Three Moves Ahead 134: The Alpha Centauri Show

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

Strategy, Games & Hobbies, War, Strategy Games, Games, War Games, Video Games

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2011

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Zynga's Brian Reynolds makes Planetfall on Three Moves Ahead and, along with Soren, Troy, and Rob, founds a discussion of Alpha Centauri. He explains what went wrong with the "Civ in space" idea, and the role of the game's fiction. He and Soren talk about how Alpha Centauri changed the Civilization series, and take a look at some of its strange features, like the design workshop and climate change. Brian reveals he used the cast album of Les Miserables for inspiration as he wrote for the game, and Troy immediately proposes marriage.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. With me tonight are my regular panelists, Flash of Steals, Troy Goodfellow, and our summer intern, Civilization 4 designer Soren Johnson. Welcome to the show, guys. Do you realize Soren has now been on more consecutive episodes of this show than I have all year? Well, that's why we needed an intern, and I'm super glad he designed Civilization 4. That was really impressive. Got my foot in the door.
0:23.5	Yeah.
0:23.9	Yeah.
0:24.3	Well, now's why we needed an intern, and I'm super glad he designed Civilization 4. That was really impressive. Got my foot in the door? Yeah. Yeah. Well, now you can make me feel bad when I don't come back. Tonight we welcome Zingas Brian Reynolds to the show for our long overdue discussion of Alpha Centari. Brian was the creator, designer, and lead writer of Alpha Centauri, and we're very glad to have him on the show. Brian, thanks for joining us today. Hey, great to be here, guys. There's a lot of things to discuss with Alpha Centauri. I think the first thing I'd like to start with, though, is when the game came out, a lot of people looked at it and said, and still do, say that Alph Santari was the civilization in space.
0:55.4	I'd like you to talk a bit about the degree to which that's true
0:58.2	and how it differs from the rest of the civilization series.
1:01.6	All right, so, yeah, civilization in space.
1:05.4	I think, you know, back when I was working there,
1:08.1	I probably wasn't allowed to say that for legal reasons.
1:12.6	The, you know, a decade...
1:13.7	The secret's out now, huh?
1:15.4	Well, you know, a decade in hindsight.
1:17.0	I mean, it's obviously everyone knows that we had all left from micropros and started
1:25.7	a new company for Axis.
1:27.9	And we wanted to do some kind of logical game that seemed like it would be a logical game
1:34.2	that our fans would expect from us.
1:36.4	And we couldn't call it civilization.
1:38.6	So that was kind of out.
1:40.4	And we also weren't very excited about trying to go start a competing line of
1:47.5	historical 4x strategy games and and so that we didn't get too excited about that but one
1:55.7	of the things we thought is well you know at the end of civilization there was that
1:59.5	whole Alpha Centauri thing.
	...

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