Alpha Centauri is still the best 4X game 20 years after launch

It's been two decades since the greatest year for PC gaming: 1999. Perhaps it was the fear of imminent annihilation from the Y2K bug, but never before or since have so many groundbreaking, genre-defining and defying games been released at once. In 1999, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic founded the team-based shooter. EverQuest launched a thousand MMO addictions. The Longest Journey was the Last Good Adventure Game. Planescape: Torment wove an interactive story that remains unequalled. And Sid Meier gave us his magnum opus: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. For some time, Alpha Centauri was the undisputed greatest game of all time. It topped countless lists of the greats, and for many it is still unsurpassed, especially in the 4X genre. What kind of game casts a 20-year shadow? Alpha Centauri was the spiritual and narrative sequel to Civilization, picking up after a Civ match has been 'won by launching a spaceship to another star. In Alpha Centauri's story, this was less a triumph of technology and more of a necessary escape from an Earth that had been torn apart by environmental catastrophe. Life on the new planet wasn't about to get any better, however, since the colonists split into seven philosophically distinct factions prior to their arrival, and founded seven different colonies around the planet.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2WU90bI