In any case, I did crave the occasional dose of American culture, and saw English-language films at the movie theater in Zurich whenever I could. This included, among others, the soon-to-be-classic comedy Blazing Saddles (also known by its German title, Der Wilde Wilde Westen). You could tell who in the audience spoke English, because three or four of us would explode with laughter at a punchline, and then the rest would laugh a moment later as they read the German subtitles on the screen. It was the first Mel Brooks movie I ever saw, and definitely not the last. My Wild West prototype had a frontier family named the Schwartzes in his honor, and it’s no accident that Civ’s slogan was “It’s good to be King.”
The thing I like about Mel Brooks, and comedians in general, is that they’re actually very analytical. To dig down and figure out what’s funny about a particular phrase or story is not so different from isolating what makes a gameplay experience compelling. Both are trying to engage the audience with a sharpened version of reality, and both require an appreciation for humanity’s flaws in order to know where the hook fits best. Humor also has the counterintuitive ability to make serious moments more potent, which is why most of Shakespeare’s tragedies are peppered with comedic interludes. Especially when your materials are limited—whether by painted theater sets, or eight-bit graphics—humor can acknowledge the lack of grit in a way that ends up drawing the audience further into the fantasy, where the grit can be supplied by their imagination instead.
We can’t always get away with silliness. Gettysburg! was justifiably solemn in its presentation, and even the modding community usually took the opportunity to make that game more realistic, rather than less. Conflict in Vietnam was similarly dignified, and Magic: The Gathering wasn’t ours to toy with in the first place. But nearly every other game I’ve made has a comedic self-awareness, from the overdrawn James Bond villains in Covert Action to the tiny bridge worker who almost gets left behind in Railroad Tycoon.
We thought it was especially important with Civilization, because the concept of running the world is naturally a little daunting. We’re inviting you to make life-or-death decisions for hundreds of millions of people through six thousand years of history, and the lighthearted bits serve as a kind of friendly wink—a promise that we’re here for you, and we’re on your side—while secretly investing you even more in your own success. Newspaper headlines would provide regular updates on the status of your nation, but we filled the rest of the page with side stories like “Lions Defeat Gladiators 7–0,” and “Marie Antoinette’s Diet Secret: Cake!” At one point, we needed a physical representation of citizens’ happiness, and after a lengthy discussion with Bruce Shelley about traditional symbols of joy, quality of life, and political empowerment, I went with Elvis. He remained a running joke throughout the series, and in Civ III there’s an Easter Egg—a hidden piece of code, in player lingo—that turns your King into Elvis himself when the game is played on his birthday, January 8.
Of course it was always popular to insert ourselves into the game, too. I played the Science Advisor in Civ I and III, leader of a Hidden Faction in Alpha Centauri, both tutorial guide and King of the Barbarians in Civ IV, and a marble statue in Civ V. Jeff Briggs served as the military advisor in Civ III, and Brian Reynolds appeared in Union garb on the cover of the Gettysburg! strategy guide—an honor bestowed on him as the undisputed champion within the office. My voice also snuck into Gettysburg!, although I’m pretty sure that was an accident. We record dialogue placeholders so we can figure out which lines work before bringing the professionals in, and somehow my line “Our flanks are covered!” never got replaced. Meanwhile, nearly every voice and likeness in Ace Patrol belonged to someone at Firaxis, because our mobile games were on a budget, and it was cheaper than hiring actors.
No one in the company appears in SimGolf, but strangely enough, one of the lakes is named after Robin Williams’s son, Cody. There had previously been lakes named after all three of his children, because Bing Gordon told me he was going to let Robin play the prototype the next time they got together, and I thought it would be a funny thing for him to discover. But the other two kids, Zelda and Zak, had to be replaced before the game was officially released, because both would have looked like copyright infringement. (While the former is probably more recognizable today, the latter had appeared only a handful of years earlier in Lucasfilm Games’ Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.)
