I think you are the first person I come across that knows that game and you were an actual dev on it! So thank you! I played it when I was around 13(I think) and I loved it. The whole concept of simulating a planet and the animals on it was pretty much mind blowing for me at the time(it still is). I should have kept the poster that came with it...the different sapien evolutionary branches were really interesting.
Cool! It's admittedly an obscure game. My main contribution included the random generation and movement of the cratons. This involved mapping Cartesian to spherical coordinates but harder because each row of tiles was offset by half a tile's width from the rows above and below, like a brick wall.
We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also difficult!
I also worked on the initial placement of some visual elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of the different data structures for loading/saving games.
After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened) Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
