The Rise and Fall of Peter Molyneux (All Parts) | Kim Justice

peter molyneux's twitter parody account peter molly do has its own entry on wikipedia did you know that that fact is utterly amazing to me in a world of largely faceless people there's this one man this one games designer who's so famous and so well known that the existence of a joke account that spouts ludicrous game ideas in the classic molyneux style will be preserved forever on the world's most popular information resource when we're all gone the aliens will download the whole of wikipedia and they'll be able to find out about peter molydue themselves oh and jimmy wales will still be at the top in the 26 000 feel of his bitcoin donation drive to cover molyneux is an intimidating task where do you even start what do you come up with and well what's your goal the easy thing to do would be to make something that reflects whatever the popular consensus is on molyneux at the time which likely now more than ever wouldn't be very positive it would be so easy to present all the events and to conclude the video by saying that molyneux is one of gaming's biggest and greatest chances to say that molyneux was once someone great but fell into obscurity and conmanship or even to say that actually just how great were molyneu's best games maybe they weren't any good after all however i would find that hard to do seeing as he's the man behind some of my favorite games who controlled a studio that defined gaming for me one of the first people in gaming who i was aware of and admired so no i'm not here to scorch peter molyneux i'm here to look at what he's done and be a bit fairer about it almost to document and appraise his work in as best way as i can in a youtube video and also to examine the way he goes about talking to the press the people that he hires and so forth and in doing so perhaps they'll find the answer to some questions how much of it was passion and how much was [ __ ] just what drove him and when all said and done what is peter molyneux's legacy there's no easy answer to any of those and yeah it will take a long time it's going to be three parts i imagine as one of the most important figures in the history of british computer games and indeed computer games as a whole over the last 25 years he deserves that and so this is the story of god or not peter douglas molineux obey the story goes let's molyneux first try to break into games with something called the entrepreneur in 1984 caught up in the bedroom codaboom he was utterly convinced that this text-based business simulator would be a massive hit i've cut a bigger postbox in front of my front door i sat by the post box waiting to hear this truck turn up with you know tens of thousands of orders it wasn't and according to peter he only sold two copies of it one of them being to his mum it's so obscure that no one seems to know what system it was even made for although i imagine it was for the c64 defeated he left game design forever and settled for a career selling baked beans no really until one day commodore gave him a call mistaking the baked beans company taurus with the company taurus with the letter o that's specialized in networking software the upshot of all of this is that molyneux stumbled upon the greatest business deal he would ever do commodore would provide taurus and molyneux 10 free omegas for porting overly networking software that he didn't do there was like an angel a devil on my shoulders and one saying go on you've just got to tell the truth you know you can't hide like this and then this other voice saying just lie just lie get the machines go to the stone space and just sort it out afterwards of course i ended up lying the understanding was soon cleared up but taurus made a database program for the amiga and more important than that they had some computers an interesting story i do sometimes wonder about some of the details particularly anything that involves commodore giving things away for free but hey ho the database and the computers are what allowed molyneux and his business partner les edgar to form bullfrog productions in 1987. there's handling the admin side and molyneux games designer heading up a handful of people or so in the heart of guildford in surrey these are the first available games that molyneux worked on as a designer a port of a gauntlet clone called druid 2 and fusion a shoot-em-up of all things there's nothing wrong with these games but it has to be said that there are few first games that are more misleading than these ones to say at least they were humble some would even say average beginnings but they got bullfrog's feet on the ground molyneux's heart was never at any point with games like lee's he envisioned something more ambitious where you were well a god populist apparently was first inspired by the work of an artist at bullfrog one glenn corpse who was idly building isometric blocks one day having played david braban's virus molyneux being molyneux one isometric block was enough to set his world of fire populace as a game evolved rather than being designed i think my first thought was let's create a little world and have these little people moving around this little world he developed an isometric landscape made some little people or peeps to potter around it and watched them play the game-changing mechanic being able to raise and lower terrain was developed simply because doing that would make it easier for the peeps to move around populist was born out of my incompetence as a programmer this is the absolute truth of it i thought when i just get the player to flatten the land so i had them just build a little land and just wander around the shore and that gave rise to that this thing called exploration that they could explore and that was because i wasn't smart enough to do the code the next idea was that if the peeps found enough flat terrain they'd build houses which would allow them to expand and grow in number finally the game had an aim there would be another side also changing the land and expanding their peeps and the two sides would eventually fight the side with the most peeps would very likely win we play it almost every day and then that night i'd refine the game in such a way so it would be to my advantage so i think i won every single game because i used to effectively cheat and refine all the rules and so this is how molyneux created the god game it should be noted that a god game is a little misunderstood sometimes as a genre it is not necessarily a sandbox game where you can do anything you want there are walls and restrictions and there is a goal to achieve that of beating the other side but rather than achieving it through directly controlling the people on the ground which you never do in populous you achieve it through well divine intervention creating the ideal space for the peeps to grow and achieve their goals the peeps are your followers and the more they grow the more money you earn which you can use for special god powers like creating volcanoes causing earthquakes or most important of all turning people into nights there's a balancing act you can terraform the land to give your peeps space to grow but you can also meddle with the opponent's land or build up defenses with hills and water you have much more freedom in something like civilization than you do in populous but civ is not a god game the god game in this form is more like a different approach to real-time strategy so with the concept created and famously recreated in lego to show off to press folks the team built world after world the original populace consisted of 500 levels where two gods could go at it if you were ever dedicated enough to beat the 500th level you would be greeted with a single screen text-based ending because it was only right at the end of the developments that the team realized that they forgot to code an ending into the game populous is such a huge and influential game that i could easily spend another 30 minutes talking about it but there's no time for that i don't mean to gloss over it at all by just telling you how the game works but that's the important bit these same building blocks cover not just this game but a lot of other molyneux games the game itself was of course massive it was something completely new that received 90 plus scores from every mag going and a big success for bullfrog and the game's publisher electronic arts and i got this phone call three weeks after it was released from one of the chief people at electronic arts and he said um how does it feel to be a millionaire and honestly it deserved all of them populous was and is lots of fun you are after all a god who can completely screw up the entire world with a flood if you please what's not to love about it populous is amazing and even if you're not in control of the action on the ground as you would normally be it's no less addictive for that it's the game that put bullfog on the map it was even ported to consoles and it is rightly an influential game it created a whole new genre not bad going to be honest and it does set out one certain aim for molyneux he has with just about all of his games molyneux always wants to create something new in putting bullfrog on the map populous put peter molyneux on the map too never at any point was molyneux standing on the sidelines he was always front and center the first in-depth molyneux print interview might just be here a big company profile of bullfog and their projects in the september 1989 issue of the one the tone is slightly incredulous as if gary ritter can't believe that this team can produce all the unnamed projects they're being coy about almost as if populist was just a fluke the feature covers three games all of which did come out project w was a peter molyneux led project released in 1990 as power monger project f was a platformer called flood and then there's project x for which very little is set but that would come out too more on that later indeed the only game covered in depth here that didn't make it was the one that had a name glenn corpse's creation which we'll get to soon the most interesting thing about the feature is seeing the team and just how young they are even for a team of coders and graphic designers one of them sean cooper wasn't even 20 years old and had come from a yts scheme now he was working on flood it was this it was as if he came in and said give us one of your guys and then left again and then i was sent round to his offices and i had to first of all have to find his address which was above a hi-fi and then i rang the buzzer and no no one answered i rang it again no one answered still so i was outside for like 10 minutes and then someone answered and hello i said hello it's shawn who sean and he went silent and then for five minutes no one let me hint i just thought oh actually don't want me anymore molyneux was the wind leader and for him it almost seemed as if the bedroom coda days never ended in a later interview he said that he would rather take on young and inexperienced people with good ideas than battle-hardened vets he even said that he could teach someone to program in two weeks disregarding its importance however close to the truth that might have been the team were never short of work but seriously how on earth are these young upstarts going to follow populous to their credit they did so with hit upon hit here's the next molyneux game power manga a relatively early rts with exciting 3d terrain and a memorable display the map complete with massive generals looking at you menacingly always made the game look fascinating in magazines it is kind of based on populace but being an rts you have a lot more direct control over your troops as far as playing it goes there are probably better rts games and it is quite hard to understand but this was certainly something that increased the genre's scope i made the fatal mistake of having a good idea programming that idea up and actually releasing it without ever really playing it flood meanwhile is a different kettle of fish an old platformer that's based around the realistic implementation of water in a game slowly trickling down and flooding the level as mentioned sean cooper was one of the main people behind this one and his next game would be an altogether different matter both of these games got great reviews and sold well to boot adding more to bullfrog's reputation just like populist powermonger ended up getting ported to other platforms including the mega drive being with the system's top third-party publisher obviously helps with that mind you still bullfog games were already going far beyond the reaches of the amiga even at this early stage smash cuts to the june 1991 second issue of amiga power where the front cover says it all even in games magazines it's rare for a designer to find themselves front and center but then there hadn't been any designer up to this point who was as a welcoming to the press as molineux was and this is one of his greatest early achievements this five-page feature is triumphant bullfrog molyneux and the still tiny team are officially amiga boys done good and recognised the world over much like the bitmaps and sensible creation at this stage still seem to be coming along okay but the real exciting portion is sean cooper's game bob or higher functions a game where you as a head of a corporation control cyborgs and get them to do your bidding can you guess what it is yet if you want a justification for molyneux's policy of hiring the young and inexperienced look no further than sean cooper the then 20 year old xyts coder who would go on to head up syndicate perhaps bullfrog's greatest game and one of the darkest most nihilistic most gripping and flat-out brilliant games ever made naturally we'll be seeing a bit more on that later or how about demi hasabi a later hire who would co-design and do the lead programming on theme park when he was just 18 years old he hadn't even finished his computer science degree yet but molyneux knew a prodigy when he saw one so what was it like working there anyway according to most it was in all honesty a pretty great time it goes without saying that it was a boys club where people worked hard and played hard but they were usually doing so out of passion and love working on games for long hours because that was what they wanted to do not because there was a crunch when you were at bullfrog there literally wasn't anything else for you except bullfrog i was next to a fire an old fireplace with roosting pigeons that used to crack down the fireplace and splatter up my leg so the end of the day i had bird [ __ ] all down my leg because it was really glamorous molyneux himself easygoing and approachable as a boss in ways but determined and with a very powerful skill an undoubted gift of the gap if you look over the amiga power interview all the molyneuisms are already in place he almost plays with interviewers welcoming but coy and always obtuse but his passion is never questioned nobody can sell a game like peter mullen you can and that wasn't just to advertisers but also to his team he had such drive and passion towards his products that he always had this certain vision for him and while that was open to other people it could cause some other people within his purview to bristle a bit at times there are some people who tend to dip in and out of the molyneux empire because of this um we just looked at theme parks who's gonna play this this is like a kids game so i quit one of my many strops in my time he encouraged creativity at bullfrog and never favored experience he made it policy to always stop everything and meet on friday afternoons just so everyone could exchange their latest ideas it's a tough one to pin down molyneux might not have been the boss as such but he was undoubtedly the leader he'd have this sort of the same shirt on every day and he'd be hunted over his computer with a with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and there'd be cigarette ash all over his computer and so finally it was time for the big one at the end of 1991. the sequel to one of the amiga's most famous games would more than anything at this point decide bullfrog's fate if populus 2 were a hit then it would probably be safe to say that bullfrog were the biggest and best finn going on the whole of the amiga to show once and for all that there was nothing fluky about them by making a great follow-up to their premier title i've waited until the sequel to go a bit more in depth about populace because while the original was so good and so groundbreaking populist 2 trials of the olympian gods feels like the true finished version seriously what a sequel you have a consistent ancient greek theme and the ability to customize your deity and increase his skills you have an instantly usable and streamlined interface it's not the book from the original but it moves so smoothly there's new handy options like armageddon which allows you to drop everything and just go straight to an all-out battle to the death as well as new heroes with more abilities than the original game's knights everything great about the first game is here but better in every way and it's one of the best sequels ever made there is an argument to be made that's molyneux as a games designer never got higher than populous that he started at the top and has been working his way down ever since it's where for someone to create something so new yet so intuitive and well just so all out fun and addictive and filled to the wind with personality populace 2 is just as it was in 1991 an absolutely essential game that must be played and one of the amiga's greatest games in the end populous 2 was a triumph more 90 scores not a single score below that from any amiga magazine in fact it's a classic victory lap sequel the game just needed to be a triumph and with that it was clear that bullfrog had already won and this is before we get to syndicate and theme park this is before we even see a bunch of the stuff that ended up never being released bullfog productions were at this stage on a truly amazing one and it would only get better after all it wasn't just molyneux one of the most important things to note about the man is just how much talent in a way he ended up nurturing and a look at bullfrog would be incomplete without properly seeing the two games that came from the studio's most apt pupils first up sean cooper he joined bullfrog on a yts or youth training scheme which if you don't know was basically a training course for school leavers back in the late 80s early 90s or ultimately a way for employers to get someone to make the tea for less than peanuts famously the