Was Gandhi really a monster in Civilization? Explaining “Nuclear Gandhi”

Nuclear Gandhi is one of the funniest memes in video game history — one already big and old enough to cloud the collective Internet memory on whether it stems from a real thing — but it is actually a perniciously hilarious hoax.

In Civ, Mahatma Gandhi, the famously pro-peace anti-colonialist martyr from India, is often seen as a surprisingly aggressive and nuclear war-prone leader. What the hell is up with that, and why does it happen not just in one game but in many across the series? Let’s look into the facts of this mystery to shine a light on Gandhi’s alleged war crimes.

Nuclear Gandhi: the origins of a hoax

The first memory I have of the Civilization series comes from a visit the kid version of me paid to an older friend. He wanted to show me Civ 2, a game I had only seen screenshots of and immediately discarded as a boring and too-complex strategy game for older people — so, probably ages 14 and above.

My friend was just four or five years older than me, but he sure knew what he was doing, as the memory of watching a dude play a game I didn’t yet care much about would stick with me forever. Shortly after he loaded the save file on his PS1 version of the game, he spouted, “f*ck, Gandhi is nuking me… Again”.

The “nuking” part was hilarious, but what did me in was the “again” part. I’d immediately written that off as my friend joking around had it not been for his alarming seriousness. I was a silly kid, but one still knowledgeable enough to know nuking people wasn’t Gandhi’s thing. So why would he be nuking a teen promoting the one game starring Gandhi of all people? Once I was done laughing my ass off at the incident, I asked what the hell was the deal. My friend replied that he had no idea, “Gandhi is just like that.“

Though the real Gandhi actually held some highly reprehensible beliefs, I quickly found out he’d fired a total of zero nukes throughout his lifetime. So, for a while, that’s all we got — the uncertainty of not knowing whether Gandhi just hated my friend’s external policies or whether developer Firaxis just really wanted to taint the man’s legacy in a hilarious manner.

The instance made me laugh hard enough to never forget about that one afternoon, but I quickly moved on from the Civilization series for a while. A few years later, when I became old enough to convince my parents I was old enough for the Internet, I began reading gaming forums where many people also complained about Gandhi going nuclear on them. It was a thing.

The Nuclear Gandhi bug

In 2012, 21 years after the release of the original Civilization, we finally learned that Gandhi was bad because of a hilarious development oversight. You see, Firaxis actually had designed Gandhi to be just as pro-peace as he was in real life, but something had gone wrong. Once India became a democracy, it would lose some points in aggression, but Ghandi already had a base value of 0 for it, and trying to make it go lower would pretty much break the universe. Democracy would create an actual horseshoe effect that would have Gandhi’s aggression value shot up to the maximum of 255. This was why so many people had to go to war with Gandhi, or so they thought.

Because the Nuclear Gandhi bug was total bunk

Turns out, it was just an unproven hoax that appeared on TV Tropes and spread like wildfire despite the poster having absolutely no data to back it up. It was only in 2020, with the release of Sid Meier’s biography, that the truth came out. Meier explained, via more complex and boring computing lingo, that the supposed Nuclear Gandhi bug was impossible in that particular game.

Gandhi behaved like any other leader in the game. The only explanation for Gandhi’s thermonuclear global dominance ways was the Mandela effect, where people misremember a historic event or person. Only a modest percentage of players ever really got on Gandhi’s bad side, but Civilization is a hugely popular game, so many of them got obliterated by the peacemaker. Gandhi was not a monster or a good man who could go full evil because of a bug. He was just some guy, some guy you should not f*ck with.

The truth about Civilization’s Gandhi is out — and has been out for a while — but it’s just impossible for the truth to catch up to a lie that goes viral. Sid Meier doesn’t mind, though, as he claims to enjoy seeing his game taking a whole new dimension in the imagination of fans.

Firaxis doesn’t seem too bothered, either, as the studio officially made Nuclear Gandhi part of the game in Civilization V and VI — and that’s not a hoax. If you’re heading into a game of Civilization V or VI, you should know beforehand that Gandhi is the most peaceful of leaders, but he will very quickly resort to you-know-goddamn-well-what if you push him too far.

Civilization 7 comes out on February 11, and I can’t wait to get nuked by Gandhi again before some dumbass does the same IRL.