These days, you don’t see as many Easter Eggs, due in large part to the “Hot Coffee” scandal of 2005. A deactivated, but never-completely-removed minigame was discovered within the code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and its reinstatement by the mod community revealed pretty quickly why the studio had decided to cut it. The series was already well-known for its adults-only content, but there was a significant legal backlash over whether the minigame had been intentionally hidden to evade the ratings board, and settlements in the case ultimately totaled over $20 million. After that, publishers were understandably nervous about secret content of any kind, and Easter Eggs became widely discouraged.
Instead, their comedic function has been mostly taken over by the concept of Achievements, or virtual awards for meeting certain game criteria. Standard recognitions include things like winning at a particular difficulty level, but others are a little more silly, like the “Book ’em, Danno” badge that appears after discovering Hawaii in a random-map game. Beating the Civ V Mongol scenario earns the achievement called “Khan,” but losing it produces “Khaaan!” instead. Some badges are as rare as they are strange, like the Ninja Turtle–themed “Pizza Party,” which is awarded when the player activates Leonardo da Vinci in New York City, while possessing Great Works by both Michelangelo and Donatello, plus at least one sewer.
But of all the inside jokes and running gags that Civilization has inspired over the years, the funniest to me will always be “Nuclear Gandhi.” The reason why, however, is complicated.
The default leader for each civilization was generally their most well-known historical figure—the Americans were run by Abe Lincoln, the English by Elizabeth I, and so on. While this was a great shortcut for characterization, it also caused some problems. Case in point: Mohandas Gandhi was the most recognizable figure from India, but he wasn’t exactly the world-conquering type. I decided that was okay, though, because there was more than one way to win the game, and Gandhi could still present a formidable challenge in the race for scientific advancement while remaining mostly pacifist. A well-balanced AI takes all types.
Here’s where the story gets interesting (not to mention well-documented online): all of the leaders were given a score from 1 to 12 across a number of variables, and Gandhi’s military aggressiveness was placed at 1, as would be expected. A different piece of code, however, called for an automatic two-point drop in military aggressiveness whenever a country adopted democracy, which would theoretically have put Gandhi at a score of negative 1. But since negative numbers were impossible in this type of calculation, an overflow error caused the value to wrap around to the top of the number list, giving him a score of 255. Thus, the moment India became democratic, Gandhi would turn into a vicious warmonger and begin nuking everyone in range. A revision was quickly sent out, but players were so charmed by the hilarious juxtaposition that it became a running joke that has been thoroughly enjoyed and built upon by fans ever since. Images of Gandhi with captions like, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you cleanse them in atomic fire,” and “A nuke for a nuke will make the whole world bow down to me” have been shared far and wide. Other memes needed no words at all, like the photoshopped picture of Gandhi riding the falling bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
But it’s not the countless callbacks and references that make the nuclear Gandhi story so funny to me. It’s the fact that none of it is true. The overflow error never happened at all.
It is true that Gandhi would—eventually—use nukes when India was at war, just like any civilization in the
game, and at the time this did strike a lot of players as odd. The real Abraham Lincoln probably wouldn’t have nuked anyone either, but the idea was that every leader draws a line in the sand somewhere. It’s also true that Gandhi would frequently threaten the player, because one of his primary traits was to avoid war, and deterrence through mutually assured destruction was an effective way to go about that. Since all leaders used the same basic diplomacy script, Gandhi’s reminder that “Our words are backed with nuclear weapons!” was identical to Napoleon’s or anyone else’s, and perhaps came off as a bit of a non sequitur from the humble ascetic. Plus, as a scientifically aggressive civilization, India was more likely to acquire the technology early in the game, meaning Gandhi’s threats of atomic annihilation might begin at a time when the player had barely mastered gunpowder. So it’s fair to say that Gandhi could, on occasion, seem a little unnecessarily zealous, if only verbally.
