Nuclear Gandhi

About

Nuclear Gandhi (also referred to as Sid Meier’s Civilization Gandhi) refers to Gandhi in the Civilization game series. The game version of Gandhi became famous due to his striking dissimilarity to his peacefully real world counterpart, being the heaviest user of nuclear weapons.

Origin

The source of Gandhi’s heavy nuclear weapon usage was due to a bug in Civilization II. Each of the leaders available in the game were given a set aggression level, with Gandhi’s being the lowest. As the player reaches the Modern Era, the aggression level of all world leaders would lower. However, in Gandhi’s case this would make the aggression reach a negative value in the game’s coding, which made his aggression value underflow into the highest setting. This caused Gandhi to become extremely aggressive just as strategic weaponry came into play, effectively making Gandhi an extremely heavy user of nukes. As overlowing the setting wasn’t possible, it then became impossible for the player to reset the aggression value of Gandhi. Due to the popularity of the bug, it was later intentionally put into later iterations of the game as an Ascended Glitch^[2] where Gandhi would intentionally be given the highest level as a producer and user of nukes.

Spread

On September 2010, the Online comic Critical Miss published a comic comparing the real life Gandhi to the version within the Civilization games. On October 23rd, 2014 a copy of this comic was uploaded to Reddit. On the same day, Redditor Kserge commented on a picture on Reddit^[1] explaining that Gandhi’s use of nuke and warmongering was initially due to a glitch. This comment was later used as a basis for articles from Kotaku^[3] and Geek.com.^[4]