Populous

Okay, I'll admit I've played the sequel back in the day more than this, but it still remains a great game. Lots and lots of themes pioneered with this single game; terraforming, disaster striking at will, sabotaging the other player, all mixed with a hint of voyeurism - all these make up for a great game.

I've seen a 1-hour talk of Peter Molyneux at GDC (I'm sure others would love to hear him talk while others will probably want to slice their wrists, so tread carefully!), where he shares lots of anecdotes regarding the starting of his career^*, but he also kind of confesses that he's a voyeur at heart and wants to program AIs and then just sit and watch them go by and play. He also mentions that he totally loved multiplayer from the start and that's why all his early games focused on that... it must be really fun playing populous and Powermonger with a human opponent!

An excerpt from there from those that can't listen to the old man babble for an hour:

Quote:

Before Peter Molyneux was a famous game developer, he was just a man living in England. To generate income, his girlfriend's father convinced him to start a company that shipped baked beans to the Middle East. He innocently named his company Taurus, not knowing that the name would be his key into the gaming industry. After shipping beans for some time, Molyneux received a call from Commodore. Slightly confused but eager to see what this inquiry was all about, Molyneux obliged their invitation to visit the company's offices. Commodore presented him with the Amiga 1000 and asked him to create a software program for it – not a game. It dawned on Peter that Commodore had mistaken his bean-shipping company with a legitimate software company named Torus, but he didn't correct them. The following week, Commodore shipped him several Amigas and Peter's first programming adventure had begun.