Populous

Populous (1989), from Bullfrog and designer Peter Molyneux, founded the genre still known today as the "god game": playing a deity, the player shapes the landscape indirectly — raising and lowering terrain, unleashing earthquakes, floods and miracles — and, drawing on the number of followers who supply their "mana" for spells, wages war on a rival tribe without ever directly commanding units. An iconic touch was the deity's own hand, the cursor through which the player physically pokes at the land and its people. Its isometric view and simple, legible rules let it spread across most of the era's platforms, from the Amiga and Atari ST through the Commodore 64 to DOS-based PCs and, later, consoles like the SNES.

Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods (1991) kept the core idea intact but added a choice of several deities, each with its own set of spells including a devastating Armageddon, and a stronger mythological framing drawn from Greek gods. Many players still regard the second game as the most polished version of the original idea — it added depth and better graphics without weighing down the simple, easy-to-read flow of play.

Populous: The Beginning (1998) rebuilt the series in full 3D and pulled it closer to real-time strategy: the player no longer just shapes the land but directly commands shamans, warriors and preachers, builds villages of temples and huts, and leads units against the enemy much like the RTS titles popular at the time, across a single shaman's campaign travelling between worlds. To some, this refreshed an aging formula; to others, it was a departure from the pure "god game" play that had made the series famous — and it was also one of the last titles Molyneux completed at Bullfrog, alongside the similarly god-like Dungeon Keeper, before leaving to found his own Lionhead Studios.

Either way, Populous was the first to show that a player could feel responsible for an entire civilisation's fate without controlling a single character or an army directly, and that idea later inspired a whole wave of games, including Molyneux's later Black & White, even if they don't measure themselves against Populous directly. That's part of why Populous remains one of the key landmarks in the early history of computer strategy games.