Populous

You're not a hero or a soldier – you're a god. And under your hands the land rises and falls so that your people can grow, while the blasphemers on the other side of the map await destruction. Populous by the studio Bullfrog and visionary Peter Molyneux is a game that gave rise to an entirely new genre: the so-called "god game," a game in which you play as a deity.

The gameplay principle was revolutionary for its time. You can't directly control your believers, but you can shape the terrain – raising and leveling the land so your settlements have somewhere to build and grow. The more followers you have, the stronger your divine power, which you then use to unleash calamities upon the enemy people: earthquakes, swamps, volcanoes, or destructive floods.

What makes Populous stand out is precisely this indirect form of rule. Instead of micromanaging units, you manipulate the environment and watch your civilization grow naturally. The struggle between two deities for dominance over the world plays out across hundreds of levels, giving the game enormous staying power and replayability.

Titles like Populous put Peter Molyneux and the studio Bullfrog on the map of the gaming world and inspired an entire generation of strategy games. The concept of a god shaping the world and leading their people to prosperity became the foundation for later genre classics, and Populous is today rightly considered one of the most influential strategy titles of the late 1980s.

The console version brought this previously computer-bound concept to SNES players. A top-down strategy where your opponent is an equal deity offered something fresh and intellectually stimulating on the console amid a sea of action games – an experience that rewarded deliberation and planning rather than quick fingers.

Why play: The founder of the "god game" genre by Peter Molyneux – if you're drawn to the idea of leading your people from the position of a deity and shaping the world to your will, this is where it all began.