Tau Ceti in Fiction - Games

Games

• Cerberus: The Proxima Centauri Campaign (1979), strategy board game designed by Stephen V. Cole and published by Task Force Games. Humanity tries to colonize a world in the Proxima Centauri system that is already inhabited by aliens from Tau Ceti. The game revolves around ground combat between the rival races. Note that Proxima Centauri, at 4.24 light-years from Earth, is about 13.37 ly from Tau-Ceti, giving us the claim of proximity while leaving the right of prior possession to the Cetians.
• BattleTech (1984), wargame and related products launched by The FASA Corporation. Tau Ceti is the first star outside our Solar System to be explored by human beings, first by an automated interstellar Magellan probe (see graphic), and later by men who fare forth in the JumpShip TAS Pathfinder, the latter vessel being powered by a superluminal Kearny-Fuchida drive. The pioneers discover a watery earthlike world in orbit around the star, attended by a single moon (Lanna); the planet will be colonized and named New Earth.
• Tau Ceti (1985–1987, various platforms), computer game designed by Pete Cooke and published by the CRL Group. The year is 2164. A robot rebellion has sealed off Tau Ceti III, and previous attempts at retaking the planet have ended in failure. The last best chance of restoring human control is to send in a single pilot (the player) in a small ship, with the mission of infiltrating the capital city Centralis and shutting down the central reactor—the power source on which the robots depend.
• 2300 AD (1986), role-playing game published by the Game Designers' Workshop. Kwantung (Tau Ceti II) is a temperate garden-like world harboring the Manchurian colony Changpai and the Mexican colony Nuevo Angeles. The Tau Ceti system sits astride the main access route to the Latin Systems.
• Battlelords of the 23rd Century (1990), paper and pencil role-playing game designed by Lawrence R. Sims and published by Optimus Design Systems. The Galactic Alliance, spanning several galaxies, comprises twelve races (including Humans), and is run behind the scenes by large corporations that hire battlelords (the game players) to further their ends by all means legal and illegal. One of the Alliance races are the Phentari, haughty and treacherous, schizophrenic cephalopod warriors. They are methane-breathers from the cold marsh-gas world Phena in the Tau Ceti system.
• Frontier: Elite II (1993) and Frontier: First Encounters (1995), computer games written by David Braben et al. Tau Ceti is orbited by the densely populated earthlike world known as Taylor Colony, a member of the Federation. This planet was the first permanent human settlement outside Solar System, and the first extraterrestrial planet known to support life.
• Marathon (1994), first-person shooter video game developed and published by Bungie. The year is 2794. The player a security officer stationed on the Marathon, a multi-generational colony spacecraft built by hollowing out Deimos, former satellite of Mars. The Marathon has arrived in the Tau Ceti solar system and is supporting the colonization of Tau Ceti IV. As the game starts, the ship is attacked by a race of alien slavers called the Pfhor.
• Escape Velocity (1996), Escape Velocity Override (1998), and Escape Velocity Nova (2002), computer games developed and published by Ambrosia Software. The plot of the original Escape Velocity revolves around war between the Confederation government and the Rebellion against it. The game player may choose sides based on a wide variety of criteria. One of the major participants in the conflict is the Tau Ceti system, due in large part to its proximity to hyperlinks and, in the third game, wormholes. Tau Ceti remains an important center in all three games, although their plots are unrelated.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999), video strategy game developed by Firaxis Games and published by Electronic Arts. Inspired by Meier's earlier success Civilization, and set in the 22nd century, this game begins when seven competing ideological factions land on the planet Chiron in the Alpha Centauri star system. The Tau Ceti flowering, in which an experiment in planet-level sentience accidentally destroyed all animal life in the Tau Ceti system, serves as the primary argument used by the alien Progenitor Manifold Caretakers faction against launching further flowerings in other systems—such as Alpha Centauri itself.
• System Shock 2 (1999), first person action video game designed by Ken Levine and published by Electronic Arts. In the year 2114 the starship Von Braun and her military escort, the Rickenbacker, respond to a distress signal from Tau Ceti V. Once on the ground, the would-be rescuers are impressed into an alien communion that calls itself the Many—a creation of the malevolent AI, SHODAN. The player must destroy and cleanse from the ships those crew members who are in thrall to the Many, and then confront and defeat SHODAN in cyberspace.

• Earth & Beyond (2002), online role-playing game published by Electronic Arts. Three cohorts of humanity: the acquisitive, mercantile Terrans; the perfectionist, genetically-engineered Progen; and the philosophical Jenquai dwell together in the Solar System in uneasy equilibrium. The balance is shattered by the discovery of a StarGate, an artifact left by an ancient civilization. There follow war, stalemate, peace, rapid settlement of the galactic neighborhood, and domination of commerce by Terran cartels. One of the first human colonies established, and the terminus of the vast Somerled Trade Run, is the Terran outpost on Tau Ceti.
• EVE Online (2003), MMORPG developed and published by CCP Games. The wormhole connecting mankind's second galaxy, New Eden, to the Milky Way collapses and leaves all its colonies stranded. After a dark interregnum, and some thousands of years, five spacefaring cultures arise there: the Amarr Empire, the Caldari State, the Gallente Federation, the Minmatar Republic and the Jove Directorate. Game play is concerned with the wars, rivalries, and alliances between these factions (see graphic). Although memories of the home galaxy have receded into the mists of time, it is known that the Gallente homeworld was originally settled by descendants of the French colonists of Tau Ceti.