Populous

Dip The Time flannel back in the mentholated clock juice, and slip it onto your face once again. This time, we're sailing the SS Nostalgia back to 1989. When you slide the flannel from your face, your Now That's What I Call Music! tape collection will number but 14, and your sense of hard-earned self-confidence will be shot to hell by the overwhelming urge to masturbate.

Take off the flannel! Here's Populous, possibly the first god game. We humans were a primitive bunch in the '80s, our gods were savage, and as humans we wanted nothing more than an area of flat land big enough to build a castle on. We'd leave the castle only walk around, build another castle, or punch some guy in a nearby hut until he disappeared, so we could build a castle where his hut once stood. The works of our creator were all around us, back then. It was the god's primary job to provide you with flat land, and to attack the evil people with floods and volcanoes. Populous didn't give you a chance to go relativistic about the evilness of the other team -they worshipped a skull. As far as giveaway signs of evil are concerned, skull-worship is on a par with wearing SS uniforms.

And you can forget the peaceful win conditions of modern games like Civ -every level is building up to one thing: Armageddon. Once you've gathered enough people, and won enough prayer power, it's time for everyone to unbuild their castles, presumably carrying the bricks to the centre of the map, where they'll use them to crush the skeletons of their minutes-old enemies.

This is the game that launched Peter Molyneux towards his ambassadorship for uncomfortable interactions with impossible children. See where the madness began!