In February 1989 The One opened its preview of a new Electronic Arts game with a joke about the number of kinds of computer game. There were probably only seven, it said, “but Bullfrog Productions’ Peter Molyneux reckons that his company has just invented the eighth.” The game was Populous. It put the player above a small, tilted world as a god, with no direct control over anyone in it. The god’s only real tool was the ground itself: raise it, lower it, flatten it for building or sink it under the sea. The people did the rest.
Fast facts
- Developer: Bullfrog Productions.
- Publisher: Electronic Arts.
- Released: spring 1989 for the Amiga and Atari ST, at £24.95.
- Credits: Peter Molyneux (design and programming), Glenn Corpes (graphics), Dave Hanlon (sound).
- Worlds: 500 in the Conquest game, plus a custom mode with worlds generated at random.
- Two players: two computers joined by a serial lead or a modem.
- Sequels: Populous II (1991), Populous: The Beginning (1998).
Before Populous
Bullfrog grew out of an earlier company. The One reported in April 1989 that Molyneux and Les Edgar had started in 1985 writing business software for the Amiga under the name Taurus, before deciding that the future lay in games. Molyneux later told Edge how Taurus got its Amigas. A Commodore executive rang to say how much he looked forward to “our product” on the new machine; neither side said what the product was. Only when Commodore offered to send five Amigas did Molyneux realise the call had been meant for Torus, a maker of network cards. Taurus “desperately needed the hardware”, Edge wrote, so he kept quiet and took the machines.
Bullfrog’s first jobs were small. According to ACE, before Populous the team had made only two games: a conversion of Druid II: Enlightenment to the Amiga for Firebird, and Fusion for Electronic Arts. The One said Populous had been in development for more than six months by the start of 1989.
A world made of Lego
The idea was tested before it was coded. ACE and The One both reported that the team built a landscape out of Lego to work out the world’s dimensions and perspective, and ACE added that the Lego version was playable. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer was told it had been designed “on a set of Lego bricks in a couple of evenings”.
The team was small. The One named Molyneux as “master programmer”, Glenn Corpes as the artist and Dave Hanlon as the author of the sound. Hanlon made the crackle of fire by crumpling an empty crisp packet. The magazine was told that about 40 per cent of the team’s time had gone on the computer opponent’s “artificial intelligence”. Most of the code was written on the ST, although the Amiga version came out first.
Playing god
The screen shows a close-up of part of the world, drawn in an isometric view (see isometric projection), with a map of the whole world at the top and a panel of icons for the god’s powers. Each world starts with a handful of people on each side. They wander until they find flat ground and build on it, and the more flat land around a building, the bigger it can grow, from a hut up to a castle. Bigger settlements produce more people and more of the god’s power, which Computer Gaming World called “manna”. Everything the god does costs it, even raising a single square of land.
The player steers the population without commanding it. A religious icon, the Papal Magnet, draws people to a spot, and the first to reach it becomes their leader. A leader can be turned into a knight, who marches off to kill the enemy’s people and burn their houses. With enough power the god can use disasters: earthquakes, swamps, volcanoes and floods. A flood drowns everyone living on low ground, so the trick, ACE explained, was to settle your own people high up and wait for a careless opponent to fill the lowlands. The last power, Armageddon, sends both populations to a final battle.
There was no music. The One described a soundtrack of “eerie low-pitched wailing and rushing wind accompanied by a dull heartbeat” that sped up and slowed down with the player’s power.
The Conquest game offered 500 worlds, reached by passwords. Winning well could skip the player several worlds ahead: Computer Gaming World’s reviewer played about forty games and found himself on world 137. The worlds came in four kinds, each with its own colours and rules: grassland, desert, ice and a world of rock and lava. On the ice, a castle produced no more power than a tent.
Reviews
ACE gave the Amiga version an ACE rating of 963 in April 1989 and called it “the biggest game of the issue and indeed the year so far”, ending: “If only every Amiga game was as good!” The One gave it 95%, and its reviewer liked that the consequences of each decision were shown close up: “you really do feel that you’re shaping the course of the game”. Its verdict ended, “It’s what the seventh day was invented for.” ZZAP! made it a Sizzler; one reviewer had not seen “such an original game since The Sentinel”.
In the United States, Computer Gaming World reviewed the $49.95 Amiga version in August 1989, crediting the design to Molyneux and Corpes. It found it “as addictive as any that you’ll ever play”, and pointed out that for all the talk of floods and plagues, “playing Populous is more like watching a Saturday morning cartoon, than sitting through ‘Platoon’.” By December it stood third in the magazine’s list of top games, behind F-19 Stealth Fighter and SimCity.
Awards and sales
Amiga Computing called Populous “last year’s biggest success on the computer leisure scene” in March 1990. It listed the awards: the British industry’s Best Original 16-bit Game of 1989, Programmer of the Year for Bullfrog, Best Strategy Game at France’s Tilt awards, and Game of the Year and Game of the Decade from the Swedish magazine Dator. The Golden Joysticks, reported in ACE that June, named it Most Original Game of the Year.
