Worst Bug In Gaming History Vol. 4

Hello. Welcome again to The Worst Bug In gaming History Vol. 4!

Today we're covering a bug that was so bad that it turned one of the most peaceful and influential minds in history into a white-hot war waging nuclear loving genocidal maniac.

You likely already know who and what we're going to be talking about or have seen his meme once or twice on Imgur or Reddit.

If not, don't worry. The story behind this is comical and easy to understand.

We're covering a dusted off copy of the first Civilization game and a simple programming error that made players scratch their heads and reevaluate their history books.

Civilization is a strategy game where you play with a handful of other world leaders competing for victory.

Conditions for Victory:

1. Global conquest until everyone is under your rule

2. Managing to be your own power until you're the first leader advanced enough to launch your own people to our closest star system Alpha Centauri.

3. The game reaches year 2100 and the game just awards the victory to the highest scoring leader.

Each leader on the map had his own digital persona which reflected his real world counterpart.

This made the game multi faceted because no leader was the same. One leader would praise you for an action you took while the other would condemn you for it.

Each leader had traits such as aggressiveness, how fast they wanted to expand their territory, how scientific they aspired to be, and many more.

Each of these traits were set at a value of 1-10.
So if a leader had a scientific trait value of 10 you could expect that leader to try to achieve a space victory by any means necessary.

It is here we bring up Gandhi.

True to life the programmers made Gandhi a very passive leader with an aggressive stat of only 1/10.

If he was on the board you could naturally assume him to pose no hindrance to your goals with his peace loving tendencies and all.

In the mid-late stages of the game all leaders had to choose their own style of government such as democracy, anarchy, monarchy etc.

The government chosen slightly modified the trait values of the leaders to reflect their choice of government.

Gandhi's choice of government was always democracy which has a -2 bonus on the aggressiveness stat.

In theory this would have made this lovable leader into even more of a snuggly cuddle bear.

However, there was a minor problem with this. You see, Gandhi was already at 1/10 on aggressiveness.

The game was not coded for anything to be in the negatives so instead of going to -1/10 his stat underflowed to the max number of 255/10.

This led every game Gandhi was in to take a very unpredicted turn. Anything and everything Gandhi caught wind of sent him into a genocidal rage.

What added fuel to the flame is that this is about the time that nuclear weapons are discovered.

Very soon after his newfound perspective on life and newly acquired access to weapons of mass destruction every leader within range of  Gandhi's nuclear arsenal was subject to his unrelenting wrath.

It didn't matter if his armies were outnumbered 10 to 1 he wasn't taking shit from anyone anymore.

Every game with Gandhi present was set up for guaranteed destruction regardless how much of a peaceful approach the players took.

The developers were so surprised that they overlooked a flaw so obvious that it was used as an example on what could go wrong with future installments.  It was used so much that Nuclear Gandhi grew on the developers and they decided to let him exist in later games as an easter egg.

How so you ask?

Well, they fixed his aggressiveness but they gave him the highest stat for nuclear weapon hoarding and the willingness to use them.
It's difficult to get under Gandhi's skin, but when you did you always knew.

And this is how Nuclear Gandhi was born and how he became a staple in the Civilization franchise.
We couldn't be happier about it.

This marks the end of Vol. 4 I know it took awhile and I hope you enjoyed the read. If you would like feel free to check out my previous entries below!

Pt1. http://m.imgur.com/gallery/fc8mh

Pt2. http://m.imgur.com/gallery/aAZsU

Pt3. http://m.imgur.com/gallery/vtcst