doomed character in the classic specky joke game advanced lawnmower simulator is a yts junior gardener and that was most folks on yts only without the death i was helping out a lot of people and we were building we started building games and different pieces of software and just basically mucking about trying to learn stuff and that's when peter came peter molyneux came in anyway i digress sean cooper joined bullfrog and now he was about to make one of the greatest games ever made syndicate evolved from being people screwing about with ai and thinking of ways that they could batter each other into a futuristic cyberpunk world domination simulator and strategic shooter where teams of agents do horrible things to cities brutal assassinations mind control sprawling gun fights where innocents get caught in the crossfire syndicate is not a nice game it's one of the creepiest and most atmospheric games ever made in 1993 you almost never saw a living breathing city in games let alone something like this in le bladewano and newer mansa mold mission is immaculately designed and wins a new challenge to the table as your agents get stronger and stronger there's so many ways to complete objectives and some of them are just so one this isn't mary grand theft auto mayhem this is harry lyme scoffing at any compassion you might feel for those dots down there it's scary and the best way i can convey this is to without comment show you the story of special agent bush i feel it's necessary to point out that the actions in this story are not something that i condone in any way this is merely a demonstration of one possibility that the game syndicate offers of many i should also note that this section comes with a content warning and if you want to skip it then please click that annotation below thank you [Music] so [Music] [Music] yes that is something you can do in syndicate with your own mind i could talk about this game for hours many hours one day i probably will for now i'll have to move on and just say that it is quite simply bullfrog's greatest achievement a game unlike any other and one that i approach with i must say a certain alarm demi hasabi the other man in question here was as i mentioned a prodigy by the time he was 13 he was already a chess master demi was hired by bullfrog when he was a mere 16 years old and started off by designing levels on syndicate before lead programming and co-designing theme park the very next year with molyneux and the idea of the game was that you designed your own disney world and thousands of little people with their own desires and characteristics and came into that disney world and judged and decided how much fun they had in your theme park and then if they would go and tell their friends and they would come the next day i've already done a review on theme park on this channel but i'll sum up my thoughts briefly the brilliance of the original theme park doesn't merely lie in the wonder of building your very own land where kids have a magical day out it's lighting combining that with fleecing those kids for every single penny they had all the joys of ruthless capitalism theme park was bullfrog's most hardcore simulator to date a game that's revealed in tiny details and signature molyneux touches like it's being a genius move to say put up a chip stand jack up the salt content and then stick a cola stand next to it watered down with ice cubes obviously and if you sell strong coffee then your customers will move around the park like grease lightning theme park is one of the most penny pinching games ever you build a glorious roller coaster and at the same time you water down the beer and make it virtually impossible to win on the coconut shy all the while paying your staff peanuts it's almost comic like the best way to earn money in theme park is by being an [ __ ] boss it really is you almost don't realize that you're doing it these two games were of course huge hits two of the most famous games ever to come out for the amiga in fact you don't really need me to tell you what the general opinion on peter molyneux was back then he was revered a sun god for some people he might have been the best games designer in the world at the time and the rest of his studio could match him bullfog were right up at the top of the tree and really you can't argue with his track record by 1994 molyneux himself had been heavily involved with free all-time classic games and virtually everything that bullfrog had made since populous was golden i posed a fake question earlier on the one supposing that maybe molyneux's best stuff was never truly great the one posed by people who'd wonder how on earth molyneux ever got such status for the answer you just need to look at the legacy of his first company even without the games the creative freedom and ideas that molyneux inspired at bullfog would be something special but who boy did they have the games every single game that they released on the amiga after populous would end up being acclaimed as once the best to come out on the machine but perhaps one more loose end needs to be tied up remember project x it didn't end with that first interview in the aforementioned issue of amiga power there was a competition to actually win a job at bullfrog and not just making the tease or test in the games as a fully fledged programmer who would work on the top secret project x the task was to code a unique variation on space invaders it would take a while but the results would finally be announced in the august 1992 issue the winner was mr wobbly leg versus the invaders from space and lakota was a certain mr mike discot who would go on to head up syndicate was i made syndicate wars 15 years ago back when i had a full head of hair he also did the original programming on project x so what do you think this project was having put everything together [Music] well done if you guessed theme park it was a pet project of molyneux for quite a while diskette along with the man himself and her sabi was instrumental in finally bringing it to bean doing a lot of the coding on the game and it all started with a competition in amiga power and so that's the legacy of bullfrog productions arguably the most exciting and flat-out greatest team of coders in the history of the amiga certainly the youngest a truly glorious time left some would argue was the pinnacle of peter molyneux's career next we see how the glory days of bullfrog came to an end theme park would be bullfrog's final amiga game they were one of many who decided to at last leave the system behind they would hit the ground running on the pc with 1994's magic carpet led by mark huntley and sean cooper one of the first third-person 3d games out there brought into existence through lots of lovely vauxhall it's an odd game you'd think it hasn't held up because it's a 3d game from 1994 but in a way it has because i can't think of much else like it it's a very open-ended game where you a wizard try to collect mana while protecting balloons that collect mana from dead enemies and other sources collecting mana builds the castle and once the castle is built you've completed the world simple once you figure it out anyways it does work well as a just screw around and shoot finn's game especially because this 3d game from 1994 actually has destructible terrain and after enough blasting with enough patience you'll figure it out i also really like this old games master segment where dave games animal perry presumably reading from a molyneux script proposes a far out idea that combines magic carpet with that old chestnut creation still hyped five years on like a flight sim carpet and you're shooting all these monsters that are coming at you from the sea and everything and all of a sudden you're getting bored you've been playing it for a couple of hours and so just by dipping the carpet towards the sea you suddenly enter a completely different game called creation which is set under the sea and as long as that game is stored on your hard drive there's no need to reload the game or anything the computer instantly recognizes the instruction and puts you straight into the new game it's not my favorite bullfrog game but magic carpet certainly fun enough and yes it was another huge hit it's one of the games that people most readily associate with bullfrog in fact whether it was 2d or 3d the company was going from strength to strength behind the scenes however there were lots of things that were changing there is such a thing called the molyneux cycle coined by jim sterling as a shorthand for the extravagant promises that tend to be made during the hype period for one of his studios games which are then frequently not met we'll get into that later but i would like to introduce a second molly new cycle to describe his time with various companies and it all started with bullfrog and their main publisher electronic arts molyneux's gift of the gab allowed him to become very close with other companies while still at the head of his own flagship bullfrog weren't just a company that published games for ea they were essential to their vision going forward and molyneux himself was just as essential to that vision one day the phone started to ring and there were all these big big companies saying look if you ever want to sell your company we're really interested in buying it we're going to take you out to dinner or we're going to fly you to this resort and it was like being a roster and so the relationship between ea and bullfrog would get ever closer in 1992 ea bought a significant amount of shares in the company at the start of 1995 this led to ea acquiring bullfrog all out however unlike many other ea software house acquisitions molyneux remained as the company's head more than that molyneux was now a vice president at ea giving him who knows how many other hats and responsibilities and that meant that he would also consult and help out with other companies and divisions under the ea umbrella but still the main one for him was overseeing bullfrog it was a vast sum of money this group of people were getting a little bit impatient you know there was nowhere for them lots of them to grow selling out to electron cars who were really really passionate about the games that we we made just seemed like that really the right thing to do so what happens next well even if the culture around the office might change a little thanks to big overwatch in companies with their marketing and their hr and what have you business at bullfrog for the next couple of years appears to be as good as ever more arcadey-based games such as the sequel to magic carpet and the popular sci-fi racer high octane are released in 1995. there is another strategy game that's perhaps not as famous as a lot of other bullfrogs called gene wars which isn't as well received as some of the other games but does have its fans the aforementioned syndicate wars arrives in 1996 the sequel to perhaps bullfrog's greatest game at least in my opinion that's something of a tall order especially seeing as the game is 3d to boot but the result is certainly worthy of the name complete with a level of destruction that honestly hadn't been seen in any game up to that point it's not as good as the original the 3d graphics haven't aged well and it'll never be as scary a game again but syndicate was is still another really fun strategic blow everything up and destroy all cities shooter it's pretty damn fantastic and in the midst of all this molyneux finds time to head up another game 1997's dungeon keeper a game with a simple enough concept what if you are in charge of all of those dungeons that the hero has to beat haven't you ever felt like you could do a better job of designing them and keeping heroes at bay it sounds great and it largely is a new and altogether fiendish take on simulation where you can slap your workers into shape and imprison enemies at your leisure it is kind of dank but easy enough to understand and play it's a lot easier to control this line it is syndicate wars has to be said molino's design was still very strong despite all his new responsibilities however dungeon caper was delayed and molly had to fund a significant amount of the development out of his own pocket in order to keep ea from killing it we were locked up in his house for a period of time we had great fun because we played each other in the night okay peter said oh there's a design flaw when he lost and changed the game so it resulted around still the game was released to another big round of applause and plenty of sales to boot it did absolutely brilliantly and lastly in this little roundup we have another absolute barnstormer theme hospital for march 1997. it's like theme park only this time set in a hospital which doesn't necessarily appeal to some of bullfrog's vets all peter said was it's called theme hospital so i thought great it's even worse than the game i left in the first place ah well never mind gary theme hospital is fantastic there's a big satirical bent an almost absurd carry-on doctor-a-thon mood to the whole thing where you are in charge of healing the sick and usually failing but with this game it was clear that bullfrog's themes where you build a world and those little people fill it with their own desires that could work anywhere it didn't just have to be in an amusement park it could be in something as mundane as a hospital this was and is by far the most successful game that ball for ever made i think it's sold some ridiculous number it's about nine million uh copies on the pc alone so i'm quite proud of this and this is one big tick of the games that i'm really pleased i've worked on theme hospital improved on the formula in every way and it's right up there with the original syndicate and populus 2 one of the studio's very best games and alas their last game that would come close to reaching that sort of level it is usually around this time a couple of years down the road that lemony new cycle enters its second half quite simply well peter molyneux tends to get a bit bored he feels as though he's not really in charge anymore he yearns to get back to the way finns once were smaller but more creative teams with people he can supervise and talents he can nurture he himself wants to get his head fully back into game design as he tires of his more executive and onerous duties as vice president of wherever and so even though finns are at this point going very well indeed in august of 1997 to the shock of just about everyone peter molyneux leaves ea and with it he leaves bullfrog the company that he created with a heavy heart various bullfrog alumni will eventually ride with him again but suddenly bullfog is without its leader i went to the president of electronic cards and i said look this is my problem you know i'm not doing the job i love i can either go back to being a designer which is taking this huge step backwards or i could leave set up another company and publish my games through electronic cards and that is exactly what i did does any of this sound familiar so far it is the same scenario that would play out many years later with lionhead although with the odd difference in circumstance it's certainly a tough situation for bullfrog because while there are so many brilliant and creative people working at bullfrog for many bullfrog was peter molyneux he's not the only one to leave bullfrog around this time mike diskit creator of syndicate wars and winner of that amiga power competition leaves alongside gary carr and a bunch of others to form muckyfoot productions the creators of startopia an exodus continues over the next couple of years glenn corps forms lost toys in 1999 simon and dean carter form big blue box and that won't be the last time you'll hear that name and there would be plenty more all of the companies including molyneux's new one would stay in guildford which had the side effect of making guildford one of the uk's top places for video game development and of course other bullfrog alumni such as programmer mark webley leave to join molyneux on his new adventure many miles away okay just down the road in pete's mansion for that is where his new company lionhead studios would be born molineux could also count on the returning at least for a short time of prodigal ai genius demi hasabi company co-founder les edgar now also an executive at ta would stay on and if anyone was to be molyneux's creative replacement it would be sean cooper having actually left bullfog in 1996 after a dispute with molyneux cooper took his departure as an opportunity to return bullfrog's later years are a mixed bag at first finn still appeared okay projects that were started under molyneux were finished and other games still appear to be good or at least successful there's a new populace called populously beginning that can actually still be played online to this very day thanks to the fans but didn't go down as well with fans of the original and dungeon keeper too complete with its um very 1999 indeed box but still a good game with cooper at the helm instead of molyneux however the big warning sign was 1999's theme park world mainly because it was not satirical at all it was in fact quite casual and frankly it wasn't very good certainly not when compared to the infinitely better roller coaster tycoon is this one title that's not very good that makes you see a bigger problem suddenly all that bullfrog are producing are direct sequels to their older products wild dungeon keeper 2 was a very good sequel indeed populist beginning was well it's ok and theme park world well compared to the original land theme hospital not only was it rubbish it was also one thing that bullfog games hadn't been it was boring and generic and so this is the final part of the molyneux company cycle what happens to the company in question after his departure molyneux's other hidden strength as a boss becomes clear he is very skilled at keeping his flagship company away from all the shitty stuff that comes from being under a bigger company's empire usually thanks to his high standing in said empire with molyneux gone bullfog are suddenly no longer immune from executive meddling and what do you know suddenly you're making endless sequels to theme park and and original projects just don't happen anymore creation a project that was originally named all the way back in that 1989 interview in la one is one of the most notable casualties the idea itself featuring a world that's mostly underwater and a caretaker in charge of a tiny aquatic population that needs to survive and thrive was great and hyped up quite a lot it even had a trailer released in 1995 but in the end despite everything it was