Interview With 'Populous' Creator Peter Molyneux

Anonymous Coward writes: "Gaming magazine Spank! has posted a new interview with Peter Molyneux, the madman behind Black & White, as well as the classic games Populous and Dungeon Keeper (amongst others). The interview is all over the place, with Peter talking about the genesis of Black & White, his thoughts on the upcoming next-generation console systems, his beloved Tamagotchi (which was drowned in a cup of coffee during Dungeon Keeper's crunch time), his thoughts on Pokemon, and if you can believe it, other topics as well."

Comments

Re:dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter Molyneux is the reason for this story. If Slashdot is even going to have a "games" category, then an interview with Molyneux certainly belongs in that category. Peter Molyneux ranks with the likes of Sid Meir, John Carmack, and Shigeru Miyamoto in terms of both history and influence in the industry. You just don't find any bigger names than these.

Perhaps more to the point, you have the power to ignore both stories about games and stories posted by emmett, why not use it instead of spending much more of your precious time whining about the story than you did reading it?

Re:Populous rules!

[Pathwalker]

I loved the "bit planes" landscape in the promised lands expansion pack - Atari Vs Commodore :-)

I used to play those levels via 2400 baud modem with my friends all the time :-)

Re:Populous rules!

[Pathwalker]

I never played the SNES version - so I can only tell you about the PC version.

The Bit Planes (I'm pretty sure it wasn't plains) was one of the worlds on the promised lands expansion pack - it had Lego World, Bizarre World, French Revolution world, Bit planes, and I think a couple more.

With the Bit Planes map, the world was sheets of tractor feed paper (green/white striped). Where crops were growing, there was printing on the paper.
Where there were swamps, holes appeared in the paper.
The landscape was dotted with coffee mugs, pencils, etc...
Buildings ranged from abaci and calculators, up to clusters of supercomputers.
Plus, instead of good vs evil, you had Atari Vs Commodore - great for working out that everpresent argument :-)

Can't spell?

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Why should the strength of a spell be linked to how well you can sweep the mouse in a circle?
Well, if you cannot spell, you could use some spellchecking software.
__

Re:Populous rules!

[Industrial Disease]

The Promised Lands also had a Cowboys vs. Indians tileset; the Cowboys were the evil ones. Bizarre world was kind of neat because it had such weird settings: only the smallest and largest settlements actually grew in population; everything else disappeared after a while.
--

Populous World Name Gen

[UnknownSoldier]

Here's a program that lists all the world names for Populous 1.
I wrote it back in 91 when I bored one weekend... :)

The astute reader will notice that you can't play all possible world combinations in Populous (32,768 world names I believe.)

/*
This program lists all the world names in Populous

Written by Michael Pohoreski on Nov. 19, 1991
*/

#include &LTstdio.h&GT
#include &LTconio.h&GT /* getch() */
#include &LTctype.h&GT /* tolower() */

int Pprefix = 4; /* index to prefix */

int Proot = 0; /* index to root */

int root_add[] = { /* 32 world pattern */
25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 26, /* -7, -7, -7, -7, -7, -6 */
25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 26, /* -7, -7, -7, -7, -7, -6 */
25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 26, /* -7, -7, -,7 -7, -7, -7, -6 */
25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 26, /* -7, -7, -7, -7, -7, -6 */
25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 26 /* -7, -7, -7, -7, -7, -7, -6 */
}; /* relative changes to each other */
int Proot_add = 0;

int Psuffix = 23;
int suffix_add[] = {
13, 14, 14, 14,
13, 14, 14, 14, 14,
13, 14, 14, 14, 14
};
int Psuffix_add = 0;

char *prefix[] = {
"RING", "VERY", "KILL", "SHAD", "HURT", "WEAV", "MIN", "EOA",
"COR", "JOS", "ALP", "HAM", "BUR", "BIN", "TIM", "BAD",
"FUT", "MOR", "SAD", "CAL", "IMM", "SUZ", "NIM", "LOW",
"SCO", "HOB", "DOU", "BIL", "QAZ", "SWA", "BUG", "SHI"
}; /* taken from populous.exe */

char *root[32] = {
"OUT", "QAZ", "ING", "OGO", "QUE", "LOP", "SOD", "HIP",
"KOP", "WIL", "IKE", "DIE", "IN", "AS", "MP", "DI",
"OZ", "EA", "US", "GB", "CE", "ME", "DE", "PE",
"OX", "A", "E", "I", "O", "U", "T", "Y"
};

char *suffix[32] = {
"HILL", "TORY", "HOLE", "PERT", "MAR", "CON", "LOW", "DOR",
"LIN", "ING", "HAM", "OLD", "PIL", "BAR", "MET", "END",
"LAS", "OUT", "LUG", "ILL", "ICK", "PAL", "DON", "ORD",
"OND", "BOY", "JOB", "ER", "ED", "ME", "AL", "T"
};

void update_world( void );
void display_world( void );

void main( void )
{
int x; /* current world to print name of */
char key;
int pause;

fprintf( stderr, "Display pause ( Yes / No ) ?" );
do
{
key = getch();
key = tolower( key );
} while ((key != 'y') && (key != 'n'));

pause = 0;
if (key == 'y')
pause++;
fprintf( stderr, "\n\n" );

