The First God Game
Date : 2025-09-22 Entry ID : 17411 Entry type : review Game : Populous (@722)
I was shocked to find out that the game runs at around 7 FPS
The first god game was created in 1989 by Peter Molyneux and Glenn Corpes. It was the second game released by Bullfrog, developed on Amiga 1000s. Seeing this game in 1989 was a revelation. The grandfather of simulation games, SimCity, came out earlier the same year, but the graphics was much more simplistic. In populous, you can mold a small world, rendered beautifully in isometric graphics of a quality unlike anything that came before it (Marble Madness being the only real contender). Little dudes walk around and build little buildings on your created landscape, and you are tasked to lead them to victory over other small dudes that worship a different god.
The game has 5000 randomly generated levels on different tilesets, so this game has many hours of gameplay.
The controls for your little dudes are a bit hard to get used to, everything is very indirect and perhaps overly complicated, but when everything works out and your knight is razing the enemy settlement, it feels great. It's a game about slowly turning the tide, and I think it does it very well.
Recently, I was shocked to find out that the game runs at around 7 FPS, but still works. The reason why it works is pure Amiga magic: The mouse still runs at 50 / 60 FPS, regardless of the frame rate, so your input is still precise, the result is just delayed an average of 70 ms, which is less noticeable due to the very indirect control.
These issues were minor drawbacks, easily ignored when playing a game that felt absolutely revolutionary at the time.
Review written on 2025-09-22.
Review score: 
(good)
(good)