cancelled in 1997 in the most pragmatic fashion forwards sub games don't sell the indestructibles was another major project that bit the dust this time in 1996 you control a superhero in a 1900s world that almost sounds like a sandbox where you can chuck cars around deform the landscape and battle enemies it sounds like a crackdown on the xbox 360 only five years before the release of grand theft auto 3. alas it never made it various other projects didn't make it including more theme games that weren't based around amusement parks and mysterious titles like void style and genesis the hand of god alas theme park world and theme park inc they all did make it fortunately bullfog's end wasn't all that drawn out in 2001 ea decided to fold the company into ea uk finishing off bullfrog productions les edgar was already gone by this point out of va and eventually out of the industry he's now the chairman of resurrected uk sports car manufacturers tvr sean cooper left the picture but stayed in the ea fold working heavily on james bond 007 everything and nothing and oh geez the godfather game it must be said that the limitless psychopathic loan shark potential for this game makes a lot more sense when you consider that's the man behind syndicate was heavily involved anyway he would move on to the casual market after ea and he stayed there until recently occasionally ea made noise about the uk studio resurrecting old bullfrog titles but for the most part this basically never happened and the studio were most famous for harry potter tines before being closed completely in 2011 by which time they were known as ea bright light no matter bullfrog story had ended 10 years previously and despite the shaky end they are still one of the greatest companies ever to grace gaiman as a whole let alone just from the uk with a ratio of classic and just flat out unique games that very few studios can match they already had this reputation in 1997 when peter molyneux left and with his next company people were wondering if he could do the same thing over again so here we are the second part of the journey we've just seen peter molyneux leave bullfrog to set up another studio in guildford lionhead his reputation is still akin to a sun god he'd led one of gaming's greatest studios responsible for classic after classic the story of bullfrogging compasses not just molyneux but a whole generation of great british coders who got started there the man is by this point already a legendary figure only a couple of game designers could ever have claimed to surpass the reputation that peter molyneux had back in 1997. we didn't know what lionhead was going to do but we were pretty sure it was going to be great and so this is the first part of their story the attempt to create a new truly independent studio even as gaming itself got bigger and bigger we'll go up all the way to the creation of a monster that ended up swallowing its whole but for now it's time to once again play god in many ways the formation of lionhead studios was peter molyneux starting from scratch he'd tired of the situation at bullfrog and now it was time to re-roll this time all the problems that we've had in the past we can get right we have got to create some great original ideas some ideas that have never been attempted or created before he'd do so with the aim to avoid what he'd had near the end of his time there he didn't want to employ lots of people and he wanted to be free of control from any big publisher so that he could focus entirely on game design essentially just as bullfog were in the days before they were bought by electronic arts he stated his two cardinal walls many times including here in the 1997 interview with simon carlos lionhead will only work on one title at a time and they would never employ more than 20 people molyneux wanted a small team comprised of what he naturally dubbed the best of the best of the best whether it was people he'd previously worked with at bullfrog or a scant few who were recruited through adverts in the likes of edge magazine peter founded lionhead with the intention of keeping that family atmosphere keeping teams together and passionate about their projects not big company politics and being part of a machine it was a test in a time when studios were vastly expanding to meet the increased requirements of the generation standards was there still space for a small studio peter molyneux would break both of those walls eventually but we'll see how long he lasted we originally wanted to call lionhead red eye it turned out the red eye just about every company in the world is called red eyed and we couldn't call it red eyes so we panicked mark webley my business partner says hey why don't we call it after my hamster he's called lionhead mark then went to go and check on the hamster he turned out to be dead in his cage stiff with rigor mortis so we are named after a dead hamster the other main reason for lionhead was so that molyneux could create well his next grand vision something groundbreaking that would take a very long time and would not have been possible at bullfrog it's thought that by the time of this interview he and demi hasabi were around a year into creating what would eventually be black and white the game isn't even called that yet but molyneux simply says that the new project is simply far beyond anything that they've attempted before and doesn't even tie his mast to a rough release date it would soon be too big for the cello of his mansion line had quickly moved into new offices in guildford at a one occam court a decently sized space with essentially a decent pub close by the boys club atmosphere waned once again with the staff working from morning till midnight on the game fueled by endless cigarettes and chinese takeaways the familiar walls were still in place stop everything on friday afternoon for a creative meeting and test test test as soon as a working prototype was playable molyneux felt it imperative to test as much as possible not just to spot bugs and problems but to see where the game could go next the molyneux philosophy len is just as it was with populace a game isn't planned meticulously from the outset so much as it is evolved into being usually through lots of testing and brainstorming again people who worked at linehead attest that this wasn't due to molyneux having a whip hand he didn't have one he didn't even specify hours for employees seemingly you just went there and that was where you were for however long molyneux inspired creativity and he inspired dedication the early days of lionhead were just as fertile as the glory days of bullfrog only now all of the energy was focused on one title that was apparently monumental scheduling was not a thing the game would be done when it was done but it had to be done in the later days of development there was a period where the team spent nine months working 15 hours a day in the studio in typical crunch fashion even though some folks bowed out such as demi hasabi in 1998 the 25 strong studio was filled with people who would become a monster best and brightest in british gaming just as bullfrog was i mean as damaging as it could have been to lose a literal genius who knows more about hay island just about anyone in the world the other man who was actually hired thanks to that amiga power competition in 1992 as a one or up and would later go on to sell his company deepmind to google for half a billion dollars nine head was strong enough to weather that particular blow either even can predict ahead of time uh it's modeled the world the game world so well it knows where the space venus will be ahead of time so as the space invaders speed up when you get less of them on the screen it does as far as the final shot is a kind of predictive shot of where the final space invader will be in a few seconds time the new team was stocked full of talent there were names like mark webley mark healy and jonty barnes who had been with molineux since the bullfrog days as had andy wobson who headed up the all-important testing department and had the power to say to molyneux that this idea was unworkable or sadly somewhere idea there's bugs that need fixing and he did so often paul mclaughlin and russell shaw heading up heart design and music respectively had been with molineux virtually since the start newer hires such as kuimatouni would go on to achieve greatness later on having started out with lionhead it was a team that could undoubtedly match the quality of bullfox if not to surpass it which is one of the reasons why lionhead never achieving their full potential was such a great shame but of course we have to get into that later much later one thing is for sure in the utterly convoluted and incestuous world of the british games industry you can find a quite ridiculous amount of people connected to molyneux or who got their start from molyneux anyway back to black and white every so often the hype for the game would rise as molineux came back to the press a surefire way to earn column inches and tv time here's line head in december 1999 with molyneux showing off early bits of the gameplay here there is a barrel and on that barrel is a little apple and in that apple you can just see there is a worm and i can go from looking at this worm and pull back and actually look at the whole village obviously and even go further back and look at the whole world here's molly again on the final ever episode of bits talking up the game with emily newton and saying some um quite questionable finns there's lots of special things you can do with the creature first of all on his first birthday he will have this overwhelming urge to create his own web page another thing you can do that's great with the creature is tattooing it is probably around here now that molyneux is on camera more and more where we really see molyneux's media personality come to the fore but we'll go through that soon enough for now molyneux was content with usually saying relatively modest finns for the most part at least at this moment features that molyneux talk about end up in the finished game although it is obviously going to be utterly groundbreaking near the games designer didn't say right you will be evil you will be good you have to do this so you have to do that to actually progress through the game you'd be yourself then this fascinating thing could happen is the game would actually perhaps turn into something like a personality test so was lots of sort of complicated ideas popping under my head as their normally meanwhile the work continued furiously as ea the game's publisher constantly asked questions about the game's developments that could be summed up as simply when the hell is this coming out as the cycle got longer and longer and the game got more and more out there and naturally expensive not that linehead tended to believe all that much in deadlines the hype was probably white on the brink of being too much and too long at this point black and white was going to be the greatest pc game ever but when were we actually going to see it and geez what about the ports they were supposed to be a fin that came out for people to buy and something to really show that the consoles could handle a god game of this magnitude this is the trailer for the ps1 version and here's another trailer for the dreamcast version neither version is available but both were apparently quite close to completion around the time that the hammer fell on them however these ports never arrived in particular the dreamcast being discontinued in april of 2001 was a fatal blow to the port's developers chrysalis software who also happens to be amiga veterans by the way finally and most brutally ea were not interested in hiring the development team and saving the games and indeed the studio the cancellation of the black and white ports killed chrysalis and they folded in november of 2001 just one minor casualty of this whole production cycle finally though after all the drama of building a new 30-person studio the arrivals and departures the genesis all of that coding the endless testing and a shipping containers worth of chicken chow mein at the start of 2001 black and white arrived one of the most hyped pc games ever but before the reaction let's see what it's like to actually play black and white in 2016. oh wait no there's something else i need to digress into quickly well if it isn't tamagotchi her new favorite pet yes so what's that make me fish sticks oh are you hungry oh no no no by all means feed it plainly hearts content tamagotchis the spawn of two people akihiro yokoi and aki maita originally sold by bandai in late 1996 and it didn't take long for them to become massive worldwide with millions upon millions sold they were virtual pets that you could play with by a little lcd screen and you could wear the tamagotchi around your neck you could feed it nurture it all sorts you could create your own little virtual pet family the tamagotchi craze hit over here in 1997 and basically everybody had one well every girl anyway the tamagotchi was marketed as quite a feminine toy over here the more masculine and extreme version was also sold in 1997 the original digimon the toys could be controversial as half a day of not caring for the pet could be disastrous and result in their death meaning that kids took their tamagotchis to school you know how annoying 30 year old farts who you went to school with on facebook always post silly pictures about how they weren't distracted by their mobile phones in class yeah right they had tamagotchis to distract them instead anyway you'll never guess who else had a tamagotchi yep peter monday new loved his tamagotchi fed his tamagotchi cared for his tamagotchi talked about his tamagotchi to everyone including andy wobson who frankly didn't see the appeal of the finn one day when molyneux was out of the office wobson took peter molyneux's tamagotchi and dropped it into a mug of hot tea upon his return molyneux was horrified to find the scene of the crime the murder of his beloved tamagotchi according to some he mourned and perhaps it was this moment this realization of just what feelings you could have for an entirely virtual pet that set molly's world of fire even more than those isometric blocks that had triggered populace this virtual pet ended up truly defining just what sort of a game black and white was going to be black and white is indeed the sort of god game where you can do anything and be anything in many ways it's the classic video game fake morality where apparently choosing whether or not you want to throw a villager directly into the sun with that big old hand for no reason is a deep mole decision worthy of a 9.5 from gamespot and yet there is also a sort of wheel morality in how you treat the pull of the game the virtual creature the creature is supposed to be a representation of you on earth and you can train it to do anything it can eat grass animals and yes people that's also more sandbox shenanigans but the morality comes in what you do next stroke the creature or slap it you get to tell the creature if what it did was good or bad there's very few games where you are so utterly in control of the walls as you are in black and white where your actions can have such an effect on a creature's personality the way that you treat your creature and your people affects the very nature of your world and both approaches have advantages you have to make people believe and you can do that through performing miracles and saving their lives or aiming a few boulders at their houses that creature as they grow bigger in size becomes the main defender of your land and they can fight others the world itself will appear different depending on just what you do it's all quite muddy as there's no right way to achieve your goal as a god it becomes an almost impulsive and barely thoughtful decision reacting to things as they happen black and white is kind of an odd title to be honest it doesn't actually fit with just how great the game can be a creature picks up a person toys around with it a bit and you give it a stroke for just being so nice then after you've done that the creature eats the person to the [ __ ] of everyone on one level this will never stop being really freaking funny but it sticks with you as you actually ponder why that happened maybe the creature wasn't being malicious maybe they were just hungry my creature also ended up eating a beach ball at one point so maybe i've just built them up to eat everything perhaps i should think about changing their diet their slave grow too fat but is it good i hear you cry after all this time yammering on about tamagotchis and what have you yes it is it's amazing those five years were worth it and it's still amazing because no game has come close to doing what it did before or since for all the freedom you have the decision to be a good god and treasure the people or to wall them with an iron fist the true freedom is in just watching and letting things happen watching as your creature roams free doing things that make you laugh or even outright shock you it's still so different such a wonderfully impulsive experience and yes you should still play it now for me this game is an essential document in later years morality and behaviour and all those things were streamlined with slider bars how easy how binary how boring black and white is a dilapidated signpost signaling the hard word not taken it's not wholly perfect as a game some would even say that there isn't even all that much game in here but for some just the experience can be unforgettable even now it's the perfect tamagotchi the original reception for black and white was well pretty damn great huge scores everywhere big review saying that after almost five years in development lionhead had actually broken new ground molyneux was again at the height of his powers he'd done it again he'd changed the whole scenery weirdly low that critical love it didn't last the backlash against black and white seemed to start a couple of years later when gamespire of all websites put it at the top of a most overweighted games list saying that despite all the creature training the learning the freedom the actual proper freaking world where's the game dude it's smoke and mirrors in it now 9.9 times out of 10 people don't listen to game spy but oddly enough this seemed to stick and the game's reputation just slid from there i'm not sure if it's harsh or not to say that black and white tesla be here now of molyneux's career but for such a praised and big selling game it's almost forgotten now it's an odd middle child between his last projects at bullfrog yet dungeon