/* x &LT 495 */
for ( x = 1; x&LT 1500; x++ )
{
/*
pattern changes at world 174,
& world 333, 506, 679, 852, ...
goto to next suffix if world &GT 174 & (world + 13 mod 173) == 0
*/

if (x == 174)
{
Psuffix = Psuffix + 1;
if (Psuffix &GT 31)
Psuffix = Psuffix - 32;
Psuffix_add = 0;
}

if ( (x &GT 173) && (((x + 13) % 173) == 0) )
{
Psuffix = Psuffix + 1;
if ( Psuffix &GT 31 )
Psuffix = Psuffix - 32;
Psuffix_add = 0;
}

printf( "%5d: ", x );
display_world();
update_world();

if ((x % 10) == 9)
printf( "\n" );

if (((x % 20) == 19) && pause)
{
printf( "\nPress a key to continue..." );
key = getch();
printf( "\n\n" );
}
}
}

void update_world( void )
{
Pprefix = Pprefix + 5;
if (Pprefix &GT 31)
Pprefix = Pprefix - 32;

Proot = Proot + root_add[ Proot_add ];
if (Proot &GT 31)
Proot = Proot - 32;
Proot_add = Proot_add + 1;
if (Proot_add &GT 31)
Proot_add = 0;

Psuffix = Psuffix + suffix_add[ Psuffix_add ];
if (Psuffix &GT 31)
Psuffix = Psuffix - 32;
Psuffix_add = Psuffix_add + 1;
if (Psuffix_add &GT 13)
Psuffix_add = 0;
}

void display_world( void )
{
printf( "%s", prefix[ Pprefix] );
printf( "%s", root[ Proot ] );
printf( "%s\n", suffix[ Psuffix ] );
}

Populous

[airos4]

Populous was one of the first "God Games" where your goal was to make your people happy, so that they would worship you, create more people, and eventually launch a holy war against the other people led by the other god. It was rather cool -- you could raise and lower landscape features to make nice flat land for your people, create 'Acts of God" to kill off the other people (I enjoyed 'Volcano' myself) and just generally be a deity. I recommend picking up a copy if you haven't seen it. The game is somewhat dated technically, but it's like SimCity.. the gameplay carries it through the graphics.

Playing God...

[Dinosaur Neil]

I picked up Populous for my Atari ST (a decade and a half ago) and wasted many many many hours causing floods and earthquakes and what-not. It's kinda cool to find that the creator is not some arrogant God's-gift-to-gaming twit. Too bad the interview was short and full of fluff...

Populous

[spiralx]

One thing I read about a long, long time ago was that Bullfrog were developing this great new game based on the idea of you being a god and controlling people, and that in order to test this idea they built landscapes out of Lego in order to test the various effects and game rules. There was a picture of this large Lego landscape complete with people and trees, just like in the actual game :)

Re:You guys call yourself nerds?

[belgin]

Heh. YHBT. HAND.

Translation for Usenet illiterate: You have taken a joke seriously. "Have a nice day" or HAND is code that a given comment is intended to garner a response, not be taken as serious or factual. YHBT or "You have been trolled" is the usual response. Trolls are usually moderated down on Slashdot.

You learn something every day, huh?

B. Elgin

This is worse then Daikatana

[NightHwk]

When I first heard of black&white I thought it sounded like a cool idea, and the screen shots looked like it had some promise...I thought the same on the 10th, 50th and 100th preview of the game.

Then I realized I was all wrong!

This game is all hype and it screams it! *EVERY* day you can goto bluesnews or any other game news site and see at LEAST *3* new preiviews for this game, and at least 1 interview with the head developer, Mr. Molyneux....

How can anyone program a game and do all those interviews and make all those screenshots and preview movies at the same time?

This guy is more BS and hype then John Romero and the entire staff of monolith combined.

If I see an announcement of Peter Molyneux doing a spread for playboy, I'm going to take my own life.

NightHawk

Browse at -1 as this will obviously be marked flamebait or a troll by moderators who cannot see these companies for what they are.

Was I the only one scared by Populous?

[Glowing Fish]

Was I the only one who was ever scared by Populous? Was I the only person who ever pulled my covers over my head at 5 AM, blurry eyed, as I realized that after long long hours, I couldn't find a way to defeat the forces of evil?

