Populous
Super Obsessive Game #3
Type of Game
A factory for making plots of land. And mountains. And tidal waves. And thousands of fanatical terrorists.
Release date on our machines
1990 in PAL version, but impossible to find out the month of release. If anyone knows, it will help me sleep better.
Developer
Bullfrog Productions Ltd. The game that made me love the logo with its... bullfrog, right.
Publisher
Electronic Arts Inc. The game that also made me love the logo with the spinning shapes.
Populous : available on the Mega Drive Mini 2, on GOG, on the EA site, and Epic Games ! Not bad for an old cartridge.
While I can't quite remember how I first became acquainted with the game, I do remember falling under its spell in a matter of moments. At the time, my father-in-law was still buying cartridges for his personal entertainment, so maybe Populous was one of them. He must have played three or four games before resuming his favorite activity of taking me for his living doormat, and forgot all about the multitude of little characters frantically building their huts. I didn't forget, on the contrary. The more time passed, the more the concept drove me crazy. Wait, is there anything other than guys beating up other guys while walking horizontally? Or flat cars overtaking other flat cars by sliding three centimetres above the road? The isometric view is so cool, for real! Although I wouldn't learn the word isometric until about 2003. Can I try it, or how is it? With Dad-in-law and Elena Vestibule above me in the family hierarchy and demanding their share of playtime, it's not easy to find a place for myself in front of the Mega Drive.
Divine love at first Sight
Fortunately, the former changed hobbies like he changed pants (not saying shirts, since he wore two a month at most), and the latter often returned to her mother's house. So within a few days, I was able to squat Populous in abundance. And several years later, my addiction was still living its best life. I don't think my older sister ever touched it again; I made owning the controller a no-holds-barred battle when we started a game. No more passing the pad back and forth, blahblahblah. I lose, I keep going. I win, I keep going. I was going to play it for hours, as soon as I could, as often and for as long as I could. At least, that's what I told myself in my head.
Genesis of a new genre
Here's another term I learned a thousand years after I first experienced it: the God Game. Populous would be its first representative, sweeping under the carpet other more or less legitimate contenders for the title. A simulation in which the player embodies a kind of god, with no means of directing his subjects directly, but with various methods of getting those ungrateful morons where he wants them! In this case, the main mechanic is to shape the terrain as you wish. The population builds stronger houses according to the flat space available, draws a corresponding resource (called Manna, with two n's), and reproduces at variable speed, depending on the housing they inhabit, the characteristics of the terrain and... no doubt the power of our units plays a role too? I think so, and I believe there are other parameters, but I'm going to stop before I tip over to the dark side of supposition.
The more dwellings you have (especially the big ones), the more energy you store to cast your divine spells (using the so-called Manna). People can be encouraged to build in a reasoned and peaceful way, to build in an expansionist and inquisitive way, or to merge (yes, yes) towards the leader to give him more strength, which is useful for combat, of course. What's more, there are hundreds of different levels, each with its own criteria (which influence the speed at which enemies reproduce, the availability of powers, the time subjects can spend in the water before drowning... etc.). And the opposing side does the same, in the hope of gaining the upper hand over the other: namely, burning down all its houses and killing all its citizens!
We're not saying that the concept blew a breath of fresh air into its resolution either, eh? But it did have a depth of gameplay that was unheard of for me at the time. My preferred strategy was to build my empire on a two-tiered floor, so as not to swallow anyone up with a tidal wave. A strategy that stopped working after a while, before the enemy became capable of smashing me before I could even throw a small earthquake at them. At the same time, I was flattening entire hectares as fast as possible to see a few castles rise (the most powerful building, but with the lowest reproduction speed). I thought I'd invented hot water, but the concept turned out to be a bit more subtle than that.
My jaw dropped several times before I got round to playing it! In fact, I never finished it. As a result, my jaw has never really been able to close since I was six years old; how convenient. All these ideas would come from a single brain, that of Peter Molyneux, a formidable mind with a inflated ego at least as big, founder of the Bullfrog company, and responsible for many of my best videogame memories. The guy was just unstoppable in the '90s, churning out Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper, among other legends and... er, crazy unfulfilled promises, which will disappoint even the most assiduous of fans.
