Populous

Title		Populous
Game Type	Management Sim
Players		1 (2 with linkup)
Compatibility	Patch available for fast Amigas
Submission	David Braben

Review
To me this was the first game that brought Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog to
success (they did an earlier game called Fusion, but I didn't think much of
it), and it itself was a landmark. A publisher (I think it was Ian Stewart
now of Gremlin, but I'm not sure) had just publically made the statement
that there were only five types of game, in explaining why many games were
so similar to each other. I had just released Zarch/Virus, then Populous
came out, neither of which fell into this depressing view of games. This is
one of the reasons Populous stood out at the time.

Populous started the much copied genre of God games, and for those who don't
know, the game is based on the player being a god, competing against another
god. You must look after your population through the ages, which hopefully
increases and your powers (or mana) in the game also increase as a result.
This gives you more things you can do, like causing floods, earthquakes, but
to me the beauty of the game was that it worked so well despite the fact
that there was very little the player could actually do at the start, ie
simply raising or lowering little bits of land. It also worked beautifully
as a two player game, and was the first multi-player computer game I played.

Alphabetical list.