The sales figures grew in the telling. Amiga Computing put sales across Europe on the Amiga and ST at more than 80,000 by early 1990. ST Format later reported that Populous was the biggest-selling game of 1989 and had sold 46,000 copies on the ST alone. By 1992 Amiga Format was saying it had sold more than a million copies on all formats, while Amiga Power in late 1993 gave a figure of more than 750,000 worldwide. No publisher’s figure appears in these reports. Molyneux told ST Format in 1990: “We had no idea at all it would be as successful as it was. It was terrifying.”
Data disks and conversions
The first data disk, The Promised Lands, came out at the end of 1989 on one disk for both the ST and the Amiga. It added five new worlds: the Wild West, Revolution Française, Blockland, Sillyland and the Bit Plains. The One had also reported in 1989 that an IBM PC version was being written.
The consoles followed. ACE reviewed the Mega Drive version in November 1990 and reported that it would be Electronic Arts’ first Mega Drive game in Britain. The Super Famicom version was made by the Japanese developer Imagineer. TecMagik published a version for Sega’s 8-bit Master System in 1991. The same year Raze reported that the PC Engine version was the first game on that console to need a card with extra RAM as well as ROM, because of the amount of information Populous had to keep track of.
Sequels
Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods (1991) set the fight in Greek myth. Amiga Power reviewed it in December 1991: 1,000 worlds, a pantheon of rival gods, many more powers, and a custom game in which the player could set the rules. It called the original “one of computer gaming’s few true original ideas” and the sequel that idea “polished until it shines”.
Molyneux saw his next games as the same idea at smaller scales. He told Edge in 1998: “After that there was Powermonger, which simulated a country – instead of a whole world – in a lot more detail. Moving forward from that was Syndicate, which was a city.” By then he had left Bullfrog, which EA had bought, to found Lionhead, and his Black & White was the next step on the same path.
Bullfrog made the third game without him. Populous: The Beginning (1998) is a prequel set before the gods, in which the player directs a tribe’s shaman and her followers directly. Edge thought Bullfrog had needed “to prove that there is life after Molyneux” and found “an effortlessly playable game”, played across small round worlds whose horizons curved away as the view rotated.
The name came back once more. Populous DS, developed by Genki, came out for Nintendo’s handheld in 2008. In 2012 Molyneux’s new studio, 22cans, raised money on Kickstarter for Godus, which it described as a spiritual successor to Populous.
Sources
- The One, issue 5, February 1989, p. 9: preview (the “eighth” type of game; Molyneux, Corpes and Hanlon; the crisp packet; 40 per cent on artificial intelligence; the Lego model; the serial lead; Fusion for EA; April release at £24.95).
- ACE, issue 18, March 1989: preview (the Lego model; Bullfrog’s earlier games, Enlightenment for Firebird and Fusion for EA).
- ACE, issue 19, April 1989: review of the Amiga version (the Papal Magnet, knights, floods; ACE rating 963; release box).
- The One, issue 7, April 1989, pp. 34–36: review, 95% (the heartbeat soundtrack, 500 worlds, two-player mode, “the seventh day”); Bullfrog profile (Taurus, 1985; code developed on the ST; the Lego landscape).
- ZZAP!, issue 48, April 1989: review of the Amiga version, Sizzler.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 62, August 1989, pp. 16–17: review by Biff Kritzen (designers, price, Lego, the four kinds of world, world 137, “Saturday morning cartoon”).
- Computer Gaming World, issue 66, December 1989: readers’ top games; The Promised Lands and its five worlds.
- Amiga Computing, vol. 2 no. 10, March 1990: awards and European sales.
- Amiga Format, issue 8, March 1990: Bullfrog’s two industry awards.
- ACE, issue 33, June 1990: Golden Joystick awards.
- ST Format, issue 13, August 1990: Bullfrog profile, release in March 1989, Molyneux on the game’s success.
- ACE, issue 38, November 1990, p. 7: Populous as EA’s first Mega Drive game in Britain.
- Raze, issue 8, June 1991: preview of TecMagik’s Master System version. Raze, issue 9, July 1991: the PC Engine version’s ROM and RAM card. ACE, issue 49, October 1991: Imagineer and the Super Famicom version.
- Amiga Power, issue 8, December 1991, pp. 28–31: Populous II review.
- Amiga Format Special, issue 4, 1992: Bullfrog profile (“sold over a million copies on all formats”).
- Amiga Power, issue 31, November 1993: “sold over 750,000 copies worldwide”.
- ST Format, issue 60, July 1994: history of the ST (biggest-selling game of 1989; 46,000 copies on the ST).
- Edge, issue 66, Christmas 1998: Populous: The Beginning review; Black & White preview with Molyneux on his god games; feature on the wrong number from Commodore, as Molyneux recalled it.
- XSEED Games, “Populous DS” (web, secondary). https://xseedgames.com/games/populous-ds/
- “GODUS Kickstarter launched by Peter Molyneux studio 22cans, a spiritual successor to Populous”, PC Gamer, November 2012 (web, secondary). https://www.pcgamer.com/project-godus-kickstarter-peter-molyneux-22-cans/