1/1/2024 0 Comments Populous game![]() "Populous had been released and it had been on the market for about two or three weeks, but had shot to the top of the charts in Europe, the UK and in the US," he says. It was a real rags to riches story."īack in the early '90s, the whole process of meeting with potential publishers and business partners was rather more haphazard than it is today, what with things like GDC and the internet existing – as Molyneux's next anecdote attests. "I had never really spoken to anyone in the press before, the company was not really making enough money even to pay Glenn let alone me, so when Electronic Arts came along after shipping the game and said, 'Congratulations, you’re now rich!', it was unbelievable over the course of six weeks it changed the whole course of my life, and without Populous I’m sure my life would have been 100 percent different. "My life at that time was one of incredible debt and complete and utter obscurity," he admits. It was more the journalists who made the genre rather than us." Nonetheless, the game's impact on Molyneux's circumstances was transformative. There was an evil God and a good God and that was it we didn’t make the connection. "We had no idea what we were making at the time. Populous sold millions of copies on home computers and is credited with siring the 'God Sim' genre – although Molyneux says creating new game categories was never an objective. The game had 500 randomly-generated levels, and the testing guy asked, 'How do we get to the end of the game, so we don’t have to play all the levels?' And that’s when I realised that we hadn’t actually done an 'end', so we had to quickly mock one up, which was incredibly underwhelming." It was so different in those days because I think it only had two days’ worth of testing before it was shipped. "We finished the game – I think in total it took around nine months with the two of us, Glenn doing the graphics, and me doing the game – and then it was launched. "Then this 'plaything' started to become real," recalls Molyneux. The team knew they had something special on their hands, but convincing a publisher of the title's merit was significantly harder several companies were approached (including the Danish toy firm Lego, primarily because the team had conceptualized levels using real-life Lego blocks), all of which rejected the concept until industry giant Electronic Arts agreed to take Populous on. Molyneux and Corpes had found the hook of Populous – competitive play, not just against the AI, but a human player as well – and eventually introduced elements such as terrain deformation, combat, buildings and natural disasters, the latter of which a player could use to thwart the progress of their opponent. "Basically, if Glenn ever won at all, I used to think that that was proof that the game wasn’t ready to ship, so I would change things so I would continue to win," he chuckles. "Glenn and I connected together our two machines using an RS-232 cable, and we used to play the game," continues Molyneux. "I mocked-up this prototype where there was a landscape of isometric blocks and then I thought, what should I put on that landscape? I thought it would be fun to have little people." And thus, a legend was born. Instantly gripped by the tantalising potential of the premise, Molyneux asked if he could play around with it. "It really all started with a person who I worked with at Bullfrog called Glenn Corpes, who had drawn some isometric blocks on screen," recalls the one and only Peter Molyneux OBE, the game's designer. To get the full story of how this remarkable and groundbreaking game gripped Japan, it helps to get right back to the beginning and investigate its genesis.
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