But at no point did a democratic score change, or any value approaching 255, come into it. That kind of bug comes from something called unsigned characters, which are not the default in the C programming language, and not something I used for the leader traits. Brian Reynolds wrote Civ II in C++, and he didn’t use them, either. We received no complaints about a Gandhi bug when either game came out, nor did we send out any revisions for one. Gandhi’s military aggressiveness score remained at 1 throughout the game.
Dedicated fans will be quick to point out that Gandhi’s preference for nuclear weapons over other forms of warfare was set to 12 in Civilization V, as revealed by the game’s lead designer, Jon Shafer. But that was nineteen years after the original release, and Jon was only leaning in to the existing amusement over Gandhi using nuclear weapons at all. His was the first game in the series to codify it as an Easter Egg for fans, and he had never heard of the 255-overflow story when Civ V was released in 2010.
Where, then, did it come from?
The first reference appeared in July 2012—two years after Jon’s game, and more than two decades after the original game’s release—when a user named “Tunafish” added the supposed trivia to the website TVTropes.org, which can be edited by anyone. It sat, untouched except for cosmetic changes, until November of that year, when a watered-down version of the same story was added by an anonymous user to Wikia, a pop culture site similar to Wikipedia. No other edits were ever made to Wikia from that IP address, and while TVTropes is not as forthcoming with their user data, it appears that the Tunafish account was never used again, either.
Six weeks later, the spread began. First, two well-established users of a gaming forum repeated the story, with one of them citing the Wikia page after someone asked for a source. A few posts trickled out to other small forums over the next few days, again meeting only a single expression of skepticism, which was this time refuted with the TVTropes link.
Things percolated gently for the next year and a half, with the rumor cropping up every few months on the message board Reddit, and once on the Tumblr page of a gentleman named Chaz. The big break came in October 2014, when a comic called “Real Life Gandhi vs. Civilization Gandhi” was re-posted on Reddit. The comic itself was several years old, and only generically highlighted the humor of putting Gandhi’s finger on the button at all, but in the comments that followed, half a dozen users chimed in to share the story they’d heard about the overflow error.
With that many in agreement, it became truth.
Ten days later, the gaming news site Kotaku wrote a story about the bug, which was followed by a similar post on Geek.com a few hours later. Both referenced the Reddit thread as their source. Several other news blogs picked up the story, now citing Kotaku as their source. In February 2015, the circle became complete when an anonymous user, again having never contributed to the site before or since, left a single exasperated post on the Wikia talk page: “Are we not going to mention the Democracy bug with Gandhi’s aggression level? It’s only been a core part of Civ since Civ 1.”
A week and half later, a description of “Nuclear Gandhi” was added to the massive website Know Your Meme, with the origin being listed as a “confirmed” fact about the series, though for some reason they attributed the bug to Civ II, rather than its prequel. Six months after that, it was presented as a real-world example of an overflow error in the curriculum of a computer science class at Harvard University. Today, the story is still being revived on major news sites and message boards on a regular basis—Elon Musk tweeted about it as recently as 2019—and almost always triggers at least a few replies of, “Duh, I thought everyone already knew this.”
Obviously, there’s a cautionary tale to be heard here about the importance of sourcing your facts. I can’t imagine what purpose Tunafish had in making it up, unless perhaps it was an intentional demonstration of the internet’s unreliability in the first place. Those who know it best trust it least, and this person clearly had enough knowledge of programming to make the story plausible. Maybe somebody out there is sowing seeds for fun, to find out how many detailed-but-utterly-false stories they can establish in the culture as received wisdom. Or, maybe Tunafish is just a random guy who happened to get nuked one time right after India developed democracy, and he was willing to take any logical leaps necessary in order to blame the AI rather than his own failed diplomacy.
