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Last Sunday at the stroke of midnight, Reprisal was released. An on-line RTS game made in homage to Populous that’s been a personal project for almost a year. Seven days on from the release and it’s already had well over 100,000 plays and been featured on numerous gaming sites. Being my first attempt at a game, this has been overwhelmingly incredible to see.

Edge magazine “Its chunky, and fashionable, pixel visuals are augmented with an attractive, tilt-shifted depth of field effect that gives the game a unique look, while the cheerful tutorial leads you through the game’s territory-conquering gameplay with easy charm.”

Download the full desktop version of Reprisal for free!

From the press release:

You must guide your tribe to island glory by either collecting lost totems or reprising the land removing any tribes that may stand in your way. Totems will allow you to control nature itself, from raising or lowering land to summoning fire from the sky, volcanoes, tidal waves and many more.

Developed by Jon Caplin over the course of a year, Reprisal has been made in homage to Populous, one of the first ‘god’ type games made. Jon’s background in games consisted of playing them rather than making them, with Reprisal being his first, applying his background in fine art and graphic design to the task.

Reprisal combines nostalgic pixel graphics, tilt shift effects and a complement of 8 chiptunes by Eric Skiff.

“From the moment of using a Spectrum 16k home computer the fascination of pushing little coloured blocks around a TV screen took hold. Spending what seemed like hours typing in code listings from magazines, just to draw a graphic of a union jack … and then finding you’d entered a number wrong so it was all messed up will hit a heart string with a generation of home coders I’m sure. The coding seed was sown even though I didn’t realise it back then.

Progressing to a Commodore Amiga 500 and playing Populous, I realised the power of capturing someone’s attention making them lose hours of their lives playing games. I fell in love with those little pixel guys!

I made Reprisal in homage to Populous and most of the development is done from memories of the game. Approaching the game as a personal graphic design project it began as a way to fill time recovering from a broken jaw. Hopefully it will re-introduce gamers to the original, simplistic genius of the early ‘god’ games.”