keepers and the like and the monster that was to come next and sweep everything away a sequel arriving in 2005 was received okay but much more coolly than the original game was and cells were disappointing of course by that point linehead's mind was on some other game entirely the game that would dominate everything but before we get to the monster i feel that it's only fair to give lionhead's other original game the time it deserves because otherwise it's just not going to happen in 2005 lionhead released the movies adrian moore headed up the project a guy who'd gradually worked his way up the bullfrog ladder before leaving in the late 90s to help start up small rockets another guildford studio that spun off from the company following molyneux's departure some of those studios didn't make it too far with small rockets gone along with the likes of mucky foot people like moore and gary carr of theme hospital fame found themselves hooking up with molyneux once again at lionhead where they would be welcomed with open arms um so i went back to peter again it was like my you know my sugar daddy um carl would find himself on a quite mysterious projects that we can't really go into yet but more would do the movies a business simulation game two words that almost automatically make the game seem like a welcome throwback to the bullfrog days and games like theme park you get to build a movie studio sounds okay you have been working on this game for quite a long time how long actually has it been in the making this i woke up at five o'clock in the morning on january the 19th 2002 next to my girlfriend and i said i've had this she's probably an idea for a game and she said go about asleep the premise itself is quite fun you can be a proper movie mogul you set up a studio in 1920 hire stars get scripts written shoot the films and release them in all their glory trying to make your studio the best as the eras go by and movies continue to evolve you react to reviews hire new stars manage those stars and make sure they don't claw each other's eyes out all sorts it sounds fantastic but sadly the movies doesn't really do it for me in the way that bullfrog sims did it just lacks something it never helps when there's an awful and really long tutorial section to kick everything off of course but it's the sort of game where it feels like you've seen most of it right out of the gates like an hour or so in make a movie and repeat the more movies you make the better they'll be and the better your stars will be it's all about increasing in size you just don't feel as involved with the process as you did in theme hospital and like it's almost as if you're a god not a mogul funnily enough the people on the ground are amusing to watch with all their movements and the like and all of their personalities and quirks but it does all feel a little bit like a fancy take on the sims only with a lot of stuff attached that doesn't really fit meaning of course that it's not as streamlined or as flat out good as the sims so yeah the game starts off quite badly but a couple of hours in it turns out it actually does work you get into a definite rhythm of always doing something just as you get in another film ready to shoot someone's going to be writing the script for the next one improvements to the studio come thick and fast actors are throwing tantrums so you have to try and de-stress them the unbearably slow and hand-holdy start of the game ends up revealing something quite fast-paced and fun with definite progression it's an absolute no-brainer that your first movies will tank horribly but it gives you time to experiment and get a feel for the whole thing in the end it's good i still don't think it's a patch on either of the proper theme games but it has its merits even if 1920s cinema audiences might not be quite ready for something like war men i can damn well give it to them anyways [Music] mind you the sims side is only one part of the movies the other part is in actually being able to create your own scenes and like which is the way you can actually make these movies feel as if they're your own this could have been the real pull of the game and lionhead definitely knew that they set up a website where you could upload your movies for the whole world to see it sounds like a brilliant idea and it was unfortunately it came just a bit too early the game itself wasn't a big success pc gaming wasn't in a good way then and perhaps the premise was just that little bit too niche and because of that the site didn't catch on either transplant the movies into 2007 and well where do you think all those videos of people making their own movies would have ended up the movies alas just missed out on taking advantage of a video sharing website that would have ended up being used by everybody maybe that would have sold the game but alas the game was a misfire that's disappointed for both lionhead and activision it wasn't the only one 2005's black and white 2 as previously mentioned was also a disappointment perhaps it added a bit too much and changed a bit too much about something that was already a really good fin perhaps there was too much responding to the eventual criticism of black and white that it just wasn't enough of a game and in trying to make it more of a game they kind of took away what was special about it and well the shine was already off the original anyway by this point dude the first thing is you know just to have some awesome technology um and to you know put that into a strong gameplay uh gameplay game and that was a problem with black and white one it's an awesome technology but where was the game there and we really wanted to put the game in so and that is the molyneux cycle tell us the next game is going to be amazing while the last game was rubbish sales for the sequel were once again just below expectations and that signaled the end of lionhead and indeed peter molyneux's long relationship with electronic arts such expensive flops take their toll and linehead were at this point starting to flounder behind the scenes in public though they were triumphant having released the first chapter of their biggest series the finlax molyneux would describe as the best game ever the absolute killer app for microsoft's xbox they were firmly in the grip of the monster fable was originally known as project ego and was at first the product of a lionhead satellite studio one of a few that molyneux set up agreements with in the early 2000s big blue box games a studio that started out in 1997 in the wake of molly news departure from bullfrog and was filled with bullfrog alumni in particular simon and dean carter the original creators of project ego they had their own young guns too like john mccormack who had gone to become a big part of lionhead in the years to come the aim was an open-ended open-world rpg where you could be whoever you wanted to be pretty much an rpg that was all about your character it might be surprising to some considering just how often molineux would hype the game up to ridiculous degrees that the genesis of fable actually didn't lie with molyneux but he certainly embraced the idea quickly and fable would become their next big ace in the hole molyneux gave big blue box the green light to keep on working to take that original premise to wide it into the sun and sell it to publishers which they did the satellite studio idea at first seemed innocuous as we will see it was the start of line head changing forever [Music] ultimately big blue box found a publisher in microsoft who felt that fable might just be the rpg that the xbox needed in fact lay absolutely loved everything about it fable was for microsoft a potential major player and once again in the early 2000s the hype train started to trundle as molyneux at least in public took the game by the waynes it's taken a while and yeah you know fable has been in the making now for four years and we're only just confident enough now to start showing you yeah yeah i mean you know you could be down in the bottom of town and one of the towns folks says can you rescue the you know the girl on top of the cliff you look up there and there's eric the blood slayer going up the rescue oh no he's gonna get all the credit for that and lionhead well it just grew bigger and bigger at the time of black and white the studio was at around about 30 or so people and that number would soon travel after it it also made sense eventually to buy a big blue box outright so that the 30-man team would actually have a fighting chance of completing fable they now joined forces with lionhead there was another lionhead satellite in the winds intrepid who were working on a game called bc bc you have a tribe you know you want to have the tribe grow which is by getting them food shelter you know all the kind of classic neanderthal things you need to do to live add it all up and there's around 150 or so people working for the company perhaps closer to 200. and yes they're working on more than one game in 2002 you had big blue box on fable intrepid on bc a team on something called dimitri and teams for both black and white 2 and the movies later on it was also announced that jeff minter and llamasoft were working with linehead to develop a typically mintuesque psychedelic sort of game called unity remember that molyneux had promised that lionhead would never work on more than one game or that there would never be more than 20 people working there molyneux's promises at the start of lionhead as honorable as they might have been simply never had a chance of being fulfilled in these days and times working with such big publishers on such big games it was impossible it seemed as though fable also at various points didn't have a chance the reason why i refer to it as a monster is not because i wish to bag on it is because it almost grew unmanageable beyond anyone's control because remember games evolve here that's always been the philosophy but it's almost as if no one realized just how big the game was actually going to become they underestimated just how much would have to go into a game like fable with the best will in the world the 30 strong team at big blue books would have never had a hope in hell of completing it but joining forces with lionhead caused problems of its own as people who wanted to make a more simulation style traditionally line head game balked at the idea of creating an rpg this didn't describe everybody but it still caused the odd bit of friction and of course there were more casualties chief there just wasn't enough resources to dedicate to this dawn of mantastic tribal evolution strategy game something that was very linehead indeed and it was finally cancelled in late 2004 or so maybe before its demise meant that the satellite studio behind it intrepid also bit the dust project dimitri something we'll eventually get to also found itself cancelled not for the first time and not for the last time unity the jeff minter project also ended up out of this dimension and out of existence and the games that we did see black and white two and the movies both if anything suffered from a lack of focus thanks to fable it was almost seen as a blessing at points by the teams if peter's focus wasn't on either game but they were both somewhat disorganized in development it was all about the monster and it needed to feed if you feel that those games suffered chances are fable was the reason why and of course in the end there is the publisher who just wants a game fable had been hyped for years now and you can only call it the best game ever so much before finally people just want a [ __ ] game lionhead the company that didn't believe in deadlines would find themselves with a concrete deadline for gold masters from microsoft that must be met or the project is over and while a lot had been achieved on fable from combat to modelling and plenty of tricks it was still not exactly a game yet at this point if you press it you can go [ __ ] so when we're playing cooperative quite often we walk down as a band and go [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] and i just saw him sort of rap and doing our own rap the final year of fable's development may well go down as the most punishing and brutal death crunch in the history of the whole video game industry as the alien big blue box lionhead and microsoft worked together to basically do the tech equivalent of pushing a big steam ship up an even bigger freaking hill it's up to you whether or not you wish to picture molyneux as fitzgeraldo creative meetings annual leave time away from the studio these things did not happen there was nothing but the crunch the act of trying to tame this monster into something of a game 18 hours a day every day for a whole year some didn't make it a lot of people were spent mentally physically and spiritually the crunch is a controversial subject in this business and for the biggest piece of evidence for the case against look no further than fable and what it did to the people who worked on it the crunch made a sports direct warehouse looked like a vape shop in shoreditch in the end fable made it but the damage was done big blue box was essentially no more a 30 person studio that swelled to around 70 during fables crunch it basically burst and a lot of those people left lionhead and even the games industry some of them for years some of them for good lionhead itself was changed by the experience and most would say that it wasn't for the better the vision of a small independent studio was now a distant almost comedic memory and as we will see peter molyneux himself and the perception of molyneux was changed forever we have seen nothing but positive about him so far this is the turning point we'll get to that glow before that we have to look into the monster's eyes and examine fable itself for now though i leave you with the most apt closing line to a famous monologue i can think of hugh captain quint we delivered the bomb fable is at its core an action rpg simple and solid combat rolling around at enemies and all that and all that stuff works just fine just as it did in ocarina of time or whatever but it's a deeper game than that it did promise a lot of freedom after all as well as all those choices to do a good deed or a bad deed even the guildmaster at the end of the tutorial doesn't seem to be too bothered about you possibly going on to be an evil bastard which is well hey-ho karma was already a finn in rpgs all the way back to dungeons and dragons and sometimes it was used for exciting play areas but this feels a bit more like plat's old video game classic punching a bully good punching the bullied kid for no reason bad it all appears to be a bit binary how will being good or being evil actually affects the world in the grand scheme of finns that can be a little questionable not that choosing your path isn't fun and you can certainly be extremely angelic or extremely evilly evil but it's perhaps not quite what was promised just looking at the game low in 2016 it's perhaps not wise to get too hung up on those promises we will get to lim fable is a very good action rpg with a lot of neat stuff attached the thing that strikes me a lot about the game is the personality of it how cities actually do feel lived in and occupied by people even the smallest of npcs actually feels like a proper person and everything it's in direct contrast to something like elder scrolls that's never gotten past its reputation for being robotic and stilted i also really dig games where your reputation does matter and things that you do get commented on and fable does that very well indeed i seem to have acquired the nickname of chicken chaser just through following traditional zelda-esque tropes and attacking chickens whenever i see them i never had to even seek it out at all [Music] in fact just talking about the comments and the like does the world of fable injustice this game's world is beautifully realized and it actually does feel like you have an effect on it people won't just call you a hero they'll actually follow you around they'll get haircuts and clothes just like yours or they'll run away in fear and again as in black and white i appreciate that lionhead don't do slider bars how you look your physique and what have you depends on how you play and how well you do use swords and you'll become big and strong be stealthy and you'll be wiry in life and so on it's things like this that are appreciated and really separate the game from again something like elder scrolls as much as i do like elder scrolls it seems like you're purely in search of a hollow ethic title at times and aside from that it's almost as if you don't exist there's almost too much freedom this is controlled but naturally so and there's so much fun stuff to seek out everywhere including lots of cool minigames like freaking coin golf i could do stuff like this for hours i appreciate that this isn't a full review and i'm not going to do the whole thing justice in all this time but fable does what it does very well if you could call this a first impression almost then it's a very good one indeed there's another thing that fable has that wasn't all that common a certain britishness about it plenty of quirks here and there a definite sense of humor and playfulness for all the horrors that happened in its development you don't really notice it in the main game and it is just in the end quite a lot of fun to play breezing through the main quest might be a slog but as with any game like this the fun comes in just immersing yourself in the town looking into the side quests and relaxing into the experience little fins here and there like proper merchant systems buying up houses or caught in folk make it even easier to do that and it is just quite solid mechanically it's fun to have a fight it's fun to cast spells it's fun to just travel the world it's a very good action rpg indeed and the reviews were excellent so why were people so angry well there's one answer for that something to do with a guy who is by now on the verge of finally going completely bald whenever fable gets brought up molyneux's promises must be mentioned because who boy did lay cause controversy as he'd done for most other games he'd been in the press a lot and said a bunch of high-profile [ __ ] getting head up about the game all emotional and stuff and saying stuff that well didn't quite end up happening there were three fins in particular the first was that faber would have multiplayer which it didn't the other thing i should say is we can't really demonstrate it here fable can be played up to four player multiplayer cooperatively all you do is you take your joy pad