{"id":80021,"date":"2019-02-03T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-03T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2019\/02\/feature_playing_god_how_peter_molyneux_hooked_japan_with_populous"},"modified":"2019-02-03T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T14:00:00","slug":"feature-playing-god-how-peter-molyneux-hooked-japan-with-populous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/02\/03\/feature-playing-god-how-peter-molyneux-hooked-japan-with-populous\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature: Playing God: How Peter Molyneux Hooked Japan With Populous"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When the Super Famicom hit Japanese store shelves at the end of 1990, it was accompanied by a host of particularly strong titles that did a superb job of communicating the power and versatility of Nintendo’s new platform: Super Mario World<\/a><\/strong>, F-Zero<\/a><\/strong>, Pilotwings<\/a><\/strong>, Final Fight<\/a><\/strong>; these were arguably system-sellers that could walk effortlessly into any console launch lineup, but there was another title which, to some, may have seemed like the odd one out. Granted, Bullfrog’s Populous<\/strong> had already become a critical and commercial smash hit in Europe and North America on the Amiga a year earlier, but how had a strategy game which was apparently so focused on western sensibilities managed to sneak its way into the Super Famicom’s fledgling software library, a library which comprised almost entirely of Japanese-made action or adventure titles?<\/p>\n

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. “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. Instantly gripped by the tantalising potential of the premise, Molyneux asked if he could play around with it. “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.<\/p>\n

“Glenn and I connected together our two machines using an RS-232 cable, and we used to play the game,” continues Molyneux. “Basically, if Glenn ever won at all, I used to think that that was proof that the game wasn\u2019t ready to ship, so I would change things so I would continue to win,” he chuckles. Molyneux and Corpes had found the hook of Populous \u2013 competitive play, not just against the AI, but a human player as well \u2013 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. 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.<\/p>\n

\"Populous\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

“Then this ‘plaything’ started to become real,” recalls Molyneux. “We finished the game \u2013 I think in total it took around nine months with the two of us, Glenn doing the graphics, and me doing the game \u2013 and then it was launched. It was so different in those days because I think it only had two days\u2019 worth of testing before it was shipped. 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\u2019t have to play all the levels?’ And that\u2019s when I realised that we hadn\u2019t actually done an ‘end’, so we had to quickly mock one up, which was incredibly underwhelming.”<\/p>\n

Populous sold millions of copies on home computers and is credited with siring the ‘God Sim’ genre \u2013 although Molyneux says creating new game categories was never an objective. “We had no idea what we were making at the time. There was an evil God and a good God and that was it; we didn\u2019t make the connection. It was more the journalists who made the genre rather than us.” Nonetheless, the game’s impact on Molyneux’s circumstances was transformative. “My life at that time was one of incredible debt and complete and utter obscurity,” he admits. “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\u2019re now rich!’, it was unbelievable; over the course of six weeks it changed the whole course of my life, and without Populous I\u2019m sure my life would have been 100 percent different. It was a real rags to riches story.”<\/p>\n

At the time, the home computer gaming market \u2013 dominated by the Atari ST and Amiga, but also including the PC and Apple Mac \u2013 was under increasing threat from a new wave of specialised and powerful Japanese games consoles, and the best computer games were being earmarked for conversion by publishers keen to meet the demands of this rapidly-expanding potential audience. Populous was, on paper, an obvious candidate. “There were a bewildering number of versions,” recounts Molyneux. “I think at that time some of them were handled by Electronic Arts, some were handled by us internally and some were handled by other publishers. Because the money from Populous allowed us to expand a little bit, we decided not to do the conversions in-house, because we didn\u2019t know much about things like the Mega Drive and the Super Famicom and we didn\u2019t have a licence, so what tended to happen is you\u2019d get approached by a publisher and they would handle the conversion.”<\/p>\n