Populous: The Beginning was developed by Bullfrog Productions and released on Windows in 1998, with a PlayStation version following a year later. It is the third entry in the series and also the most radical departure from what Populous had been.

In the first two games you were a god acting on the landscape while followers carried out your will. Here you are a shaman — a specific character you control directly, who leads her tribe in person. That change moved the game from divine simulation towards real-time strategy with a heavy emphasis on terrain.

Terrain is the heart of it. The landscape is fully deformable and you raise and lower it with spells, creating flat ground to build on, mountain walls for defence, or dropping enemy settlements into the sea. Villagers work on their own, so micromanagement is not your problem; you concentrate on spells, expansion and on cutting your opponent off from anywhere they could build. The campaign runs twenty-five missions across a solar system, with the shaman's eventual godhood as the goal.

Technically it was the first entry in full 3D, and Bullfrog waited four years after Populous II precisely so the technology could catch up with their idea. The planets are real spheres — you can circle the map all the way round, which was unusual then and still looks good.

Weaknesses: camera control on a spherical map is confusing at first, difficulty in the later missions climbs sharply, and those missions lean on learned solutions more than on improvisation. But as the last major Bullfrog title it still has its charm.