your joy pull out plug it in there no setup screens you're in the world will you be able to show it today or is it because the second was that you could get married in fable which you could and have children which you couldn't and definitely in this game you can chat up women you can even get married and you can have children i won't go into the details of how you do that okay we will see a lot of yeah the third was that you could plant an acorn and over the course of the game that acorn would grow into a tree which it didn't and you couldn't which one do you think caused the biggest kerfuffle that bloody acorn it is kind of odd the two other fins seem like pretty important features and mechanics that didn't make it or ever had a chance to it's known that molyneux announced in multiplayer for example wasn't known by a lionhead at all when it happened and apparently caused a huge panic this is one of the first visible examples of a rather shitty molyneu practice he didn't have a script or a filter he could blab fins major things that weren't necessarily a part of the plan that basically just came from his head and all of a sudden that's out worldwide not good for already very stressed people usually peter could be dialed back of course but the damage was already done and in the wake of fables release people focused on that acorn fans of the game in fact raised a massive stink about it saying that in general faber was not anywhere nearly immersive open world experience it was supposed to be and more like a souped-up action rpg with some cute tricks and morality the acorn was the symbol of that even if it was more like a cute feature than something actually important like the other two would have been let alone the less mentioned facts that's this open world rpg was a game where you could be exactly the person you wanted to be good or evil but not male or female the general point is peter molyneux hype actually damaged fable by making it out to be something it wasn't fully going to be as opposed to the really good game that it actually was the result of this was that peter molyneux ended up delivering a personal apology on fables forums filled with statements that would become familiar during just about every lionhead game's postmortem talking about how excited he gets using his not great code in knowledge to explain reasons why x feature isn't in the game and saying that perhaps he shouldn't talk about these fins as much essentially that he should become more conventional instead of excitedly talking about games that are years away still embryonic it all appears heartfelt but is it genuine is molyneux trying to present himself as someone outside of the system to make up for a game's shortcomings molyneux outside the system of all people is all that just a poor attempt at techno babble to obfuscate other issues it almost reads sometimes as if he is in part trying to make people feel bad for having such a go at him this wasn't the first time let's molyneux had promised a little too much and it sure as hell wouldn't be the last but this was one of the first major high-profile examples and so despite everything even the successful and really good game that linehead had created fable caused a significant dent in the reputation of peter molyneux and honestly i'm not sure if he ever truly recovered from it that acon had a lot to freaking answer for we had this simulation the kids get up and they go to school and they go back to my horror i went into testing this is about a year ago and i went to testing i looked to someone screened and they were all dead however regardless of anything that molyneux had said the promises he'd made that weren't delivered on the lawn development and brutal crunch one thing was certain fable was deservedly a huge hit and so was 2005's expanded edition fable lost chapters it was the fastest selling game in the history of the xbox at that point won numerous awards and went on to sell 3 million copies worldwide the only franchise that was more important than fable to microsoft was halo the monster had done good and it was here to stay in 2005 linehead could count as many as 300 people among their numbers and despite the success lionhead were in a troubling position because they were just too big the studio was becoming impossible to manage and thanks to a humongous wage bill impossible to profit from the success of fable was offset greatly by the relative failures of black and white 2 and the movies all the losses generated through cancelled projects molyneux himself is in an awkward position again unable to maintain control of a ship in heavy waters he wasn't any good at this whole management fin the studio was bluntly put not making enough money to sustain itself it had spread itself way way too thin the main cause of all this mess happened in 2001 when lionhead tried to float on the stock market they've been told by experts that doing so could make their company worth a ton of cash almost half a billion dollars in fact with big pound signs in their eyes molyneux webley and the rest of the management set out to do it preparations for floatation included buying up big blue box and intrepid and expanding the studio this was also when lee one game at a time idea was totally abandoned as it was important to have a lot of potentially successful properties in the pipeline expanding the studio more but no worries because the flotation would cover it it all looked good everything was ready and then 911 happened the stock market in general went to hell and floating the company would have at that point been madness the plans to float bit the dust but all the agreements were still in place and suddenly that money latter was going to cover them wasn't going to be there from that point on lionhead had to rely on venture capitalist investment and frankly they struggled from that point on with only one success out of the next three games following on from that and their resources drained for an expansion that no longer had a purpose it became clear eventually that they were not going to recover from this flow without taking drastic action the solution well it's almost a case of history repeating the independent studio dream was over and it was time to either make massive cuts which molyneux was not prepared to do at least not himself or sell up the two interested parties were ubisoft and microsoft the former world paints an odd future where we'd have likely seen fable sequels on all next-gen platforms while microsoft's interest was based utterly in securing a prized product for the xbox line alone this wasn't all that similar to bullfrog aside from the sale itself whereas bullfrog were the hottest property on the market and could sell to anybody for lionhead securing a deal was about securing the company's future the way things were they could have gone under in spectacular fashion in the end microsoft won the day meaning that fable and all other line head products would be xbox and xbox 360 exclusive it is not known exactly how much microsoft paid for line head but it is known to be a lot less than the 375 million dollars they'd paid for wear a couple of years previous apparently it was a bargain fable the monster had almost killed lionhead and at the same time it ended up saving lionhead and so lionhead's independent years came to an end in the third part of this trilogy we will look at the microsoft years or alternatively the fable years and as for peter molyneux well the worst is yet to come [Music] where in the second part peter molyneux plateaued perhaps it was just after the release of black and white the point where his reputation could get no higher the high water mark where the wave broke in the years after that the ground that he was on began to shake and at one point he could have fallen off right into the mouth of an uncontrollable monster called fable originally the story of lionhead was going to be covered in just one video but it's too big for that and there's two noticeable halves separated by what happened at the end of the last video line had been sold to microsoft the second half of linehead is well a bit more depressing than the first there is a reason this series is called the wise and fall of peter molyneux after all and yes even if it's not in this video we will eventually get to 22 cans for now though we return to where we left finns as per the barcode on their forehead lionhead are now the property of microsoft let the role playing games begin [Music] [Music] in the fallout from the original fable and the deal that followed it there were some definite winners and losers one person who hasn't been mentioned up to this point was louise copley who ended up managing the project and has often been credited with saving the game from oblivion she like andy wobson was someone who could actually keep people's or rather molyneux focus on just finishing the damn game and not adding any more to it i think what i've learned is that every time you finish a game there's a hundred things you want to do differently again and you come up with loads of ideas so i mean we're really proud of every fable that we've done the carters and luesta of the big blue box team weathered one hell of a storm and saw their vision right through to a deservedly successful end even if the studio itself paid the price really interesting thing to be able to look at where the hero is at the end of somebody's game and see how they've played the game ah you're not very good at combat that's where you've got scars and things and that's why you're gonna battle scar or you use far too much magic which is why you're slowly going bald microsoft as a whole for once have to be considered a monster good they believed in fable enough to give blue box all the resources they needed in order to finish it if it wasn't for their supporters publishers the game would have never come out of course in doing that it was pretty clear that lionhead and microsoft's futures would be forever intertwined a monster losers were largely the core of lionhead itself people like jonty barnes mark haley basically most of the black and white team were suddenly marginalized and not really working on anything andy robson also found himself out in the cold somewhat line head originals were given a bit of a short swift particularly after the deal where microsoft bought line head for frankly not a lot of money in le grand scheme of finns these people were somewhat unhappy at linehead's clear new direction the management themselves thanks to the misguided flotation attempts redundancies and venture capitalists ended up arguably selling line head for a lot less than it was potentially worth and in the public eye well no one was a bigger loser more than molyneux himself whose careless talk almost scuppered the whole project and almost made fable something that should be praised with caveats as opposed to something that should have been praised purely for being a fantastic game it was a harsh lesson and as we'll see it was one that molyneux wouldn't learn quickly all at all i don't think anyone else in the whole industry goes out there and talks about concepts when there's still concepts and i do partially because i have a big mouth and i get very excited but um i will admit i'm going to try and curb my my enthusiasm in the future and then tell you about that gradually in the mid 2000s and especially following the microsoft deal a lot of the lionhead originals started to leave andy wobson took himself away to form a company called testology purely focused on external testing of games although this company would still work a lot with lionhead mark healy alex evans david smith and kawimatuni found themselves working together on a heli-led independent game named ragdoll kung fu and from there they left lionhead in 2006 to form media molecule games they wouldn't do too badly what with going on to create a little big planet and all that jonty barnes after 17 years in the molyneux domain left in 2006 and ended up joining bungie as a director of production where he remains to this day adrian moore also left the guy behind the movies he joined up with pandemic for a time a lot of things changed at lionhead and lay certainly lost a fair bit of talent and again a lot of this had to do with the monster after all microsoft's purchase of lionhead came with some conditions you get some money now but you only get luis on successful completion of both fable 2 and 3 released on time to boot from that point on it was pretty clear that there wasn't going to be much else aside from fable and so a lot of originals respectfully took their bow still a lot of people stayed worried by the prospect of keeping lead jobs and of the support that microsoft could offer lion head as a whole changed from boys club mosh pit 2 professional game studio the whole of ockham court was now les the walls were given a new coat of paint chicken chow mein was replaced with fresh food from the canteen everybody got an xbox 360 and as line head employee ted timmins amusingly put it every pc now had a legitimate copy of windows lionhead had weatherless storm even if they hadn't come out of it how lay entered it and so it seems like a good time for peter molyneux to start talking about dogs gamers casual games everybody who sees that dog as they say that's a dog i understand him i understand when he's excited i understand when he's sad i understand when he's uh when he's happy i understand when he's hurt he looks like a real dog it was thought that creating fable 2 now that the groundwork was there wouldn't be as tough a task as the original even as the series was jump into the 360. still it wasn't like lionhead to just do more of the same there were two things that molyneux mandated the first finn was lately sometimes controversial more progressive elements of the original must not only be retained but enhanced the original was noted for having several strong characters of colour as well as a gay character even if it meant that the odd person or magazine called lionhead satanists for it and no they actually did the second was to literally shoot the dog the hero must have a dog and that dog dies some say that list was inspired by molly's own experiences not too long back his two dogs had wandered on somebody's land and had ended up being shot one survived the other died now your dog can get hurt the dog will always try and catch up with you he'll always try and be by your side he loves you so completely even if it takes him hours and hours he'll he'll try and catch up and we'll we'll actually we'll heal him now because it really upsets me what with this mark whibley's hamster dying as soon as the company was named after him and andy wobson murdering the hell out of his tamagotchi it seems as though poor peter doesn't have the best of luck with pets but oddly enough it all seems to go back into his games but it's a role-playing game which is very different to other role-playing games it's got some totally new inventions in it it's got the thing that's called a dog you can hear him in the background there he's completely piece of artificial intelligence indeed of all the fable games fable 2 is the one where molyneux was the most hands-on by far he was pulled from all angles by too many projects at the time of the original after all he balanced this all with another new hat not long after the purchase of lionhead peter molyneux was named as the new creative director of microsoft games europe for the second time he had risen to a very powerful position in a big company meaning that he was one of the most visible faces for microsoft and the xbox as a whole over here it even meant that he could hold influence over other companies in the microsoft europe umbrella including where so yes there's um lots more onerous duties fable 2's development went relatively smoothly until of course the end where once again it went a little chaotic there was another crunch period not as bad as the last but with less than a year to go the sequel was once again barely a game the hardened road-wedding lionhead team still largely made up of the hands who'd made the original saw it through and the sequel to fable was released in 2008 the game where you the hero can choose your destiny again only even more so and you can marry anybody do anything oh you can even pick your gender you know some i've got mixed emotions about this sometimes i want to take fable and lock it in the cupboard and say no you can never have a look at it just because you know it's been so long but i'm doing fables travel to i'm desperate to open the doors and show people what it's got because never before have i worked on the game that we actually have not really talked about all the features the thing about fable that is both quite good and frustrating in equal measure is that while all fable games take place in the same world of albion they're all different in many ways for start fable 2 is set nearly 500 years after the events of the first game in a time that's architecturally similar to england in the late 17th century or so the environments have beefed up accordingly with all your favorite towns getting bigger and generally feel indifferent it's a bit faster to get going too after the usual kiddie tutorial bum flufferies and the like which is a bit welcome and also geez there's a hell of a lot of voice talent here you'll recognise a lot of the voices if you've watched basically any british telly at all there's stephen fry zoe wanamaker sean pertwee james corden and evenly almighty east end [ __ ] oh crap do you know what i had to do to get those beetles i'll remember this kid you can back off to tibet and i shall have men natters from parkhurst dressed in yeti suits up everest no mercy but there's a lot of changes in the gameplay too the combat while good in the original undergoes a big overhaul with the focus being on very fast one button combat it's simple and certainly designed to appeal to casual players but i find it works quite well i like switching seamlessly from swords to projectiles to spells the spells also have a lot more variety this time around and they honestly feel a lot more essential to this game than they did to the original where it was more just use them or don't in fable 2 even the most physical character is going to get a lot of use out of spells like the force push and yes it is called let out white to deal with the much bigger crowds of enemies the appearance of your character will still change depending on what you specialize in though fable 2 is also line head's most headless game since the first black and white with virtually nothing on screen except the d-pad prompts and a