Past Masters: Populous - God made Man

Certainly popular in some quarters...

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A male reaches his optimum biological fitness at age 18, whereupon he is perfectly honed to take on any of life's challenges whether it be survival, competition or procreation. Hearing this, makes me wonder if I wasted my peak years. Back in the 90s, when I was hitting my prime, I could be found sat at a desk in my room, huddled in front of the cutting edge games platform for that era, an Amiga 500 with external Cheetah double-sided-double-density 880Kb 3.5" disk drive and Phillips 8080 monitor; quite a set-up I can tell you.

Had you been a fly on the wall you would have heard the tell-tell heart beat and tide sounds coming though the monitor speakers, the crackle of fire and the granite eruption of a volcano. Sounds some of you will remember from the game that made both Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux the industry icons they are today. Populous was a revelation to both players and industry pundits alike. This was before the days of hearing from development heads about their grandiose plans, something of a shame as with the scope of the game it would have been interesting to hear Molynuex's hyperbole at the start of the project. Whether he was talking as impressively as he does these days will remain in the mists of time, the game however speaks for itself.

For the uninitiated, Populous was strange because you had no direct control over the fixed isometric game characters, you could only influence them by affecting the world around them. If you provided them with enough flat ground they would build houses and pro-create. Reduce this space and their houses shrank, ejecting the people who no longer had somewhere to sleep. This simple process (known affectionately as sprogging) encoded not only the key play dynamic but also the simple ethos of the development. From this grows a whole game.

After some play you realised that you were not alone in the world shaping business, there are other powers at work in the shape of your opposing god. It doesn't take long to start using some of your more destructive powers to cause his people problems. And inevitably it's also not too long before he is over in your camp causing similar problems for you.

The game relied heavily on your ability to manage your resources as you balanced the manna you spent on developing your inhabitable spaces with manna spent destroying the same spaces in your opponent's territory. This culminated in collecting enough people to invade their land and take over their homes (goodness only knows what became of their women and children). It was a great feeling to watch a sea of your people charge over to fight the enemy simply because you had put their totem in a suitable place.

Various levels were provided that adjusted the powers available and the starting situation to provide a variety of different challenges. Sometimes you would start next door to the other player, and have to decide whether to battle it out right away or run off to re-group and come back with an army. Other times you started in frozen wastelands with just one person and hardly enough manna to even level one square, you had to eek out a meagre existence until you could, inch by inch, provide more space to expand. The harder levels started to remove your available powers until you had to resort to simply drowning the opponent's villagers by removing the land. Finally, you were limited to only being able to control the world where your people were, meaning that you had to sneak a guy over to the other side before you could earthquake, or volcano them. Invariably they would run out of energy en route and die before they got there.

The icing on the cake was the ability to have a two player game over a modem (although finding two people with the game and a modem was highly unlikely) or with a null-modem cable. Sitting there in my 18th year with my cutting edge computer, hooked up to my friend's Amiga and battling our way through the night certainly felt like a good way to use our highly evolved peak of physical prowess. Admittedly, we now look back and wonder how we managed to miss getting into the drinking and loose living that our peers were enjoying, but hey hindsight is twenty-twenty. And for all that, secretly, we wouldn't have changed those years for anything, and for that reason Populous will always have a special place in our (sad little) hearts.

By Paul Govan