Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri - On this day

Sid Meier is a versatile game designer who has tried his hand at various fields - from pirates to railways to golf and space simulations. After the worldwide success of Civilization II, Sid Meier, along with several incidental projects, devoted himself to a game called Alpha Centauri, which he launched on this day 23 years ago.

It was a strategy turn-based game in which we jumped into the distant future, based on one of the possible endings of the Civilization Games. Mankind colonized the planet Chiron in the 22nd century in the Alpha Centauri system, where they encountered an alien species called Progenitors.

The gameplay formula was pretty similar to what we saw earlier in Civilization. Bases were built, technologies were developed, territories of other factions were conquered, etc. But there were also new things such as field manipulation, redesign of units, social engineering, etc.

The game was expanded by Alien Crossfire shortly after its release and continued to live on through a series of graphic novels. Years later, Alpha Centauri fans are still doing unofficial patches and repairs for the same. Although the game never got a sequel or remaster, Sid Meier briefly returned to the space theme in 2014 with the spin-off game Civilization: Beyond Earth.