little energy bar which certainly adds to the immersion the only thing that i don't like honestly is the big old glowing breadcrumb trail that's always coming from the character it's almost naggy like hey stop screwing around and go over there already and it's never not there fable 2 still features a ton of side quests and the like and plenty of opportunities for screwing around but that breadcrumb just gets in the way and is kind of annoying personally i would prefer a mini map as far as the screwing around goes low you can do a lot fable 2 allows you to literally buy every single house shop in the entire game you can live out those psycho land baron dreams mocking a house's owner for death and then buying it up for cheap or just getting a nice little abode for you and your family or families and you can marry absolutely anybody albion got gay marriage sorted out a long time ago the whole courting process of doing expression after expression or just giving loads of gifts out is kind of repetitive though once you know what to do you can get someone to love you forever in five minutes a lot of the people anyway i miss the days when you used to actually take your partner out on a proper date pick a restaurant and you know do drive-bys and stuff still you can have children this time and getting married can be worth it because it does actually offer some benefits it is oddly fable 2's way of working well almost insulting in its simplicity still has a weird charm about it depending on exactly what you're expecting out of the games which is something i'm yet to fully figure out but of course there is louis doggie who will follow you forever you can teach the dog tricks he'll help you in combat and he'll help you find stuff in the world buried treasure and the like and also he will generally act like a dog you can even pet it or scold it although there's usually no reason to actually scold the dog beyond just being a [ __ ] i like how the dog actually does all these weird dog fins it makes him feel a bit more real and i don't know dog meat from fallout 3. and yes he does play quite a significant part in the ending of the game the dog is nice he never leaves you but he never gets in the way too much which is a relief there are other little progressive fins too eating nothing but veggies in fable 2 not only makes you healthy but it increases your purity remember molly and the team wish to spike those who complained about similar fins in the original and it worked out ok fable 2 is one of probably a very few games to get a special recommendation from of all places peter mainly thanks to the dog regardless of all that low fable 2 is really quite good especially if you like good action in an rpg as well as choosing your own destiny there are some changes that i'm not a huge fan of and i would like it if the game was that little bit less buggy but when it's good it's really good it improves on the original in quite a few ways and there's so much beef to the game letters will happily last you a long time if you wanted to while it's only available on the xbox 360 it's probably still worth playing now not just for being a beautiful game but for playing really well too and just giving you plenty of scope to build a character as you see fit and do it naturally which in the end is what i really do like a lot about fable as a whole if i had to choose then i would probably still pick the first game over it but it is very good indeed mind you i do wonder if old molly said anything silly in connection with this game like he did with the first well geez what do you think i i i kind of hit it slightly aggressively with a rather large thick and it kind of looked like i was beating dog but she physically turned round and you you know it was a physical reaction it wasn't she hadn't thought about it was physically she reacted as she'd seen a dog hit in real life yes once again we have to talk about molly's promises unbelievably we even have to talk about an acorn again wishing to make up for the original molly spoke of a golden acorn that would grow as you progressed through the game into this giant oak tree he spoke of it earnestly you almost want to shout at molly to stop bloody hitting himself ditch that acorn already still the kid gloves were on after the first game that acorn was almost treated like a one in joke and held the acorn actually did sort of make it in although it was hardly a gameplay feature probably not like molyneux made it out to be and some things you know the trees growing from little acorns to big oak trees just didn't make sense in gameplay you had no way of interacting with those trees and like 15 percent of the process time was just maintaining the trees what would you rather have you know more cool effects on the hero or growing trees and okay that is is a promise it's a well it wasn't so much a promise it's an idea that was laid down that didn't make sense people were if anything more concerned by the game's somewhat buggy nature there was a lot of crap still in there that hadn't been fixed but you could have children now and you could play with a friend although the multiplayer was rather limited and perhaps not again what molly said it was going to be with ghosts one in about the world and heroes actually interacting with each other what makes that even more powerful for the story and for the game itself is when you visit someone else's game because this is completely dynamic co-op over live because you can walk up to people in your world who are playing their single-player games on their machines in the form of these ghosts and leap into someone else's world is only when you're in that other person's world gee you know people really like you and they hate me you're more like a henchman in another person's world and little more bog standard shoehorned in co-op that didn't add a whole lot to the game when i worked on fable one i told the world about every single feature every single experiment i you know i talked excitingly about everything in fable one so with fable2 i've been very careful to button my blabbering lips and only talk about things i could show first of all and secondly to leave things like the story and what you can do in the world and how the world interacts with the things for you to discover so that i don't over promise and the game over delivers that said fable 2 was largely a triumph even more so than the first game it wasn't nearly as controversial this time around and the reception was almost universally positive fable 2 would eventually go on to be the top selling rpg on the xbox 360 and the game won several awards peter molyneux himself was once again for a short time at least at a high point lionhead had come out from a rough patch reinforced and stronger than ever seemingly following the deal with microsoft he himself was now one of the company's most powerful people at least in europe and even his reputation was well on the way to being mended because if there is one truth in the industry it's that just about all [ __ ] can be forgiven if you're making really good games keep this in mind while we go over the next eight years if ever there was a point for peter molyneux to gracefully take a back seat and go behind the scenes this was it if he'd have done that this video series would have been utterly revenant and peter molyneux would unquestionably be a legend there would be no wise and full obviously that didn't happen the computer game industry needs to invent new stuff more than ever before you know i think this year 2009 is going to be the year that we turn around and say hey this is the moment when it really started happening and although everyone in the you know everyone here turns around and thinks we're successful that's nothing compared to what we're going to be the development of fable 3 began in much the same way as the second game did with molyneux laying out initial design decisions and what have you before going off to do his own fin and leaving the team to it this time around the idea was accessibility a dangerous word to be honest but we'll see just what it meant i love the fact of collecting stuff and you know feeling my collections and customization i love that stuff but i hate the techiness and the fiddliness and the sort of billion choices of you know there's 150 things that you can change about your character i hate that sort of stuff so generally though the development team for fable3 we're looking forward to a good easy production after all the groundwork's all in place just improve on fable too of course that didn't happen what did happen was that right near the development's end molyneux crashed through the door with all the elegance of a man who's had 10 pints into curry and demanded tons of changes to the game we've got a completely new gui system i know this sounds boring but those two-dimensional lists that role-playing games have i hate for example fable 3 has a system called the road to wall which is basically a leveling up system this was added in may of 2010 and the game was released in october prior to that the game didn't even have a leveling up system this long path that winds away into the distance in the distance you can just see this castle that is your objective to walk along that path to your destination which is a castle and when you get to to the castle you're ready to leave the revolution there was an utterly abortive attempt to add integration with the 360's new toy the kinect that was never going to work out the last months of development were chaos with other elements of the game like the finnish going almost totally ignored which you can certainly see in the finished game and of course there was peter molyneux in public hyping the game up once again by diminishing the previous game and even going so far as to say that virtually everything about fable 2 was rubbish you know giving the creative direction that i gave on fable to and making the big mistakes that i made and you know i just you know stand in front of a mirror and just punch myself in the face until i'm you know until i kind of pass out which it obviously isn't certainly not when compared with fable free and that clashed somewhat with his previous opinion that fable 2 was one of the best games he'd ever done this didn't start going on about bloody acorns this time around and so alarm bells might just be winning but obviously people didn't really know about all this in 2010 all they knew was that fable 3 was just around the corner and so it was time once again to try and figure out just how much of what molyneux was saying was believable and how much of it was clearly rubbish anyhoo it hit the shelves on time in october of 2010 again later in the day people connected to the game including molly himself would say that the game needed at least another six months or even another year of development but hey that doesn't mean that what's actually here doesn't have any chance of being good right oh dear fable 3 moves the timeline even further forward another 50 years to a time in albion that can be best described as akin to the british industrial revolution it's getting gradually more modern now you are the son or daughter of the second game's hero and you're the heir to leflone your brother the kin is a bastard who is hell-bent on walling through fear and this causes you to end up leading a revolution against him because naturally you can use the guild seal meaning of course that you are a hero you must overthrow your brother and then yourself eventually saving albion from the big ultra bastard force that's behind everything sounds suitably fantastical right i mean at least you don't have to spend an hour playing as a little child again i suppose the best word to describe fable-free is linear now don't get me one there was a certain linearity about the first two games and they were never quite as open world and free as they promised to be but there was still a lot of immersion there here it's totally lacking in all those departments it doesn't really feel like an rpg at all more like an action adventure with a few elements that are just there because it's fable and it's expected you can buy houses and you can do menial jobs and play pub games and all that but is there all that much of a reason to bother beyond dole grinding it doesn't feel worth it anymore all that interest in the most damning example is the aforementioned road to wall which is just that one road blocked off by gates where you use seals to buy near enough every upgrade in the game remember when you used to actually find these fins out in the world now that wasn't going to cut it anymore have this [ __ ] instead the road was built in about three weeks on a molyneux whim and guess what it's not a surprise it's not the only baffling change there's also the sanctuary because somebody decided that plain old menus are just plain bat wonder who this replaces them a chamber where you actually have to run about to access the stuff you want and listen to basil [ __ ] faulty yammer on endlessly while you're trying to get to the bloody save button why does this exist like at all were menus deemed not immersive enough suppose so and so we get this unworkable pile of rubbish that's just totally unwanted like it would be a neat extra but don't not have a menu system as well it doesn't make the game any more immersive it's just a pain in the ass as far as the actual game goes it looks nice and everything but it doesn't feel as though the series has moved on at all if anything it's going backwards even the combat something always enjoyable in the past feels quite sluggish and a lot of the game just doesn't engage me as a result the quirks of fable the obvious blackened whiteness of the mole choices the kooky expressions that you now can't just access when you want with the d-pad the dog they just feel annoying rather than in any way charming a lot of the game just doesn't feel thought through at all and while i've obviously not gone that far the worst criticisms are usually saved for the final section where you actually do become the kin or the queen most say it feels utterly tacked on and unnecessary almost like a compulsory and utterly unwelcome grind at the finish one wonders how much of this was a part of molly's big final decisions that everyone had to rush to stick in we already know that the road to all was and that's damning enough fablefree is a major disappointment and quite honestly a rubbish game that seems to work all that was good about the previous two reviews for it even the more positive ones were hardly bursting out with positivity this was a series that was stagnating rapidly while fable 3 didn't sell too badly with over 5 million copies shipped the underwhelming critical performance of the game would in the end caused the series to lose a lot of momentum it was frustrating to see the game suddenly become unfocused and not kick on from what fable 2 had achieved there was a chance for the series to reach new heights and it was blown totally in a time when the other big western rpgs yeah elder scrolls mass effects fallouts and whatnot were both selling well and getting a lot of critical love fable was standing stock still and being thoroughly mediocre the wise of much more direct competition didn't help i feel that fables place was almost taken in and around 2011 by cd projekt wed's the richer series from the second game onwards another action rpg not necessarily one with the big open world character trinkets that fable had but much more compelling from a story and gameplay perspective the impact of the souls games on action rpgs also cannot be overstated monumental and hugely influential critical smashers that offered finns that no other games could suddenly there was a great risk of fable losing its place in le pantheon and not being able to find it again these games made fable look utterly behind the times in every regard in 2014 molyneux would describe fable 3 as a trainwreck as much as this is yet another example of the molyneux cycle at work it is one that could be considered pretty close to the truth [Music] it all seems too familiar after a honeymoon period with microsoft where lionhead initially appeared to be stronger than ever all of a sudden they were suffering their games appeared to be unfocused and now it was affecting their money maker indeed their sole product but this time lionhead were already known as the fable studio it turns out of course that there was quite a big reason for the hodgepodge of fable-free and a lot of it was connected to molyneux himself molyneux intervention was almost chaotic in its nature and caused no end of stress and most would agree that the changes made were not exactly for the better but just what was peter molyneux doing for the rest of the time that fable free was in development [Music] well let's go all the way back to project x which as you may recall was originally mentioned by molyneux in 1989 and released by bullfrog as theme park in 1994. or was it it seems as though project text is actually always something different something that molyneux can allude to a nascent idea something which he can tell you nothing about maybe the project excellent molino mentioned in 1989 was completely different to the project x that's the winner of that amiga power competition was going to be working on in 91 who knows after all there's an even bigger project x the one that molyneux started talking about in the early 2000s and the one that would become his most high profile unfinished game the one that would in all likelihood end up causing the molyneux company cycle to start all over again this project x had several code names over the years but for the longest time it was known as dimitri after peter's godson and details were as usual vague when you're working on something as ambitious as dimitri and it's so easy to describe what dimitri is and i'm just going to be tantalizing here is that if i were to describe it to you then you would have so many questions about it and unless i could actually show you the game physically working and how you do these amazing things then you just wouldn't believe me you think i was mad people thought that's the name referred to fable too but in 2006 he confirmed that dimitri was unrelated to it as lionhead became more and more about all finns fable and nothing else things went dark but finally in 2009 dimitri project x whatever you wanted to call it it came in full focus at e3 as part of microsoft's press conference the centerpiece of which was the unveiling of project natal the attempt in those days when the underpowered wii still walled the sales market to bring motion control to the xbox 