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Posted on February 3, 2012, Ross Lincoln The Video Game Gods Might Be Resurrecting Populous

If you were like me – and chances are, if your name is Ross and your grew up in the sticks, you are – then you spent a lot of your formative years playing the game that helped make Fable maestro Peter Molyneux a household name, Populous. (Or perhaps Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods, which was even better.) Possibly – probably – the first God game, populous created the template followed by later Gods-eye view sims like Civilization, Sim city and, well, name the game that fits the format. Unfortunately, the franchise has been property of Electronic Arts since its beginning, and in typical EA style they kind of mismanaged it. The last PC version of the game, 1998′s Populous: The Beginning was badly botched due to it having also been intended for use on the original Playstation. And the less said about Populous DS, the better.

So Populous has lain largely dormant for 14 years. But if information dug up by an enterprising Neogaf forum member named Kifimbo pans out, it may be due for a triumphant return. They searching for more information about a rumored Insomniac title called Outernauts and stumbled onto a wiki page bearing the name “EAP Marketing FY13 Home Page“. Searching around this site,they claim to have located references to the following games:

*The Secret World

*Overstrike

*Populous

*Outernauts

*Respawn

The Secret World (Funcom) and Overstrike (Insomniac) are already scheduled to be published in partnership with EA. The other three are not confirmed titles, though Outernauts’ doman registration has been confirmed by VG 24/7. As for the other two, Kifimbo speculates that Respawn probably refers to a new game from Respawn entertainment, a guess that sounds as good as anything we’re likely to offer.

We were not able to replicate Kifimbo’s results on the site, so take all of this with a grain of salt. That won’t stop us, however, from being excited about the possibility of a new Populous game. We really need this to happen. We’ll even pray, if it helps.