Kazuo Sawa did some amazing work on the music of this convertion of Populous, especially his take on the title theme, as well as the eerily atmospheric ambient basic creation theme.

My dad picked this up with Sim City and Super Mario World when he bought our SNES. I never saw him play it, but I'm sure glad he got it. I played this plenty.

I spent countless hours playing this game back in the day and still own it today.

I loved this game. I imagine it's not super inspiring to somebody who knew the other versions but for somebody who only had Nintendo stuff it felt very unusual and special.

Honestly, seeing what are essentially demakes from a pc to lower end hardware, when done right, is especially impressive. This, which I didn't know was on the SNES, is equally so.

Your tagline here is a pun straight from the gods, Jeremy.

What's notable is that this SNES version is what was partially used as a basis for the DS adaptation of Populous (which, like this one, was also a Japanese-developed joint, albeit by EA Japan and Genki instead), down to having the Yamato world and the Nintendo-themed one (in an updated form; the settlements/buildings now include pretty much every Ninty console and handheld up to that point)

I remember this game. My favorite strategy was to build about one or two levels higher than the enemy and then flood the world. That always rocked the AI's little mind.

Yes! Ha ha i have been waiting for this one. The SNES was magic. Great stuff Jeremy! A+

This was my second snes game..at first I never understood how to play, I had traded my snes for a tg16 and a genesis..when donkey Kong country came out, I had bought another snes, I still had populous, I learned how to really play and I fell in love

I loved the Master System version as a kid and that one satiated me enough to never try out Amiga and other 16-bit versions. That one had an enormous level count too (in the thousands) and with the same kind of progression (do well, skip a bunch of levels). Molyneux's dismissal of the Snes port sounds like typical bombast; instead of 'worst' perhaps 'least impressive' is would be more accurate.

Great work, as always!

Played this allot as a kid. Loved it at the time. Haven't been back to it and a loooong time

I always remembered this game being sold for super cheap at our local Babbages.

Populous was mind-blowing to me at the time because there was nothing else like this. I played the Genesis version, but since the SNES version came out a year and a half later, I would hope that it was a better version with more to do.

I had the Master System version when I was young. I think the SNES version blows it out of the water all things considered.

I loved Populous, played it endlessly. It was a fucked up game too. I loved building my civs land up at least 3 levels, then building up enough mana to flood my enemies to death, then sending knights to finish off the stragglers.

I always wondered how Populous ended up on PC Engine in Japan. With the console port license going to a Japanese developer it starts to make sense. The weird thing is that the PC Engine version is apparently still fully in English.

I figured you were going to to slide in the molyneux effect as his greatest work ever!

Very nice work. I didn't realize there was a SNES version. Somehow I expect I'd still prefer ActRaiser if I tried Populous, but then that's because of the narrative thrust.