360. and dimitri now known as milo would be the centerpiece of the centerpiece evolving from what was once a controller based game to being at the forefront of the motion control boom surely we've been making interactive games for 20 years haven't we well 30 years well no i don't think we have because that thing in our hands that thing that's evolved in our hands it got more and more complex got more and more buttons actually has been the biggest barrier to what we want to create the video that molyneux presented showed a woman naturally interacting with a virtual boy by the name of milo with no nunchucks required the woman could say hello and milo would respond you could almost hold a conversation with him it was said you could get him to perform actions you could teach him to do all sorts of things you've got to put these goggles on goggles put them on like this okay what like that claire has been thrown a pair of goggles notice what she did this wasn't acted she felt the need to reach down for those goggles now everybody every single person that has experienced this reaches down because they feel so connected to milo's world cool and yes it would all be part of a game that was now known as milo and kate with kate being a dog because as we've already established with fable 2 peter molyneux had something of a han up about dogs whether kate would have ended up meeting the same fate as fable 2's dog is unconfirmed when this came along that's the time we said right okay can we dare to create a character which anybody interacting with that character would truly believe was alive and we we took that challenge this video amazing as it was is something that we now know to be kind of smoke and mirrors milo and kate was still quite pre-alpha the game was not at this stage yet the video of milo was taken from the engine rendered quickly and the woman faked her interactions this was not uncommon or even all that won early in the development of black and white when people came to see what was going on at lionhead it wasn't uncommon for someone to show something amazing that the computer was apparently doing with their white hand while their left hand controlled a stealthily hidden mouse mark healy is known to have faked a touchscreen when using this method with the particularly credulous you could even go all the way back to populace's creation where a lot of the hype for the game was generated by a big load of lego blocks but molyneux was really quite excited about milo and kate seemingly more than he'd been about any project for quite some time at e3 and in the press interviews that followed the molly new factor was ramped up to 11 with peter gushing about the possibilities of nato and milo together it certainly got people talking now you may you look at you may look at that video and wonder whether it's true or real but here's the fact we're showing this behind closed doors at e3 to a selected audience and that selected audience will be able to meet milo themselves and we'll be able to talk to milo and interact with his world thank you very much i hope you agree this is a landmark in computer entertainment but then finns went dark and confused the story itself seemingly finishes quite quickly in 2010 people wondered why we hadn't heard anything about milo and kate at all since the previous year's e3 and they soon found the official line oh that it was just a tech demo it's not actually a game that's going to come out for the kinect nah it wasn't ever a game to be honest this naturally caused people to be pissed at molyneux once more for getting them so hyped up about something that was never actually going to be a game at any point people who wanted the kinect to be more than just sports and party games were looking to molyneux and they felt as low they'd been duped by him once again however in 2016 we now pretty much know the full story of what happened to milo and kate and the struggle that played out over it through 2010. the first worry and sign was in june when aaron greenberg made the first reference to milo being a tech demo and not something that was going to mark it molyneux publicly refuted this and said that he would be showing more footage of milo at his ted talk in july an event that ended up confusing everything and everyone so he's discovering the garden you're helping him discover the garden by just pointing out these snails very simple at the start by the way if you are a boy it snails if you're a girl it's butterflies because what we found was that girls hate snails meanwhile at e3 last year the complete absence of milo despite being one of the presentations showcases the previous year seemingly confirmed what aaron said in spite of any molyneux [ __ ] is milo sort of like a tech simulation for e3 or is it gonna be made into something bigger like a a game or will there be some kind of development yeah these these nasty people here pr policemen that are all around me as we speak are stopping me talking about the actual game part but yeah for sure finally it was reported in september that milo had been cancelled and then confirmed by alex kipman in november who said that the game was never a product and never announced as a game at the time most of what molyneux said was dismissed as his usual crap in truth he wearing his games designer and lionhead's boss hat and microsoft were at loggerheads throughout 2009 and 2010 because milo and case was for molyneux always destined to be a game it was his project and apparently one that he had very strong feelings for to him milo and kate was what motion control was all about how motion control and artificial intelligence could work together hand in hand to create something unlike anything else it's that tamagotchi stewing away in the cup of tea again forever sticking in his mind almost as if despite black and white there was still something left unsaid or perhaps it was the most visible shout from lionhead as a whole acquired to allow them to make something that didn't have anything to do with bloody albion for a change this is the sort of project that molyneux would openly cry about when he spoke to people something that for now he saw as his potential magnum opus this is a wonderful opportunity where technology at last can be connected with where i am no longer restrained by the thing that i hold in my hand as far as a computer game is concerned or by the blandness of not being noticed if you're watching a film or a book and i love those revolutions and i love the future that mana brings thank you very much indeed microsoft did not share that vision whereas project nato was this infinitely capable motion sensor that could recognize anything you did the eventual result the connect was focused much more on the social party experience and the low specs reflected that they weren't going to be enough for what milo and kate had promised the game itself was always intended to be just a series of vignettes in any case still mini-games but presented in a different way that allowed for some actual interaction between yourself milo and his dog but even then the kinect was going to struggle with what molyneux had envisioned that original vision of milo and kate was also suddenly a stick for people to beat the game with how would milo react to a pervert what will that do for our image and so forth while the reality was that nothing whatsoever would have happened due to the design of the game molly got defensive even angry about this saying that art shouldn't be compromised and so forth passionate enough but it probably didn't help molineux also ended up sidetracked thanks to his creative director of microsoft europe hat which would see him consulting on the likes of kinect sports for wear while also trying to keep milo and kate afloat it was untenable and finally it all came to a head to microsoft connect was about party games it wasn't about an emotional connection and that was that microsoft refused to support the product any further and so it was cancelled probably around about the summer of 2010 leaving molyneux to finally turn his attention towards fable-free very late in the game's production cycle which probably explains a fair bit about that game the 50 strong milo and kate dev team moved on to 2012's fabler journey a non-whale's connect based game that almost everybody despised and was virtually shunned by lionhead the moment it was out on the shelves something unworkable and completely against the spirit of the series that deserves no more than this unenthusiastic sentence probably piled a stupid amount of money really in truth into building the tech demo for milo uh we built about three hours of game play it's fun it wasn't really a game it was it was a most awesome experience but in one way or another this was the sad culmination of what had been close to 10 years of work with some of lionhead's most experienced people no one was more dissatisfied than lionhead were and so with molyneux's pet project figuratively and literally taken out to the back of the shed and shot it's probably pretty easy for you to guess what's going to come next [Music] once again molyneux has grown tired of his company once again molyneux feels that his creative visions are being compromised once again molyneux has too many jobs that take him away from what he wants once again the company had grown too big for him to be comfortable all of what was won for molyneux with bullfrog was now one with lionhead but there was even more peter molyneux was angry on one particularly grim day there was another exodus simon and dean carter the originators of fable had already left linehead in 2011 to form a new studio called another place productions and one day lion head vets john mccormack gilon portes and jerem texler announced that they were going to go join them molyneux saw red and became a furious screaming tornado of wage shouting at them to get out he was genuinely apologetic afterwards but the incident was a little endemic of what lionhead was like at the time the staff and indeed molyneux himself were frustrated at constantly having to work at the behest of their masters on fable-based products leaving aside milo and kate there were plenty more line head projects that were muted but never finished or even close to finished because as much as possible had to go to fable any thought that the third game would have been the end of it was pure comedy and now lionhead's signature game was like an anvil tied to a chain around their necks the last non-fable game that lionhead had released was black and white 2 now almost 7 years old no one wanted to talk about albion the less said about 2012 for lionhead the better molyneux's press comments became beyond parody he said that fable the journey wasn't going to be on wales when it was on wales it's not an on-rail shooter here's the truth of the matter the first word that we wrote on the wall when we were designing this game was the word freedom shut up peter he said that you could look up and see dazzling sights when the game was designed for the player to look straight ahead only and so on to people who were just not convinced that is if there were people around who were actually listening still but there was a hope for lionhead that they could make another big fable rpg one that would push the game into proper full-on steampunk territory and create another winning single-player experience but now microsoft blocked that saying that they wanted linehead to produce a free-to-play game instead it was this event that reportedly caused mccormack and co to leave lionhead for good and solely inevitable happened on the 7th of march 2012 peter molyneux announced that he would leave lionhead and his position at microsoft at the conclusion of fable the journey's development not exactly the most glittering end after 15 years mark webley a co-founder of lionhead with molyneux would take loans molyneux revealed shortly after the announcements that he would move to a new independent venture named 22 cans although it was at that time unclear just what they would be doing it would be based in guildford and it would consist of a small team and it would absolutely be a true independent free of publisher interference it's all the case of history repeating again but before we get to any of that low just what happened to lionhead lionhead's last four molyneux years were for them in a word frustrating continued attempts to push fable 4 were rebuffed in microsoft's size the franchise had gone as far as it could have gone in single player and commercially and they wouldn't listen to anything a remastered edition of the original for its 10th anniversary in 2014 was received okay enough but few suspected that it would end up being lionhead's final game microsoft basically gave them an ultimatum you need to make a service game or the studio gets closed free to play online multiplayer micro transactions the whole works not necessarily what they wanted the idea eventually was to repurpose something called project opal that was worked on around the end of the molly new years to be a new experience under the fable name because hey well if the sword of damocles is hanging over your head you'd best stick with a proven seller the game would be called fable legends and would be a four vs one game pitting four heroes against one creature master sounds simple enough but lionhead did want to do something new in the genre that wasn't just copy and league of legends or what have you microsoft also wanted to do something new fable legends was expected to be a high quality f2p game with proper next-gen graphics and all sorts later on it was also going to be a flagship title for directx 12 and windows 10 apparently in trying to do all of these fins naturally they ended up running into difficulties problems with the concepts that they created and the game's balance that were difficult to fix the worry about cheating becoming prevalent due to cross-platform play and a whole load of assets and levels to make and so the whole thing ended up taking quite a bit of time originally mooted for 2015 the game was pushed back to 2016. a move that would prove to be fatal as by that time the market that fable legends was aiming for was really starting to fill up and top quality graphics was more and more hardly a requirement for a successful free-to-play game the game did eventually enter closed beta status with the idea that it would be transferred to open beta as soon as the game was given the green light but it was not to be at this time 75 million dollars had been spent on the development of fable legends a staggering amount for such a game when you compare it to the likes of half stone or league of legends pre-release hype was not especially strong and someone at microsoft had clearly decided that they weren't likely to make their money back and that fable legends was not going to redefine the entire f2p experience like it was supposed to on the 7th of march 2016 the hammer fell everybody found out at the same time the staff and the press hanno lemke the creative director of microsoft europe called a meeting and told the staff that fable legends was going to be cancelled and with that lionhead studios were going to be closed down the atmosphere was as funeral as you could possibly expect it to be on the 13th of april fable legends closed beta servers were shut off forever and on the 29th of april the studio finally closed its doors it was a shocking and a rather sad end to a once glorious studio unlike the stagnant end that bullfrog had this was like a sudden bullet to the head in these times when so much money is always widening on every project and the failure of a single game can usually mean the death of a studio this one hurt it really hurt it leaves a ton of talented people utterly displaced and a big gaping hole in the uk video games industry 2016 has not been a particularly good year believe me but of course molyneux was not there at the same time as lionhead were working on their abortive final project the world was coming down around him in the last part of this series we will see the true decline and full of the molyneux empire the not yet finished tragedy of 22 cans [Music] it's february 2015 and we're at the studios of 22 cannes in guildford a place where through the windows you can still see one of lionhead's many buildings at one occam court it has to say the least been a bad week a tense peter molyneux sits down at his desk for a scheduled phone interview with john walker editor of the pc games website's rock paper shotgun that he's not looking forward to he takes a deep breath before picking up the phone he asks walker whether he should just talk or if the journal has questions walker has many questions a moment passes the recorder is turned on and walker asks the first of them peter douglas molyneux obe do you think that you're a pathological liar freeze frame rewind we need to go back a little a couple of years at least we need to look through the events that led up to a journalist being able to ask someone like peter molyneux flat out whether he thinks he's a liar or not if this question had been asked of molyneux five years ago the interview would have ended lennon lair without another word the journalist in question would have been all but blacklisted by microsoft there would be no feature article but the times they have changed back we go lent to 2012 shortly after molineux leaves lionhead to start his new venture the one where he can finally truly be independent 22 cans in may he did something pretty cool actually he gave the keynote speech at the molly jam in london a 48-hour game jam where people made games based off of tweets from the world famous peter molly dirt twitter account something that good old molly actually found hilarious what we need is innovation and we need to come together and do crazy things whether they be radioactive babies or blind men walking into lampposts i don't care what it is it's that's what the world wants from us he also admitted that a part of his presence there was to look for folks that could potentially be hired for his new setup but it was fine to see molyneux being a good sport and of course it was important for him to do something like this as it made for quite a nice introduction this is peter molyneux entering a new world an independent world the molly jam is a nice moment a humanizing moment it's a shame there wouldn't be all that many of these in the times to come ideas are nothing us designers are useless individuals without the brilliance of coders and artists and sound people so you know if anyone wants to work at 22 counts people in your 22 can send me an email it wouldn't be long before they released their first game a mobile clicker curiosity or to give it its full title curiosity what's inside the cube was released in november of 2012 to something of a mixed reception is this actually what peter molyneux left lionhead for a game where you just tap a screen endlessly like a bloody woodpecker and you'd be tapping for a long time the curiosity cube apparently consisted of 69 billion cubelets fortunately you'd be working on removing them with everyone else so long as the servers were up anyway the removal of the cube's layers took several months and old pete had a classic bit of molyneux to deflect accusations that he was just making an artsy cookie clicker i'm resisting any temptation in giving any clues what's in the middle life-changing is what life-changing you know you can look up the dictionary definition of life-changing you can if you want you can score me on how life-changing it is give me a score i'd i guarantee you out of 100 that score will be if not 100 then it'll be 99. 