Nuclear Gandhi is a video game urban legend purporting the existence of a software bug in the 1991 strategy video game Civilization that would eventually force the pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi to become extremely aggressive and make heavy use of nuclear weapons. The claim was mentioned on the TV Tropes wiki in 2012, and continued until 2020, when the series' creator, Sid Meier, confirmed that the bug would have been impossible in the original game.[1] Gandhi was programmed to exhibit this behavior in Civilization V, released in 2010, and it is unclear whether this led to the belief that the behavior had also been present in earlier games.
While fictional, Nuclear Gandhi is one of the most recognizable video game glitches and has been used as an example of integer overflow in computer science, and was included as an Easter egg in other games in the Civilization series.
- ^ Meier, Sid (2020). Sid Meier's Memoir!. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. p. 262-263. ISBN 9781324005872.