Sepulveda enlists the player, a curious hacker who stumbled across Darwinia by accident, to aid him in rescuing the Darwinians and drive off the computer virus.

The first task involves clearing the virus population from and reactivating the Mines and Power Generator to provide resources for the Construction Yard.

In the final level of the game, Sepulveda traces the Viral infection back to its source, which is e-mail spam.

After Sepulveda had accidentally flashed an image of his face across the skies of Darwinia, The Darwinians had assumed him to be God.

[2] The player has the ability to run several programs through the Task Manager, similar to units used in many real-time strategy games.

Darwinia was inspired by the theme of the first Indie Game Jam, where a group of programmers experimented with generating tens of thousands of sprites on screen at once.

Another patch (version 1.3) was released in September 2005, which includes the option (enabled by default) of clicking icons or using keyboard shortcuts to create units instead of using the gesture system.

A new demo, using features of the above-mentioned version 1.3 patch and an entirely new level "Launchpad" not in the full game, was released in September 2005.

[1] This helped solve some of Introversion's distribution problems, and allowed for localized versions to be developed; a German translation was included with the Steam release.

[5] eGames-owned Cinemaware on 4 April 2006 issued a press release announcing they would bring Darwinia to US markets in June 2006.

[6] A Windows Vista exclusive version of Darwinia with extra eye candy and 3 additional levels was released on 31 January 2007.

Version 1.5.1.1 patch released on 18 June 2007, providing support for DirectX 9c, including extra eye candy and the "Launchpad" level.

[27][28] The PC version won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF 2006, as well as the Technical Excellence and Innovation in Visual Art awards.