The Symmetry Tool was "TedTycoon's" fifth program for Populous written in VB6 back in the summer of 2005. He originally wrote this to help create his own levels for multiplayer which he had been producing using a hex editor. He found it frustratingly slow copying the land and flipping it all in a hex editor, in the end he wrote the symmetry tool which could mirror the map in a variety of ways as well as move it. The program was released on his site and became popular quickly after the release. Many of the maps created after the release of the symmetry tool had obviously been created using it, but rather than using a combination of the tool and some hand-crafting to make them interesting, the creators had published rather boring 100% symmetrical maps.