During the design phase, LEGO was used to build landscapes so that the game could be visualized before it was programmed.
This was one of the few games of it's time to be written mostly in C. Most games of the time on the Atari ST and Amiga were written in 100% machine-code.
Simon Cooke attempted to convert the game to the SAM Coupé system in 1991, but this also went unreleased.
64'er magazine released some mysterious shots of an apparent Commodore 64 conversion in 1991, and Paul Hughes was also asked to produce an official C64 version, but neither of these were ultimately finished.
It was only decided that Populous would be about gods when somebody from a magazine came over, looked at it and said "so it's a bit like being a god". Before that, there was no plot to explain what was going on, and after that comment, the whole plot had a direction.