A repetitve game that starts out the same every time, with the promise of new things...and then lures you in, as you repeat the same mistakes, and hope that this time it will work.

Ironically enough, I am playing Civ II right now. Maybe this would be a good Slashdot Poll... Populous vs. Civilization vs. SimCity, although most Slashdotters seem to like all these new fangled first person shooters for some reason. In my day we didn't have such things. In my day, Mario didn't have a Brother...oh never mind, I am rambling.

You guys call yourself nerds?

[jeremyf]

I expected everyone to go off on how they loved playing Populous way back when. Now I say people saying "What's Populous?" and a billion people who played Populous on their Genesis.

What kind of nerds are we keeping with?! Did these guys just jump on the nerd-bus when it became profitable? I say all of those people get banned immediately!

- Jeremy Fuller

Re:Gesture recognition technology

[SuperKendall]

Actually in practice I think this will work pretty well. I've not actually played the game, but I did use a CAD like graphics API once (whose name eludes me) with a gesture recognition part built in. Basically what it did was generate some unique number based on your series of mouse movements, and you could then tie the number generated to a particular command.

That actually worked pretty well - you would circle something to zoom in on an area, you could shake the mouse right to left to delete something, etc. It was even pretty tolerant of variation in movement, so you did not have to be absolutley accurate for it to recognize what you did.

It is true that in the middle of a game things might be different. I'd reccomend getting a 3M precision mousing surface, then putting that on top of a normal mousepad (as they tend to slip on desks by themselves).

Gesture recognition technology

[spiralx]

Lionhead have developed a new technology - 'Gesture Recognition' technology - which allows spells to be cast, practised and perfected by mouse movement. To cast a firewall, for example, you must sweep the mouse in a circle. From this gesture, Lionhead's GR technology can sense the type of spell you wish to cast and (according to how accurately the spell was executed) determine how strong it was.

Now this sounds all very well in theory, but how does it actually work out in real life? My mouse here at work is a bit of a bastard - when you try and move it left the ball sometimes sticks and doesn't move. Wouldn't this make playing the game pretty much impossible, or at the very least cut down on the available options?

Even if I had a fully flowing mouse I still don't know if I like the sound of this all that much. Why should the strength of a spell be linked to how well you can sweep the mouse in a circle? For an action game then sure, but for a strategy game this seems more like a gimmick than a genuine aid to play.

Can anyone who has played Black&White tell me what this is like in practice?

Re:Black & White?

[SuperKendall]

Someone else posted a link, but I'll give the executive summary -

Basically, you are a god with a set of people who worship you. That sounds familiar, but this time you can "make a difference" as it were, for good or worse.

You have groups of people that worship you to provide you with power, and also you get to pick any animal in the land to be your familar - a beast that will grow to huge size and aid you in your fight against other gods.

The other aspect of the game is that as you perform good or evil actions, your followers, your land, even you familar will alter in apperance as well.

One really interesting aspect of the game is that there are no more control icons, only your Hand. You can pick up followers or your familar with it, and use it to cast spells by gesturing - here's a bit from the technology page that describes it:

Lionhead have developed a new technology - 'Gesture Recognition' technology - which allows spells to be cast, practised and perfected by mouse movement. To cast a firewall, for example, you must sweep the mouse in a circle. From this gesture, Lionhead's GR technology can sense the type of spell you wish to cast and (according to how accurately the spell was executed) determine how strong it was.

It is true that pretty much every game magazine and web site has been covereing this for some time, though I agree they should have at least provided a link to Lionhead's web site!

Peter Molyneux

[PhiRatE]

I've got to say, Peter Molyneux is, in the gaming realm, pretty much my idol. I'm not one for hero worship, and I don't follow his every move or copy the way he dresses or anything, but I firmly believe in every game he has written, and in every game he will ever write/direct, and he has never done me wrong. From Power Monger to Populous to Syndicate to Dungeon Keeper, he has been innovative, created a solid piece of software and I have always enjoyed the game, often for many months. I still crave Power Monger.

Of course he's not entirely responsible for it himself, but it seems to follow him around, through Bullfrog and now Lionhead it seems, so I choose to hold him responsible :)

I still remember learning 68000 assembler from an article Bullfrog did for Amiga Format years ago.

As an example to the gaming industry as a whole, I would have great difficulty picking anyone better. There are others who are better technically (John Carmack for example) and sometimes strategically (Sid Mier perhaps? I don't know) but for the sheer combination of gameplay, interface, innovation, and unadulterated joy, Peters games have caught me every single time.

I look forward very much to the debut of Black&White, and even more so to whatever he comes up with in the future.