September 12th, 2025
Fun fact about Populous. Peter didn't "have an idea", I (Glenn Corpes) thought I was about to lose my job after doing the graphics for the first two games and them not selling. I bought my Atari ST into the office to get some programming practice by trying to port Fusion to it. I quickly discovered the horizontal scrolling was not going to work so I let myself get distracted by making an Isometric engine. I wrote the initial prototype entirely speculatively (video of it after five days of dev on my channel). This includes the landscape modification and most of the graphics style. Peter DID contribute more than anyone else to the gameplay and coded all of it but the prototype that inspired him to do it was mine, as was all of the engine code and the graphics. The "Lego prototype" was knocked up after the game was finished to give Ace magazine something to photograph and, if I was more cynical, downplay my involvement. If anyone is interested, typing "Glenn Corpes Populous" into Youtube will show several videos where I get to tell my version of the story and the video of the 5 day old prototype I mentioned above.