Firaxis's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a favorite in the turn-based strategy genre of games. Even though some time has passed since the original release of the game, the fans of SMAC keep coming back for more. An extension to the SMAC gaming world was added with the Alien Crossfire expansion. Together, these two titles are known as the Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack.

When I first came onboard with Loki, the Alpha Centauri Plantary Pack was my first porting project. I didn't know what to expect from commercial game code, but I sure wasn't expecting what I found in the SMAC codebase. Tens of thousands of lines of assembly code was in SMAC, some of which was self-modifying. I spent most of my time looking at memory in the debugger and flipping bits.