Evil Nuke-Happy Gandhi In 'Civilization' Is A Total Myth, Says Creator

Turns out that tall tale about Gandhi being a bad egg in the original Sid Meier's Civilization, accumulating nuclear weapons and then trying to explode the entire world, is entirely false.

If you're not familiar with the story, I'll set you up with a summary here. The 1991 turn-based strategy game, developed by MicroProse and Koei, has the player choose which historical or current civilisation to take forward and build an empire. Each civilisation is led by a famous figure from this group: for example, Queen Elizabeth I for England, Mao Tse Tung for China, Mohandas Gandhi for India, and so on. Once the game begins, the player controls their civilisation and the computer will control the others, as they all vie for total domination over the game world through their own means.

Now, there is a yarn that a bug would cause Gandhi, a political figure who advocated for non-violent resistance against the British Empire, to suddenly see red. Normally, the character would have the lowest possible aggression rating, understandably, given his actions in real life. But, the bug would manifest when the player selected democracy, one of the seven governmental approaches which change how the game plays out.

Democracy automatically decreases all players' aggression by two points. With Gandhi already at an aggression rating of one, the code didn't account for negative ratings, and so it reset to give Gandhi an aggression rating of 255. That's the maximum value in the game. As a result of this error, the otherwise peaceful Father of the Nation would prioritise achieving the Manhattan Project, and threaten his competitors with nuclear annihilation. Hilarious? Yes. True? Not at all.

The discovery comes from Sid Meier's autobiography, who is the creator of the Civilization series. Meier states that this overflow error never occurred, and that the myth originated from a user named Tunafish who created a fictitious entry on the website TVTropes in 2012. "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," explained Meier.

There you have it. One of gaming's greatest absurdities well and truly debunked. Still, I'm sure there's a mod out there that'll give Gandhi all the nukes he could ever hope to have.