1992 Imagineer / Bullfrog
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Hot on the heels of the recovery of Sensible Soccer for the NES comes yet another long-lost title for the platform – the legendary god game, Populous. It isn’t clear yet if the game was previewed in any magazines at the time, though there is reference to a conversion thanks to David Whittaker’s music credits online.
The game was fully completed by the Enigma Variations team for Electronic Arts/Bullfrog, but Mark Greenshields tells us that the client just decided not to proceed with publishing the title. Darren Melbourne (who was producer for the game), informs us that Imagineer decided that the NES was probably past its prime and they wouldn’t achieve the necessary sales. Darren was pretty upset because they had put a lot of time and effort into creating the game.
In 2025, Games That Weren’t was tasked with doing some disk recovery work – and within an archive was the final backup for the game. After some work (with thanks to Martin Pugh and Paul Hughes for advice previously on Sensible Soccer’s build), we have managed to get the game up and running. Now you can now check it out for yourselves via the downloads below.
The game works fine in the latest MESEN emulator, and also Nestopia – but its completely broken graphically in FCEUX, and possibly others. If a patch is made to improve compatibility, please let us know.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t really a fan of the original game growing up and couldn’t get into the game, but from what I can see and understand – the conversion looks pretty solid. It’s a little lacking in the colour department for the main map, but it all works and plays very well.
Darren was very hopeful that we might be able to find something of the game, and so it was a lovely surprise to find everything. There’s even a new piece of David Whittaker music to check out – a nice conversion of the original music by Rob Hubbard.
As we learn anything more about the development, we’ll continue to update this page. If you know of any press coverage, please let us know and enjoy this amazing recovery!
With a huge thank you to Mark Greenshields and Darren Melbourne for arranging the recovery and to Martin Pugh and Paul Hughes for advice.
Download
Video with commentary
Gallery
The master system version of this game is the game I put more hours on my life, ever. I’ve been playing mostly continuously since 1992.
Nice work, GTW.
It is rather amazing a 6502 cpu can do this pseudo 3d generative landscape rendering. I dont know much about the gameplay, but as a tech demo Populous always seemed really cool. I played Sim Earth quite a bit too, perhaps similar but these games are their own genres
Amazing! I don’t know if it was previewed, but I believe it was found in Nintendo’s internal lot check lists
GTW is on fire lately. Congrats on yet another brilliant recovery. Amazing it’s complete and yet it was left to rot. After watching your video it looks like the dev team did an amazing job considering the limitations of the NES.