Years before Fable, Peter Molyneux finished making proto-city builder Populous in 12 hours because he "forgot" to do it sooner: "There was no end of the game"

It sounds like Fable director Peter Molyneux was just having one of those days: apparently, he only finished working on his 1989, pre-city builder Populous just 12 hours before publisher EA needed to bug test its ending.

Speaking to Edge for its new magazine issue 416, out now, 66-year-old gaming pioneer Molyneux recalled the process of developing Populous at former EA subsidiary Bullfrog, which Molyneux co-founded in 1987 before the publisher dissolved it in 2001. It sounds like a too-long evening.

"Electronic Arts had this terrifying process where, before the game was sent to the disk manufacturers, they'd do 24 hours of testing and the game had to have no bugs for 24 hours," says Molyneux. "It was only when they said, 'Oh, we need to test the end of the game' that it dawned on me: there was no end of the game. It was something I forgot to do."

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That's, uh, a big thing to forget. Molyneux and fellow Populous designer Glenn Corpes paid for it, forcing themselves to work "all night on this screen of the two gods that popped up and said, you know, 'Congratulations, you've finished the game.'" Populous initially launched on Commodore's Amiga PCs before eventually becoming renowned as the first official god game – the first of many supernatural strategy games Molyneux would go on to create and define a genre with.

So this is a story with a happy ending. It just happens to have come together "in like 12 hours," says Molyneux, until he "resubmitted the build to test."

Fable lead Peter Molyneux was so excited about selling his first game that he cut a hole in his mailbox so all the orders would fit – it sold 2 copies and "one was almost certainly from my mum."