While browsing through some old boxes in my room today, I dug up some of my old PC games. Lost in a moment of reminiscing, I though back on how many hours I sunk into these gaming classics, the likes of which included Diablo II, Age of Empires, and of course, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. For those who have never heard of that last game, you missed one of the finest PC games ever produced.

Created by Sid Meier, the famed creator of the Civilization franchise, and programmed by Brian Reynolds, one of the early 2000s unsung heroes of PC gaming, the game is a sequel of sorts to one of the victory scenarios. The game itself takes place in 2100 in the Alpha Centauri star system, on an Earth-like planet known as Chiron (often just refereed to as Planet throughout the game). Some years before, as war, famine, and disease increasingly jeopardize humanities place on Earth, the United Nations launches the UNS Unity, a starship carrying human settlers toward Chiron. Shortly before planet-fall, contact with Earth is lost, and worse yet, the Captain of the Unity is assassinated. In light of this, the crew divides into distinct factions, not divided by race or nationality, but by ideology, and each faction’s differing visions and plans for the future of humankind. You take charge of one of them and do your best to make a new home for them beneath an alien sky. What first pulled me in to the game was the factions, and the level of detail given to each of them. The leaders and ideologies are detailed and explained over the course of the game, giving some of the best cut scenes and quotes in the history of gaming. Depending on which faction you pick, ranging from the militarists of the Spartan Federation to the objectivists of Morganite Industries, it will impact on everything from your style of play to your interaction with the planetary hive-mind that Charon hosts.

Yes, you read that correctly, the world is alive, and you ignore it at your own peril. As you might expect for a game set in Alpha Centauri, interactions with the planet (and it’s shockingly frightening forms of native life) are a central part of the game. Over the course of the game, your actions will determine the hive-mind’s stance toward you, whether to embrace you as a stepchild or eradicate you like a virus. As for the gameplay, it is your typical turn-based strategy game, and it should be familiar to anyone who has ever played any game from the Civilization series, albeit including unique elements like terraforming and social engineering. The graphics, while not extraordinary, are well done. Gameplay elements remain solid to this day, and even the graphics don’t look too dated even a decade after its release.

As a whole, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri has held up nicely in spite of its age, and to this day remain one of the finest PC games ever produced, and certainly among the most critically acclaimed. PC Gamer magazine alone, infamous for their unforgiving critical ratings, gave the game its highest score of 98 out of 100 – a feat that has only been tied twice, by Half-Life 2 and Crysis respectively. It’s easy to see why – it has one of the best hard sci-fi premises ever used for a game, retains the strong gameplay that made the Civilization series a mainstay, and has a feel no other game has ever truly duplicated. To this day, it retains a devoted fanbase, most of whom probably when running for their beloved copies of this game once I mentioned it.

So if any of you ever chance upon a copy of this game, be sure to check out this classic, and then join many millions of gamers in the years since, praying for a sequel. I certainly am.