Afterlife is a god game released by LucasArts in June 1996 that places the player in the role of a semi-omnipotent being known as a Demiurge, with the job of creating a functional Heaven and Hell to reward or punish the citizens of the local planet.

Instead, the player creates the infrastructure (roads, zones for the various sins/virtues, reincarnation centers) that allows the afterlife to function properly.

Aria and Jasper provide warnings when things are going wrong with the afterlife, and offer tips on how to fix the problems.

The game is satirical, with various references to pop culture (such as a passing mention of a "San Quentin Scarearantino" or sending a Death Star to destroy buildings if the player cheats too much).

Sins: Virtues: Alternatively, players can choose to lay down generic zones for fate structures, that can house all souls of all types easily.

The costs can be lowered by building Topias to house workers in the player's afterlife, making the commute unnecessary.

The Macromanager, on the other hand, allows the player to balance manually or automatically all fate structures of a specific virtue/sin simultaneously.

These include having an excessive number of unemployed workers (leading to an all-out war between Heaven and Hell), staying too deep in debt for too long (wherein the Surfers of the Apocalypso appear to destroy everything), and the Planet's population being wiped out by either nuclear warfare or an asteroid event.

Lead designer Michael Stemmle said the idea for the game came as he played SimCity, combined with a fascination for creating an organized afterlife "that tickled my bone ever since I read Dante's Inferno".

Stemmle wanted in particular to go "whole hog goofy" by not having a setting trapped to reality, full of satirical descriptions and pun-based names.

He found Hell to be easier to design, as "ironic punishments are dime a dozen", leading him to find Heaven more creatively rewarding.

The game had only four voice actors, at first only Rebecca James as Aria and Milton James as Jasper recording across two weeks, before adding at the last minute an animated opening with a hospital featuring Steve Blum and Carrie Gordon, which voice director Darragh O'Farrell said was recorded in a "mad dash" of two days going from LucasArts' headquarters in San Rafael to Los Angeles.

[5] A Next Generation critic called the game "a title that will immediately attract anyone who was even mildly amused by the mother of all sim-builders, SimCity", and praised the vast number of options and responsibilities, the characters, and the complex government.

[3] Tim Carter in Computer Gaming World called Afterlife "a well-designed simulation that adds a lot of new twists to a successful genre."