[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-22.]

(Even Lady Gaga can’t beat this)

I ain’t revealin’ nothin’.

Strictly speaking, Day Twenty-One‘s picture is a representation of the third game in this series, but what I have in mind is what is regarded as the first “God” game: Populous. Populous was Bullfrog Productions’s second game and its first huge success, designed by Peter Molyneux and released in 1989. You play a god, who has to guide worshipers to build a civilization to take on another god and his worshipers. In the first two iterations, you didn’t control your minions, but cajoled them through your actions. Populous: The Beginning introduced a somewhat spherical world (hence the blue globe in the picture) and direct control. Populous led to many other games, such as Powermonger and Black & White.

Fun fact from Wikipedia: Populous was originally planned out using Lego.