2005
Darwinia Wiki
2015-02-21-15:07
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Darwinia is a 2005 real-time tactics and real-time strategy video game for several platforms. It is the second game developed by Introversion Software, and its setting is within a computer environment that simulates artificial intelligence.
Darwinia was created as a digital theme world for artificially intelligent polygons by Dr Sepulveda. Housed in a massive network of surplus Protologic 68000 machines from the 1980s, Darwinia is a world where the single-poly Darwinians, with their simple, but growing AI, can grow and evolve. Darwinia is also where the world can visit to see them frolicking in their natural, fractal habitat. A Darwinian lives a life working and growing, until the eventual death of the Darwinian, which releases their digital soul to later be reincarnated.
However, the player arrives in the midst of an emergency. Darwinia has been infected by a computer virus, and Sepulveda is in near panic, watching decades of research being corrupted and being used up. Sepulveda enlists the player, a curious hacker who stumbled across Darwinia by accident, to aid him in rescuing the Darwinians and drive off the computer virus. The player is given access to the combat programs, simple tools that originally began as mini-games. These are now the only means of attack against the virus. As the player progresses, it soon becomes clear this is not enough, and that triggers the third aspect of the gameplay, which is evolution.
The first two levels of the video game act as an introduction and allow the player to familiarize themselves with the controls. After that, Dr Sepulveda begins assigning tasks that span several levels to achieve a long-term objective. The first task involves clearing the virus population from and reactivating the Mines and Power Generator to provide resources for the Construction Yard. Once done, the Yard begins producing armored units, allowing the player to move on. The next task involves the reincarnation of Darwinians: the Soul Repository in the center of Darwinia collects the floating souls, and sends them down to the Receiver, where the Darwinians gather them and send them to the Pattern Buffer to be reprogrammed with the main Darwinian blueprint code, where they are sent to the Biosphere to be reborn. The player must clear the Viruses from all the facilities and reactivate them.
In the final level of the game, Sepulveda traces the Viral infection back to its source, which is e-mail spam. After Sepulveda had accidentally flashed an image of his face across the skies of Darwinia, The Darwinians had assumed him to be God. They then re-aligned a portal inside Darwinia in an attempt to communicate with God. The Darwinians managed to access Sepulveda's computer, downloading several files and eventually downloading the Spam. The e-mails were infected with a very nasty strain of internet virus which corrupted the Darwinians. The player is tasked to destroying the few remaining e-mails.
Darwinia mixes elements from strategy, action, puzzle, hacker and God games alike, meaning that it does not fall under a specific video game genre.[1]The player has the ability to run several programs through the Task Manager (a reference to the Windows Task Manager),[citation needed] similar to units used in many real time strategy games. Research allows the player to upgrade programs and weapons, which is critical as the enemy develops. Mission Objectives are given at each location/level, as the player and the Darwinians attempt to wipe out the Viruses.
Darwinia features a number of intros randomly selected when launching the game. These contain a number of references that may be obscure to some players, especially those unfamiliar with older European computers. These include:
- Cracktro text scroller: a spoof of the crack intros that were common among pirated computer games, especially on platforms popular in Europe, such as the Amiga and Commodore 64. The text humorously references both coding for 38 hours straight and finishing the intro in 12 minutes. Allegedly, the release of Darwinia on the Steam platform was delayed for several hours when a Valve employee saw the intro and believed there had been a security breach.[7]
- The Matrix: one intro features green Darwinians dropping from the top of the screen to form a logo, a reference to The Matrix (See Matrix digital rain).
- Real-time Raytracer: another cracktro-style intro featuring a raytraced scene of spinning spheres. This was a popular effect in many old demo scene productions.
- Cannon Fodder: a black screen displaying the text "This game is not in any way endorsed by Sensible Software" while the beginning of the theme from Cannon Fodder plays. The text is a reference to the message that shows at the start of Cannon Fodder, "This game is not in any way endorsed by the Royal British Legion." Some see this as an acknowledgement of Cannon Fodder's influence on Darwinia.
- ZX Spectrum: one of the intros is designed to look like the ZX Spectrum when loading a tape-based game.
- Life: a simulation of the cellular automaton game of Life in which Darwinians live, die and spread in a grid based on just a few basic rules.
- MBTI into: this intro scrolls through the four dichotomies on a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, listing introversion last as it is the name of the developer.
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