Mahatma Gandhi is an incredibly popular leader in the famous series of Civilisation games. You might know him as one of the more peaceful leaders but he is a cult figure in the game for dropping nukes. It gets so ridiculous after a point that you have to preemptively nuke Gandhi so that he is not able to wage a 1000-year war against your country. You shouldn’t trust everything you read on the internet much like this quote.
Similarly, don’t trust Gandhi in this game just because you think of him as a peace loving leader. In one of the weirdest easter eggs in gaming history, the “Mega Hitler Gandhi” is a recurring thing in the Sid Meier series of games. The nuke hungry Gandhi has crept its way into pop-culture with multiple jokes, memes and webcomics. Gamers new to this series seem to be taken aback after discovering this new version of Gandhi they had never imagined possible.
What is Civilization V?
Civilization is a turn-based strategy game where the main objective is to guide your civilization from the Stone Age to Space Age on randomly generated maps. The map is full of iconic leaders from World History who can be your allies or enemies depending on your strategies in the game. Mahatma Gandhi is an infamous AI character who decides to use nuclear weapons against you even if you don’t do anything against him.
It all started with Civilization I where different AI leaders were rated on their different qualities. The AI aggressiveness was rated on a scale of 1-10 using the 8-bit integer (255). Gandhi had an aggression rating of 1. In late game you could adopt Democracy, which had the effect of reducing the aggression rating by 2. Gandhi’s aggression would go to -1 and, as a result, roll over to 255. So on a aggression scale of 1-10, Gandhi was now rated at 255.
Because democracy is unlocked late in the game, it is also around the same time that nukes are discovered. So, when Gandhi’s aggression is 25 times the threshold, it is only obvious that he’s going to go Mega Hitler. It is ironic how democracy turns Gandhi into a war mongering maniac.
Gandhi can also be considered a vigilante in this game because he targets everyone who has the capability to wage a war against his civilization. This is exactly why Bruce Wayne will be locking horns with Superman in the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Here’s some fun bit of information that might help validate(?) Nuclear Gandhi: In a Speech by Mahatma Gandhi (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) by Pyarelal Nayyar, Gandhi says
Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.
So maybe this isn’t as blasphemous as we initially thought, right?