Darwinia

Darwinia mixes elements from strategy, action, puzzle, hacker and God games alike, meaning that it does not fall under a specific video game genre. The player has the ability to run several programs through the Task Manager, 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 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.

Darwinia was inspired by the theme of the first Indie Game Jam, where a group of programmers experimented with generating tens of thousands of sprites on screen at once. Introversion began prototyping a war game with more units on screen than had ever been done at that point. After months of iteration and development, this coalesced into the gameplay for Darwinia.

The initial beta testing of Darwinia began on 27 August 2004, and the beta testing of the full game started on 26 November, the same year. A demo level of Darwinia was released 3 months later on 21 January, and can be downloaded from the Darwinia website. S. version followed on 12 June 2006), while the Macintosh version was released 30 March 2005 by publisher Ambrosia Software.

Darwinia and Darwinia+ were positively received by critics, garnering "generally favorable reviews" according to Metacritic. The PC version won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF 2006, as well as the Technical Excellence and Innovation in Visual Art awards. New Age Gaming magazine awarded the game a score of 97, its highest ever as of June 2007, and an Editor's Choice award. It scored 90% from PC Gamer UK and reached number 21 on its 'Top 100 PC Games' list. PC Review described it as "one game that simply has to be played".

Darwinia won PC Gamer US's 2005 "Special Achievement in Creativity" award. The editors wrote, "Part RTS game, part sandbox, part Sea Monkeys — Darwinia's retro-cool is backed up with intense and often surprising strategic moments." It was nominated for Best Game in the GameShadow Innovation in Games Awards 2006 and listed in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.