Playing god at fourteen
In 1989 a small British studio called Bullfrog, led by Peter Molyneux, released Populous on the Amiga, and nothing quite like it had been seen before. You do not steer a hero. You are a god. You raise and lower the land so your followers can settle it, they build and multiply, their faith gives you power, and you spend that power making life miserable for the other god's people: earthquakes, swamps, volcanoes, floods, a knight on a rampage, and finally Armageddon.
It invented a whole genre, the god game, and it swallowed me whole. Hundreds of worlds, each one a new puzzle in mud and water, and I wanted to see every single one of them.
Datormagazin's caption: “Robert Eriksson cannot hide his disappointment.” Photo: Lennart Nilsson, Datormagazin 12/89
Third in Sweden
That summer Datormagazin, the Swedish computer magazine we all read, ran the Swedish Championship in Populous. Readers sent in their records, and mine went to the top of the list with 497,450 points. Only four players in Sweden had made it through the whole game, and those four met in the final round.
We played it out at the magazine's office in Stockholm, everyone against everyone, with a place in the European final for the winner. I was fourteen. The next youngest was nineteen. I beat Franz Kresten, who went on to the final, and finished third in Sweden. The prize: 500 kronor and a Datormagazin T-shirt. The photographer caught me after the last game, and the caption says it all ;)
Not a plan, not a mock-up: Populous on my C64 Reloaded MK2
A long time in the making
I started this port a long time ago. It has been a passion project ever since, picked up and put down again alongside life and my many other C64 projects. But Populous never really let go of me, and now it is a real game on a real cartridge, running on a real C64.
The goal was simple to say and hard to do: the original Amiga game, with its own rules and its own worlds, on a 1 MHz machine with 64 KB of memory and sixteen colours.
A grass hill raised up over the book, with settlements and walkers
The whole game, every world
All 495 Conquest worlds are on the cartridge, across all four landscapes: grassland, desert, snow and ice, and rock and lava. Type in a world's name to jump straight there, just like on the Amiga, and your progress is saved on the cartridge itself.
You sculpt the land, your people walk, settle and build, from little huts to castles, and the computer god plays its own game against you. All six divine powers are in, from earthquake to Armageddon, along with the papal magnet and the battles. Play with a mouse, the way it was meant to be, or with a joystick. No loading, no disk swapping.
Desert towns on terraces under the rail
Playing by the Amiga's rules
A Populous world is a living thing. Every follower decides where to walk, where to settle and when to fight, towns grow according to how much flat land is around them, and the computer god plans its own moves against you. Get one of those rules slightly wrong and the whole world plays differently, ten minutes later.
So the game logic was rebuilt rule by rule from how the original actually behaves, and checked side by side against it, world after world, until the C64 played the same games. It plays every original world, start to finish.
Snow raised up to the book and the rail, just like on the Amiga
A world built from little squares
The Amiga paints its landscape freely, pixel by pixel, in any colour from its palette. On the C64 the screen is a grid of small 8 x 8 blocks, and each block may only use a handful of colours. Put a castle, a stretch of coast and a flag in the same block and they all want different colours. Somebody has to lose.
So the game follows strict rules about who wins each block, and all four landscapes were redrawn from scratch with those rules in mind, in a graphics editor I wrote for the job, so that hills, shores, towns and castles still look right wherever they end up. Raise a hill high enough and it climbs over the book in the corner and up under the rail at the top of the screen, just as on the Amiga, with land and frame sharing every block they meet in. The art is still a work in progress, and it keeps getting better.
Terraced desert with palms and a walker. Every walker is a sprite
Hundreds of people, eight sprites
The C64 has eight sprites, its little moving pictures. A busy Populous world has crowds of walkers. A multiplexer reuses each sprite further down the screen as the picture is being drawn, so eight become many.
Then the world has to scroll. Move the view and the C64 redraws the land on a hidden screen and swaps it in when it is ready, so you never see it half built, while the people keep walking, the sea keeps rolling and the map of the whole world keeps blinking away in the corner. All on a 1 MB EasyFlash cartridge.
Two ports for the price of one
Here is the funny part. To make Populous work on the C64, I first had to squeeze an Amiga game into the C64's limits. And then, to let other people play with it, I took my C64 version and ported it again, this time to the web.
So the game has travelled from the Amiga to the C64, and from the C64 to the browser. The game engine in the web app is a port of my C64 engine, not a remake that happens to look similar. Same game logic, same worlds, same computer god, same C64 graphics and the same C64 colour limits, block by block. Playing it in the browser is, for all practical purposes, playing the C64 version.
The C64 game is the real thing, and it is working today. The web app is the tool that lets anyone help with what comes next, and it will keep evolving as the C64 version is finalised.
An ice village with trees and huts. The next landscape could be yours
Build a world, then play it
The original gave you four landscapes. The Fan Edition will have more, and I want them to come from you. The web app is a land editor with my C64 game engine built in: draw a whole new world, its ground, sea and shores, its towns, castles, trees and rocks, and it checks every C64 rule live as you draw. If it works in the app, it works on the C64.
Then press play and take any world of the game for a spin in your new landscape, right there in the browser. More importantly, Download pack exports your land graphics in the C64's own format, and I can import them straight into the C64 cartridge build. What you draw in the browser is what ends up on the cart.
It works best in a desktop browser with a mouse. The first visit downloads about 13 MB and takes around ten seconds; after that it starts from your browser's cache.
Two Populous on the C64? Even better
Not long ago I found out that Mr.SID, Andreas Varga, is also porting Populous to the C64. My first reaction was honest disappointment. The Austrian coder is a legend of the C64 port, the man behind Prince of Persia and Sonic the Hedgehog, both absolutely amazing conversions.
After a while, I saw it differently. The C64 community is better off with two versions of this fantastic game. I expect his to be the pretty much flawless, direct port he is known for, and I cannot wait to play it.
So mine gets its own name and its own direction: Populous: C64 Fan Edition. It stays as true to the original as I can muster, then opens the door to new worlds made by the community. This is not a race to be first. I could release a version tomorrow. I would rather wait, and release a version with the wider C64 community in it.
A lava village with red lava pools and rocks, the land reaching the book under the rail
Done, with a little polish to go
The game is there: every original world, every power, the computer god, the whole Conquest. What is left is the finishing touches. The wandering monster that turns up late in a long game, the one Datormagazin called a big green monster leaving a trail of swamp, still has to move in. The powers will get their big moments on screen, the shaking ground, the eruptions and the rising water. The graphics are still a work in progress and will keep improving right up to release.
And of course the new worlds. The Fan Edition is planned for release later this year.