To me, the more interesting question is: What makes this particular story so fascinating that it continues to generate traffic every time it’s mentioned? Of course there’s the popularity of the Civilization series itself, and the particular demographic it serves. Our players are computer literate by definition, and more likely to get their news and social needs met online, where word-of-screen persists far longer than word of mouth ever could. The tale also involves a little bit of technology, which makes people feel smart when they share it, but the explanation is simple enough that anyone can wrap their brain around it. And then there’s the humor, which adds an extra jolt of longevity to anything it touches. Gandhi firing nukes is, and always has been, inherently funny, no matter how rarely it actually occurs.
Some have argued that a nuke-loving depiction of Gandhi was in fact a more accurate one to begin with, since his political beliefs evolved over time, and he consistently expressed a deep resentment of nations that oppressed his own. But that’s beside the point. At the end of the day, my job was to create a balanced group of AI characters, and then find shortcuts that might connect players emotionally to those characters. The Indian political leader Jawaharlal Nehru might have been a more authentic choice, but without Gandhi, the game wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable, or as fun.
And that, I think, is the biggest reason why the myth struck such a chord with fans, and why no journalist made any attempt to confirm or debunk it. Finding a bug in a well-loved game feels much more satisfying than finding one in a game you don’t care about. It’s an endearing flaw—the gaming community’s equivalent of a candid photo under the headline “Game Designers: They’re Just Like Us!” So, in that respect, I can appreciate the sentiment behind its endurance, and I don’t mind if it happens to chip away at any pedestals people may have placed me on. I’ve certainly released my share of bugs, even if this doesn’t happen to be one of them, and I’m glad to see players engage with the game, and each other, in whatever way makes them happy.
25
BEYOND
Sid Meier’s Civilization:
Beyond Earth (2014)
*
Sid Meier’s Starships (2015)
I’D LIKE TO SAY I’M CAPTAIN KIRK, but the truth is I’m really Sulu. I value quiet competence. Boys in the 1960s were supposed to dream about being adventurous, hotshot astronauts, but I always knew that kind of escapade wasn’t for me. I belonged in the background, plugging away at complex calculations and just generally being reliable, while those Captain Kirk types handled the dangerous—not to mention public—interactions.
I can remember watching the Apollo 11 mission on television during the summer of 1969, and Walter Cronkite’s stead
y, reassuring intonations about “the voyage man always has dreamed about.” Those four days of nearly continuous news coverage, from the rising of the rocket to the landing of Neil Armstrong’s boot in the dust, were the first unified, real-time experience of a nation, the first hint of the constant connectivity that we now live with every day. Up to that point, news was something you watched for half an hour in the evening, and Walter Cronkite was merely a messenger. Now, he sounded like a prophet.
“We almost glibly toss that line away now, ‘man on the moon,’ ” Cronkite said. “But by golly, just think it over.”
I had been. The original Star Trek had aired its series finale just six weeks before the Apollo 11 launch, and I had watched them all religiously. My friends Chris, Frank, and I had a Friday night ritual of swimming at the YMCA,* then coming back to my house together for the latest episode. My favorite was “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Kirk and Spock travel through a portal to the 1930s and attempt to rescue their shipmate without altering history. Of course, Kirk falls in love with a woman who must die to maintain the timeline, and to a thirteen-year-old boy this was powerfully thought-provoking stuff. The question of how history could play out differently with just a small change might have come up once or twice during my career.
I suppose it’s a little strange that I hadn’t managed to make a spaceship game since graduating from ASCII art, but the ever-present Space Game prototype on my hard drive didn’t find its voice until Ace Patrol proved the concept of turn-based flying. Like its predecessor, Starships was primarily a tactical game, with a light story structure to carry the player from battle to battle without becoming so involved that it broke the Covert Action rule. But in a new twist, we were able to build on the plot outside of the game by setting it in the same universe as our latest Civilization title, Beyond Earth. Players could run either game independently, or share data between the two and develop their stories in tandem. Maybe someday we’ll be like the Marvel Universe of gaming, and link every new release together in some fashion. (No, we won’t be doing that. It seems silly to have to clarify, but better to be on the safe side.)
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 26
