What would become known by many as ‘God powers’ were introduced as the missing gameplay device; flesh to the muscle and sinew of encouraging your miniature charges to be fruitful and multiply. “The first effect we put in was the volcano,” reveals Molyneux. “We had this idea that a little power bar could grow when your people were inside their houses. That led to the introduction of earthquakes and swamps… but there was still one big problem. How could you finish a game more quickly? The last thing we added, and the solution, was the knight – the ability to combine the little people into one big soldier to go and fight.”
   
Despite their obvious passion for their opus, Molyneux vividly remembers fearing the worst when the time came to show Populous to the outside world. “I can remember worrying, ‘People are going to think this is completely weird.’ We’d already seen that loads of publishers didn’t get it and, as we had a comparatively bad deal with EA, we weren’t really expecting any royalties. Without showing someone, or better still, letting them play Populous, we didn’t really know how best to explain it. At no point during development did we talk about you being a god, or it being a ‘god game’ – it just didn’t occur to us. The person who suggested that was a journalist called Bob Wade. He was the first games journalist to come and see it.”
   

Bob Wade, then of multiformat games magazine ACE, is now a company director. “It would be nice to think it was me, but I’m pretty sure it was the ACE team as a whole that came up with ‘god game.’ I do remember the trip to see it, though. They were obviously not media savvy, and weren’t used to having that sort of attention. Only afterwards did I realise how unprepared they were for it all. They were normal people, with a genuine passion for what they were doing. It was as much them asking what I thought of it as it was me asking them about how it worked. I remember Peter asking me what I thought of it while in the pub later that day and I didn’t have any qualms about saying that it was bloody special, absolutely blinding, and it was going to be huge. I really wanted to go back and play it again.”
   
“All I wanted to say was, ‘What do you think?’” laughs Molyneux. “So we took him down the pub, drank God knows how many pints, plucked up the courage, and then asked him. And he really, genuinely, loved it. So I made the decision not to take him back to play it again, just in case he changed his mind.”
   
Critical approbation vindicated the team’s desire to innovate – and Populous truly met with universal acclaim – but Bullfrog was impoverished. At the time, the codeshop was operating out of a room in an attic (“Our offices were shite, they were absolutely awful,” shudders Molyneux) above a pensioner who would later attack senior Fujitsu staff with a mop when they attempted to pay a visit. “We were totally broke,” Molyneux confides.
   
“Our royalty cheques were due to be paid one quarter in arrears, and we didn’t expect to get any,” Les Edgar recalls. “We really were very detached from the quantities sold – we had no idea how big it was. Our first cheque was for £13,000. We agreed to pay off bills, and then think about what to do next. The next cheque was for a quarter of a million. I thought it was a mistake at the time. I actually called EA to tell them. And then Imagineer made an absurdly huge offer for rights to develop it as one of the launch titles for the SNES in Japan.”
   
Ah, yes. Japan. At the airport, Molyneux and Edgar were thoroughly nonplussed by their reception, and the events that followed. “It was massive over there,” Molyneux says, with understatement. Western computer games just didn’t, and still don’t, evoke great fervour in Japan. “They had organised this big competition, with me playing against their national champion. They even played our respective anthems before we began. I hadn’t played it in two months. I knew the cheats, though. I would have used them if I hadn’t had all those bloody cameras watching my every move. [Laughs] He absolutely thrashed me.”
   
As a footnote, it’s worth mentioning that Glenn Corpes claims that Molyneux nefariously tweaked aspects of the Populous code in order to beat him during multiplayer battles. We don’t doubt it for a second, Glenn.

This is a edited version of a feature that originally ran in E107.