A Reddit user named Lycerius has been playing the same game of Civilization II for a decade, and his in-game world has turned out pretty grim by the year 3991.
The Civilization games are grand strategy epics that span centuries. You start off as a roaming settler in the stone age, before building an army and an empire that can survive the test of time. As the years go by, and new eras are entered, you'll get better technologies to toy with.
The game naturally ends in the year 2020 (unless certain military, technological or cultural goals have been met earlier), but you can keep going if you wish. Lycerius has kept going -- now 16 years after the game's release date and way past the launches of
Civilizations III, Call to Power, IV, Revolution and
V. "I thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be," says Lycerius.
By the year 3991, only three super nations remain (the theocratic Vikings and Americans and the communist Celts), "each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swathes of the world uninhabitable wastelands."
The nuclear fallout also caused the ice caps to melt, turning every inch of land into useless swamp. With no arable land to farm, about 90 percent of the world's population has been killed. The remaining engineers work tirelessly to build roads that are destroyed by the very next turn.
The game is also locked in a perpetual war, which has been raging for almost 2,000 years. UN peace treaties and friendly ceasefires are quickly ignored, keeping the game in a military stalemate. "I can only assume that peace will come only when they're wiped out."
But Lycerius isn't giving up. "My goal for the next few years is to try and end the war and thus use the engineers to clear swamps and fallout so that farming may resume. I want to rebuild the world."
He plans to upload his savegame to the web, so other Reddit players can step into his shoes and try and sort out the mess. A subreddit has already sprung up, with potential strategies. And fan fiction.
Other users have pointed out the uncanny parallels with the George Orwell novel 1984. "A perpetual war is fought over border zones that constantly change hands, with each power too strong to ever be defeated," writes user _Muad_Dib. " Apparently George Orwell was a time traveler, and spent all his time in the future playing Civ II," says kithkatul.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
