PLAYING GOD

God simulators and management games have been a frequent source of inspiration for strategy games. Populous and SimCity, 1989, are partly responsible for an astonishingly broad array of games, from Civilization to Dune II, and there hasn’t been a time where there wasn’t some intermingling going on. With games such as Anno, Age of Empires, The Settlers and Dungeon Keeper the lines continued to blur. There was city-building and economic management, but there were troops and real-time battles, too. And it was a formula that worked extremely well: all of them spawned sequels and, in some cases, are still around today.