Populous

1001 Video Games

Populous appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Cross-platform multiplayer

One of the few games produced during the first 15 years of the PC gaming industry that allowed modem or serial-cable gameplay across different platforms (ie the PC version could play a game over a modem with the Amiga version).

Development

• During the design phase, LEGO was used to build landscapes so that the game could be visualized before it was programmed.
• This was one of the few games of it's time to be written mostly in C. Most games of the time on the Atari ST and Amiga were written in 100% machine-code.
• At one stage during development, a nasty hard-drive crash deleted most of the game. Fortunately, this did not stop the developers from starting anew. In fact, this was a blessing in disguise, as the new implementation was much faster than the old implementation.
• It was only decided that Populous would be about gods when somebody from a magazine came over, looked at it and said "so it's a bit like being a god". Before that, there was no plot to explain what was going on, and after that comment, the whole plot had a direction.

Unreleased versions

64'er magazine released some mysterious shots of an apparent Commodore 64 conversion in 1991, and Paul Hughes was also asked to produce an official C64 version, but neither of these were ultimately finished.

Simon Cooke attempted to convert the game to the SAM Coupé system in 1991, but this also went unreleased.

Awards

• Amiga Power
  • May 1991 (Issue #00) - #6 in the "All Time Top 100 Amiga Games"
• Computer Gaming World
  • September 1990 (Issue #74) - Strategy Game of the Year
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #30 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
• EMAP
  • Golden Joystick Rewards 1990: Winner Most Original Game.
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #23 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• Power Play
  • Issue 01/1990 - Best Computer Gaming in 1989
  • Issue 01/1990 - Best Game Idea in 1989
  • Issue 01/1990 - Best Strategy Game in 1989
• ST Format
  • January 1990 (Issue #06) - Included in the list 50 Games of the Year
  • May 1990 (Issue #10) - Included in the list "ST Format's 30 Kick-Ass Classics"
  • August 1991 (Issue #8) – #14 Top Atari ST Classic Games (Editorial staff vote)

Information also contributed by ElectricMonk and PCGamer77