It is often regarded as among the first city building games,[6][1][2] and credited as "arguably the earliest ancestor of the real-time strategy genre.

As each island's population grows, the ruler is responsible for housing their people, feeding their populace and keeping them happy, or else risk rebel activity, which decreases the player's score and sometimes destroys buildings.

Game algorithms generate and determine the course of rain clouds, tropical storms, hurricanes, schools of fish, and pirate ships.

[9] Ars Technica cites Utopia as being the "birth of a genre", that "prior to the mid-1990s strategy games were turn based", the "idea of adding a real-time element to force players into instant, impulsive decisions were virtually unheard of."

[5] Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice say it "helped set the template for the real-time strategy genre",[3] but has "more in common with SimCity than it does with Dune II and later RTS games.