The game was released in 1998 on Microsoft Windows, and in 1999 for the PlayStation. Unlike earlier games in the series, which cast the player in the role of a god influencing loyal followers, The Beginning took a radical departure and placed the player in the role of a shaman, who directly leads her tribe against opponents.

The Story Behind Populous - The Beginning

The Populous series inspired the term "god game", with players assuming the role of an omniscient being who leads their people to new territories or into battle. Bullfrog representative stressed the changes the game made distinguished Populous: The Beginning from other real-time strategy games on the market at the time. Textures were assigned to different altitudes of the map and blended using masks, allowing for vibrant and varied landscapes without too much developer effort.

Originally, the game was known as Populous: The Third Coming, but the name was changed by the time the game was shown in a fully playable beta form in late 1998. The music was composed by Mark Knight, who had joined Bullfrog's team in 1997. The game was released starting on November 17, 1998, on the PC.

How Populous - The Beginning Plays

The game has no formal resource management; new units are created automatically at houses, and training new troops costs nothing except mana. Whereas previous Populous games were god games where players assumed the role of a god with terrain-altering abilities, Populous: The Beginning adopts elements of real-time strategy games. While the terrain's topology is a torus, the map is locally projected onto a sphere to give the illusion of a planet.

Other spells can slowly be replenished for continued use; the rate of spell regeneration depends upon the player's number of followers. Support for 3D acceleration enables the player to view the game in 16-bit or 32-bit colour. In comparison to the isometric presentation of the previous games in the series, Populous: The Beginning features three-dimensional (3D) graphics, with the game camera at a variable height and capable of rotating 360 degrees, enabling the player to quickly move across the planet's terrain.

Why Players Still Load It Up

PCGamer subsequently decided the game failed to live up to the previous games in the series. Electronic Arts shut down Bullfrog in 2001. Populous: The Beginning played very differently from earlier titles.

IGNs Ward Trent was especially smitten with the immersive 3D graphics. Populous: The Beginning was among EA's best-selling computer games of the 1998 third fiscal quarter. Edge concluded that while the more rigid play format of The Beginning was new to the series, it had the effect of making the result "less show-stopping"; they believed that the game was caught between the god game and RTS genres, and did not excel at either.

Populous - The Beginning — Frequently Asked Questions