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Trivia / Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

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  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Richard Baxton, a character from one of the quotes, gets re-imagined as Recon Rover Rick for the sake of the in-universe Toyetic franchise, not Recon Rick. Yet people routinely skip the "Rover" part.
  • Fake Nationality: Impressively averted for the most part, contributing to the realism and immersion. Firaxis specifically sought out voice actors who were natives of the regions their characters are from. However, there is one example of playing this straight in the vanilla game: Morgan is identified as Namibian but is voiced by the African-American Regi Davis, born and raised in Baltimore.
  • Feelies: The Virtual World Secret Project.
  • Science Marches On: Being rooted in hard science while also trying to extrapolate future scientific developments meant that this was inevitable.
    • The opening cutscene implies that the Space Shuttle Program will be responsible for helping to build the UNS Unity in a similar way to how it helped to build the International Space Station. However, the retirement of the Space Shuttle was announced in 2004 and the last mission took place in 2011, 49 years before the launch of the Unity.
    • In the game, there are no planets orbiting Alpha Centauri B. In Real Life, a planet was discovered in a (very) close orbit around Alpha Centauri B in late 2012.
    • Furthermore, the Human Genome Project has long since been completed. And it was hardly 'secret.'
    • On a related note, supercolliders (such as the LHC in Europe) have been around for decades. Hardly anything groundbreaking about the concept, let alone anything major enough to refer to one such device as "The" supercollider.
  • Word of God: As noted by Bryan Reynolds, the lead dev behind the game, Miriam and the Lord Believers were deliberately made as annoying as feasible when controlled by AI. The point was to create an early-to-mid game nuisance for the players to deal with, as early game mind worms are few and far between. He even described the Believers as "a little dog trying to bite your ankle - not very dangerous, but annoying none the less". And since social engineering choices of Believers put them at odds with majority of factions by default, the faction is on constant offensive no matter who they are bordering.

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