindsay arranged to fly out EA’s marketing team for several days of
hands-on play, in a devious, underhanded and ultimately completely successful
ploy to hook them on the game and remake them as Alpha Centauri evange-
lists. Many thanks to Alex Carloss, Chris Plummer, Matt Orlich, Audrey Meehan
and David Swofford for all the hard work they’ve put in, and most especially for
taking the time to come out and really get to know us and our product.
Alpha Centauri showed well at E3, so it was time to buckle down and get this
bad boy finished. How Jason “90-hour week” Coleman and Artist Dave “I’m
very afraid” Inscore made it through the summer and autumn of ’98 is any-
body’s guess, but in the end they proved to us that a Sid Meier game can have
an interface as polished and integrated as anything in the industry. Producer
Tim Train took on the near impossible task of keeping track of what everyone
was doing and making a (gasp) schedule, meanwhile coordinating the game
manual and foreign language translations and moonlighting as co-designer.
On top of all that Tim somehow found time to become our office Alpha
Centauri champion and provide innumerable good pointers on game tactics
for us to include in the AI. When a computer player amasses an overwhelm-
ing force and then moves up to attack your bases, think of Tim.
Art Director Michael Haire developed some concept sketches for our faction
leaders, and Jerome Atherholt painted those beautiful portraits which brought
them to life as individuals. Believe me there were a lot of people hovering around
his office door the day he was working on Deirdre (by the way, that’s pro-
nounced “DEE druh.” Got it? Now say it again ten times). He also dug up and/or
manufactured all of those dossier photos, and most importantly took on the
scary task of designing the final look of Planet itself, drawing all of our terrain,
solar collectors, boreholes and so forth. We discovered that everyone had a
strong (and different) opinion on what Planet ought to look like (More red! Less
red! More detail! Less detail!), and finally one day Executive Producer Jeff Briggs
threw us all out and said “Okay, go home. This weekend Jerome is going to draw
the terrain, and when he’s done you can all look at it.” You done good, Jerome.
A NEW SUN
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