About

Nuclear Gandhi is the nickname given to the Indian historical figure Mahatma Gandhi as portrayed in the turn-based strategy video game series Civilization. Among the fans of the games, Gandhi has gained much notoriety for his obsessive nuclear warmongering, in stark contrast to the pacifist reputation of the real life counterpart.

Origin

Gandhi’s obsession with nuclear bombing in the series was first is based on the falsely attributed notion that the turn-based strategy game, Civilization II, wherein India would allegedly often evolve into the most hostile civilization during the mid to late stages of a match, despite starting with the lowest level of aggression to reflect Gandhi's historical legacy of pacifism. This was attributed to a nonexistent glitch in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) for Gandhi's aggression level, where Gandhi's already low aggression value would lower into a negative value in the game's code, at which point the error caused Gandhi's aggression to overflow from 0, to the highest value, 255, just as the level of military aggression begins to wane across the world in the game. With the advents of strategic nuclear weaponry in the Atomic Era, Gandhi's hyperaggression was explained as typically leading to rampant threats and use of nuclear bombs on other civilizations, earning him an odd reputation of being a nuke-obsessive warmonger.

Although no such bug ever been documented to have existed in the game, the belief that the popularity of the bug was later intentionally put into later iterations of the game became widespread due to the entertaining nature of the story. This was corroborated by Sid Meier himself in September 2020, where he explains that no such bug ever had been known to exist in the first place.^[2]

Spread

In September 2010, the webcomic site Critical Miss published a comic comparing the real life Gandhi to the fictional counterpart as depicted within the Civilization series. On October 23rd, 2014, a copy of this comic was uploaded to Reddit. On the same day, Redditor Kserge commented on another Reddit post^[1] to explain that Gandhi's obsession with nuclear bombs was initially due to an unintentional glitch, but it later became officially incorporated into the game as a unique feature of the Indian civilization. This comment was later used as a basis for articles from Kotaku^[3] and Geek.com.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References