When we were interviewing former Bullfrog developers for our 'Making Of' feature on the RTS Powermonger, there were a few topics we knew we had to explore, with the major one being the game's cancelled expansions.
As you may or may not already be aware, back when Bullfrog released the original game for the Atari ST and the Amiga, it announced some fairly ambitious plans for a bunch of data disks that would transform the game's setting to World War 1, the American Civil War, Feudal Japan, and a fantasy world. However, only one ever saw the light of day (Powermonger - World War 1 Edition), with the rest quietly being put to one side. As a result, we wanted to see whether we could tease out any information about these other disks to see if there was actually any work done on them.
In a May 1991 issue of New Computer Express, Molyneux had previously stated that the next expansion after World War 1 was planned to be the fantasy scenario that would have had “Less to do with wargaming and more to do with magic”. This had originally been teased a few months prior in a March 1991 issue of The One Magazine, along with the other expansions, where it was written that the game would allow you to mix various spells and would also include several fantasy races like elves, gnomes, and thieves. When we started talking to the team, however, no one could really remember how far this specific project got — or if any work was done on it at all — with the strongest memories instead being associated with the expansion set in Feudal Japan.
As the Powermonger artist Gary Carr tells us, this Japanese-inspired expansion would have been a creative collaboration between himself and the Bullfrog artist Paul McLaughlin and saw the team trying to push the 3D in the game a bit further using a newly released tool for creating PC graphics called 3D Studio.
Carr remembers, "The feudal Japanese one was more myself, but mainly Paul McLaughlin. We were gonna push the 3D a bit more. So the arena was gonna go from my 2D arena into Paul's 3D arena. It didn't happen, but we did do a 3D intro for the PC, which used the kind of columns that the generals stood inside of, and the basic game board. I think we also did a camera spin."
Unfortunately, Carr couldn't remember any details about why this disk didn't end up coming to fruition, but others on the team offered some potential explanations.
There were a couple of projects that were being prototyped at one point, and our piranha tank got smashed and a lot of work was lost at that moment.
Jonty Barnes, for instance, a tester on the original Powermonger, says it could have been related to an incident inside the studio involving a smashed piranha tank that ended up soaking a computer and causing a bunch of data to be lost. However, he wasn't entirely sure whether he was mixing stories.
"I don't know if I'm mixing things," says Barnes. "But there were a couple of projects that were being prototyped at one point, and our piranha tank got smashed and a lot of work was lost at that moment. There was a beat-em-up that Sean [Cooper] was working on, but I might be merging stories."
Alex Trowers, on the other hand, Powermonger's level designer, offered a slightly more mundane reason, stating that the game's WW1 Data Disk likely didn't sell well enough to make these other expansions worthwhile.
"I know that there was always the plan was going to be we're going to make all data disks," Trowers tells us, "But I don't think the data disk sold well enough to justify it. By then we'd kind of started work on Populous II as well, so we just never kind of got around to it. And the Japanese thing may well have morphed into that data disk we made for Populous II — Populous II: The Challenge Games."
As far as we're aware, no images of these other expansions have ever been shared online, with presumably very little having survived from the projects. That hasn't discouraged us, though, from continuing the search.