Fascists, communists, eco-warriors and the remnants of the old world’s liberal order violently squabble for humanity’s future on a planet trying to kill them. The gulf widens between the haves and have-nots as long-lived Talents lord over toiling Drones kept in line by mass entertainment and police brutality. Artificial intelligences see everything, even into dreams, as humans become more like machines and machines become ever more like gods.
Twenty years ago last February, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri challenged players to make a new home for humankind around our nearest star. Beginning where Civilization 2’s space race victory left off, SMAC represented a completely new direction. Freed from Earth’s gravity, the game combined sci-fi horror and wild utopian possibilities with innovative mechanics and engrossing story. Yet the most interesting thing about SMAC is that it acknowledges and even embraces the moral implications of the 4X genre. Where Civilization has often strived to put a cute gloss over the cold machinery of progress, Alpha Centauri asks what that gloss hides. In many ways it feels like the beginning of a conversation mainstream games are still reluctant to have.
From the moment your faction’s escape pod crashes to the surface of an alien world, SMAC emphasises your fragility on this unknown frontier. Gone are the green fields and snow-capped mountains of Earth. This world, known only as Planet, is covered in red dust, smothering fungus, dense jungle and lethal mindworms. Between this hostile landscape, the sparse soundtrack, and the isolation from the other six factions you know are out there, SMAC tells you this isn’t civilisation. This is survival.
By the time your technology has advanced enough to terraform the new world, it feels earned, clawed from the teeth of an environment utterly resistant to your intrusion. The native fungus will bloom and spread at random, choking farms and concealing hidden packs of mindworms that home in on vulnerable settlements. But plant some Earth trees and, in the peculiar conditions of Planet, they will soon turn invasive and spread to create vast forests. Planet’s prevailing wind blows eastward, so by elevating the terrain you can create ridges that capture rain on one side and leave desert on the other – potentially an act of war, if your rain shadow covers your neighbour. The coastline can be altered to form land bridges or defensive channels. Few 4X games allow players so much control over the environment. Fewer still show the consequences as well. Invasive forests can be inconvenient; excessive pollution risks mindworm attacks in greater numbers and rising sea levels as the climate boils over. Absent 15 years in Civilization and most of its imitators – only recently reintroduced in Gathering Storm – climate is a crucial part of SMAC’s living world.
Seven factions vie for control of that world. Despite their functional similarities, each represents a different vision for humanity’s future, with an immediately intelligible concept: Gaia’s Stepdaughters are environmentalist pseudo-mystics; the Spartan Federation are might-makes-right survivalists; Morgan Industries stands for unbridled capitalism. Ideologies are reflected in baroque city names like He Walked On Water, Cosmograd, Seat of Proper Thought, Last Rose of Summer. And, of course, each faction has its leader.