A deluge of Wonders
So what's the vibe of history's first God Game? Well, I wouldn't exactly know. Not so crazy graphics, a cluttered yet empty interface that takes up three-quarters of the screen, strange sound effects... AND HOWEVER! You're caught up in the urgency of building an army of followers faster than the enemy (the enemy embodied by the AI, of course, no luck pushing there). The sound of the heartbeat repeating endlessly adds to the constant stress, especially when it speeds up as the game gets tougher. I felt as invigorated as ever when I pressed the knight icon, transforming my clan leader into an armored brute. The sound it made! Like a big metal spring bouncing off a rusty bicycle wheel, I thought it was crazy.
Or I was petrified with terror, when the initiative came from the opposite camp. I never tired of repeating the same actions on worlds alternating between green grass, desert, snow and volcanic landscape. And then there are those motley monsters that appear without warning and pass through our village, leaving a trail of destruction behind them (I seem to recall a giant magician who creates a forest by blinking, a huge toad that slobbers over the earth to make swamps, and another nondescript thing that defecates mountains). Populous looks like a cocktail of bizarre things that combine into a single entity with incredible charm, from a time when tinkering with bits of code sitting on the floor in a cellar could still give life to fantastic video games. Take it from a guy who's never aligned two lines of XML, nor put two pieces of wood together to make a sword.
That said, the Super NES version looked darker and more oppressive to me (and therefore, from my point of view as a child not overly inclined to joie de vivre, even classier). I confess, when my cousin Walter played it, and despite all my love for the Mega Drive, I couldn't help thinking it seemed better. The Master System had its port too, even though I played it for a while at the home of a very good friend of my father's, a certain Eddie Chatterton. One of the few people around me to own a Sega 8-bit, and also a computer on which I saw Theme Park run for the first time. But when I went there, I only had eyes for Enduro Racer, who knows why.
Canticle Physics
Uh, what soundtrack are we talking about, exactly? The music of the main menu? Yeah, it hurts your ears, doesn't it? It's like something out of a tuberculosis scan. Apart from that, nothing! Except for the famous incessant heartbeat during gameplay, of course. Well, that allows you to concentrate solely on the sound effects, which are pretty rare, too. But hey, oh, did the cartridge run out of space or what? Can Dave Hanlon or Rob Hubbard enlighten me? Funny how the former is sometimes credited as the creator of the in-game music. Great job, man, really. PERFECTLY composed silence! On the Super NES, it was better too, with a heady loop of wind gusts and spectral voices that darkened game sessions. We could feel the danger of idolizing a god like us! Or rather, we sensed the enormous stupidity we'd made in setting out to conquer the game's five hundred levels, whose growing hostility would make any bigot on a pilgrimage lose faith. Maybe I really would have liked to own this Nintendo adaptation. Gosh, yeah...
Miracle Tower
Maybe it's just coincidence, but Populous was part of one of my most magical childhood memories. It involves a summer's day when my mother is cleaning somewhere in the apartment, listening to the band Native's first album. My stepfather isn't there, so I start the game and watch the sun's rays light up the room. Bam! A moment touched by grace, a supreme revelation, direct enrolment in an evangelical cult. In truth, I may have idealized that brief piece of day when I looked back on it years later, but I'm keeping it as it is anyway. In any case, Populous left its mark on me in many other ways. I remember spending many summer vacation days drawing the game screen with pencils on sheets of paper (so, faceless guys and houses), and listing the weapons granted to characters according to their habitat. I invented others, too, as if I were creating a kind of mod, but on paper (much less functional, but much simpler). I'd also tried to redesign the cover from memory, and offered it to a guy singing old soul tunes at a campsite in the south of France. All of a sudden, it was a very strange remembrance to write down. Today, I'm still having fun imagining additional gameplay loops to the basic game, this time on a document saved in my cloud (still not functional, but even more practical).
Then there was the time when, very focused during a rather difficult game, I was talking to my little subjects to motivate them. I kept repeating, “Come on, we've got to result, we've got to result!” (aboutir in french). My mother, who was walking by, asked me what I was talking about. For me, “result” meant “to build.” I felt a bit stupid when she explained that it didn't make the slightest sense, then I plunged my nose back into my mission. I recently saw that a tutorial exists, which strangely enough I've never opened even though I've run this game fifty times. It might have given me some useful information on how to win against something other than bedridden enemies.