r/todayilearned • u/DueNeedleworker5036 • 4h ago

TIL that the Civilizations games (and others) include creator Sid Meier's name in the title because Robin Williams joked that it would help sell more copies of 1987's Sid Meier's Pirates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#MicroProse
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u/DownstairsB 4h ago

And a deep fear of pissing off Ghandi

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u/hulksmash1234 4h ago

You’re about to learn of his peaceful ways, by threat of nuclear war

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

The Mahatma Project are backed by nuclear weapons.

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u/CzarDale04 3h ago

You realize that is the computer character that is most likely to use nuclear weapons..

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u/DownstairsB 3h ago

Yes if I recall there was some kind of integer overflow bug in his attitude, that ended up making him very aggressive instead of kind

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u/manicMechanic1 2h ago

I assumed it was a joke by the developers

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u/Illustrious-Line-660 2h ago

It became a joke in later games. They wanted him to be the least likely to use nukes, and they accidentally made him the most likely.

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u/Initiatedspoon 2h ago

This isn't true. .

Its a fairly well known myth now.

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u/sillysausage619 1h ago

I hate how everybody has agreed to this being fact, making up stories of their game making it happen regularly, when it was barely ever possible.

I don't really understand why people do it haha

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u/Initiatedspoon 1h ago

It's been programmed in since Civ 5 so for some players it has basically always been true.

For the older games especially the very earliest ones Gandhi's preset civilisation was a decent mix of traits that ment they prioritise certain techs faster than others so they often got nukes before other civilisations might have and once you have nukes well you want to use them and the juxtaposition is strong.

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u/Everestkid 13m ago

Even in Civ 5 Gandhi is only nuke-happy when you're actually at war with him, and being Gandhi he rarely ever declares war.

So the Nuclear Gandhi meme is really basically the same as the "guy putting a stick between the spokes of his own bicycle" meme, since the scenario of them declaring war on Gandhi and him responding by nuking the shit out of them is much more likely than Gandhi himself declaring war.