101 maybe finally low on the 26th of may the final layer of the cube was removed and all was revealed the winner a scottish student named brian henderson was asked whether he wished to keep the contents of the cube to himself or if he wanted to share the news to everybody he chose the letter so what was brian henderson's prize a highly important role in 22 can's new god game that would apparently change his life he would be the god of gods with a large amount of control over the game's world and shares in profits from the finished game you you the person who reached the center will be the god of all people that are playing goddess you will decide intrinsically decide on the rules that the game is played by and is the life-changing bit you will share in the success of the product every time people spend money on goddess you will get a small piece of that pie curiosity was in leander months long hype campaign for molyneux and 22 cans new game although on reflection it's probably the best thing that the studios made to date god game itself had already been announced it was called goddess and had in the main being pushed by the new hip service that everybody was using good old kickstarter molyneux arrival on kickstarter was the one that people really greeted with suspicion why does he need it this is the man who was very recently a big cheese at frickin microsoft a very successful game designer with a lot of personal capital and he needs to ask people for money one of the brilliant things about kickstarter is when you can use you it's your help your input and if you look at the pledges we really are going to listen to you i don't promise anything i just want to deliver the glory of the old days in a new format of today's world and with your help we can do that he was far from the only one but these questions didn't come up as much when big industry bods like tim schaefer chris roberts and brian fargo did their kickstarters they did for molineux and to a similar extent david braban hitting kickstarter with elite dangerous having presumably spent most of the last decade failing to make the outsider molyneux wearing his head of a small studio hat defended himself against the arguments vigorously asking why he should be precluded from taking part um and and of course there are some things where people think you know peter peter is you know he's too he's he's too well established to use kickstarter and if i was still part of microsoft i'd agree but you know being a small independent and investing a lot of your own money in this in a studio it's a very scary thing this might have been a fair thing to say but it was risky controversies over molyneux kickstarter presence almost derailed the campaign itself and goddess's funding wasn't a sure fin in lien low it made its 450 000 pound goal with two days to spare earning a total of 526 563 pounds enough to fund more single player and cooperative modes as well as linux support molyneux claimed that goddess would be finished and out in nine months quite surprising as considering how long it had taken to make most of his games nine months was barely any time at all to be fair 2013 was largely business as usual india or not molyneux was as active in the press as he ever was and a lot of work was at that time being done on goddess the initial feeling in the months following on from the kickstarter wasn't all that terrible the team was certainly active and molyneux as a general gaming legend still had a bit of goodwill left this indie venture seemed to be a lot of fun for him these group of italians then got up every day and said right we're going to turn these penises into works of art and they've created palm trees out of them they created puppy dog faces out of them and that was amazing i think what you what what's going on there they actually did it day after day after day setting themselves this impossible task and then it became the the penis creators versus the artists and you know when there was this massive huge thing what are they gonna turn this into that's amazing there's even plenty of footage of molly doing the odd lil finn with youtube personalities here and there whether it's talking goddess or having a look back at his old games it was also not wholly uncommon for molyneux himself in the early days of goddess's beta launch to drop in on regular folks streaming the game on twitch and have a little chat about it live off the cuff so we i oh my god it actually is peter molyneux well that's made my day that's made my life that is amazing huge fan peter these were all very good fins indeed and i would like to stress that probably because it's the last bit of anything good in this whole video alas something changed on the way the first worrying sign came in may 2013 when it was announced that the mobile version of goddess would have a publisher dina games this flew in the face somewhat of molyneux saying that there would be no publishers involved in the game at any point people questioned it but molly insisted that the game would not be affected and that the pc version of the game would still come first mode and it says put the device inside your pocket and lift your leg up to simulate a heart so let me hang on i've not tried this we've got to try this okay accelerometer here let's try it no and how embarrassing would that be nope that that brings the score down brilliant idea poor execution that's that's almost like a testimony to my game design theories september 2013 saw the initial release of goddess on steam early access and there wasn't a whole lot there the odd news report questioned why the game was released in such an incomplete state and also wondered just what goddess was actually going to be that still didn't seem to be altogether set in stone yet however people did recognize that the game had potential so long as it lived up to the promises that molyneux made of a true evolution of the god game where your civilization could evolve through the ages people didn't automatically bury goddess this little clip from total biscuit probably sums up the general thoughts on the game i think it's got a lot of potential and i think it could turn out to be a fantastic game as it stands right now it's got too many annoyances for me to recommend getting in on the early access but we are only 40 done with it so i'm pretty hopeful for it honestly molyneux was open enough about it all saying that the game was far from finished there was a long way to go and it was all about experimenting it feels like a test bed doesn't it the classic molyneux practice only lists time with consumers who are paying a tenner to test the game not that this is actually uncommon and indeed one of the effects of steam early access has been to make the test bed something that can be consumed the game was for a long time at 56 percent complete the 2013 version of the game that we just saw was also replaced with a new version that looked nicer but removed quite a few things including multiplayer and a lot of the combat the reaction to this new version was quite negative and people were worried that the whole thing was gradually looking more and more like a mobile game if there was any proper work done it seemed to be on that mobile version which naturally led many people to suspect that goddess was first and foremost a mobile game in spite of molyneux claiming that it was nothing of the sort mobile or not reviews and impressions of the game in this state were poor but for a long time people seemed to forget a little about goddess until at the start of 2015 there were wumblings that not all was well at 22 cans in february of that year finns came to a head for various reasons it was known that less and less people at 22 cans a small studio to begin with were working on goddess indeed it seemed like the company were losing stuff more than they were gaining them there had been virtually no news for months and no updates on steam that fifty six percent mark never shifted one fan of the game conrad nazinski was vocally unhappy about what was happening in goddess and presented his own ideas as to how the game should be going he ended up getting in contact with peter and in classic molyneux style conrad soon found himself employed as the game's new lead designer but that was as much as people heard also molyneux himself was talking about goddess less and less barely mentioning it in interviews something that was kind of unusual for molyneux instead he was talking quite a lot about something called latrail an upcoming game for which very few details are still yet known so why is molineux not talking about goddess is it because does he think that goddess is actually finished maybe he does except of course in the eyes of seemingly everybody with the exception of peter molyneux it clearly wasn't and this was the big one the gaming press decided to find out what happened to brian henderson the reported god of gods who'd opened up the cube and whose life was apparently going to be changed and they were dismayed by what they found henderson's life was decidedly unchanged he hadn't heard a finn from 22 cans for months his god of gods award and shares in the game's profit they seemed to be distant and remote indeed very few people had received anything from their kickstarter pledges there was supposed to be art book sandler-like but nothing was there and this was the angle from which 22 cans and molyneux in particular would take an absolute battering in the press they say that in guildford you may well have heard the sound of a hundred spinning plates smashing on the ground as all of these negative stories suddenly came out molyneux and the group mobilized desperately providing updates on what had been happening in an attempt to prove that they had been working on goddess all this time which honestly not a lot of people believed there is a catalogue of things that i did badly and incorrectly because i had never done a kickstarter campaign before i had never released on steam early access before i had never um i'd never done a mobile game before i you know and all of these things made me i made some horrendous mistakes the opinion was that molyneux had done it again he'd made promises that once again he had not been able to keep only this time he'd done it with the help of his fans money molyneux had often been referred to as a pipe dreamer and perhaps even in some circles as a liar that's something he's even sheepishly at times admitted to this however was the first time that other epithets such as snake oil salesman scam artist and con man could actually stick to him after brian henderson it has to be said that they were more than a little deserved i don't want to ever make those mistakes before we are still passionate about goddess we've got a team on goddess we've already spoken about you know what they'll be doing on there i apologize to everyone for the mistakes that i've made and you know you have been harsh and please continue to be harsh where did you learn your trade your stupid [ __ ] [ __ ] you idiot and so we come to that question the first question john walker asked and the brutal interview that followed even more than when we get to goddess as it actually is now this is probably the crucial moment of this whole part i'm not about to say it's a good bit of journalism because it's not really and nor is it meant to be it's savage and emotional something that's not just born out of recent goddess news but through years of bad feeling these were the questions that someone obviously wanted to ask molyneux for years but couldn't it's angry basically molyneux is on the defensive throughout trying to persuade john walker to just come to the studio and you'll see all that's going on but walker with all the fury of a man who considers himself to be gaming journalism's jeremy paxman plus the added fury of thousands of pissed off backers is steadfast in his questioning of the linux port that's clearly not going to happen of all the failed promises of the lack of progress and of what's going to happen about brian henderson it's harsh and emotional yes but a lot of it in fact pretty much all of it is deserved after years of kid gloves it could almost be said that peter molyneux had it coming the upshot of it all was in the article's headline molyneux is not going to give interviews to the press anymore with this an interview in eurogamer and a final interview in the guardian he did his i'm shutting up tour everything peter molyneux knew was one and suddenly peter molyneux found himself not able to be peter molyneux anymore even if he let quite a few people know that he couldn't be peter molyneux anymore if you catch my drift he also hired a man named simon phillips to be ceo of 22 cans and handle the business side of finns ostensibly leaving molly to get on with designing games phillips a 20-year industry veteran came in basically on a mission of mercy morale at this point was understandably quite low and he made lots of noise in the press about putting finn's white and putting an utterly broken peter molyneux back together again now don't get it twisted i'm not about to defend molyneux because a lot of finns went on here more than anything else in his career this was where molyneux deserved a serious grilling because he absolutely screwed up his treatment of brian henderson was appalling as was his treatment of every other person who'd backed the game his promise that the game would be out in nine months was pure comedy and his later claim that he actually wasn't massively late because his current record for creating the game stood at three years yeah that's obviously [ __ ] if finns were different and molyneux was still under a major publisher goddess would have probably been cancelled a long time ago and i reckon that if no questions had ever been asked well we wouldn't have heard anything molyneux struggled to adapt to truly independent life to what crowdfunding meant to a lot of people it's not like you can just not deliver at all anymore and face the consequences because there's so much worse for your reputation contingency is not something that people care about as a stretch goal either the game had changed but molyneux didn't quite understand the walls do i think that he set out with the intention of fleecing people on the game no i think that's a pretty silly thing to say but do i think that he really screwed up far more than at any other point in his career yes absolutely and when finns fell apart there was no protection in the face of a john walker type demanding accountability all the old press tricks weren't going to work where are all these pr people where are they when you independent they don't exist maybe they never existed looking back on it all you can see a few reasons why the story just ran and ran the story of brian henderson is an obvious human interest factor kickstarters widening on waves of hype from old masters apparently now free to do what they did best were frustrating people as they then struggled or just took forever molyneux was both an easy and a very deserving scapegoat for that frustration and i think people were tired of the kid gloves in general they were frustrated with molyneux just automatically thinking everything would be the same as it was in 1989 or 1997 and now pulling his tricks with actual people's money molyneux's reputation had taken hits in the past thanks to all those undelivered promises and what have you but this was when his reputation shattered all the acorns rolled up into a ball and nothing compared there's more to come when we get to his legacy but for now we do have to look a little at goddess as it is currently it's now called goddess wars coming to steam in that form early this year as a free update for those who already owned goddess and 11 quid for everyone else the cynical minder to say that renaming the game like this was probably to hide the hundreds of pages worth of negative reviews that were on steam's original goddess page as it is goddess wars is still in early access it's apparently still being worked on and brian henderson doesn't really care anymore and so as the final game in a video that's covered so many peter molyneux games what's it actually like well let's look at the original half first this is goddess in its 2.4 version there's apparently some sort of story and some other folks one in about called leo starwi the game appears to be some sort of simplified hybrid between populous and black and white only without even the ultimate goal of the former or the complex ai of the latter and i say appears to be because honestly there's not much game here at all you drag the mouse about and do lots of terraforming make sure that your followers have the required amount of flat land to build lower boats collect belief as and when maybe send the odd follower to a pit so you can get gems and uh that's about it well i mean i would say that it appears to be an okay proof of concept but that is basically all i could say about the game and that's if i felt like being in any way positive about the game which i don't and now become clear oh anyway actually i've missed out stuff while you're terraforming you can get chests which will give you stickers which you can put on your cards and get you closer to activating them the cards can do things like i don't know give you more belief for destroying a wok sometimes there's bits of story hidden in lem which is the odd paragraph of nonsense here and there occasionally a star wars mill about to the edge of your territory meaning you literally have to get them off your lawn by sculpting the land around them uh what else oh you can use a leash to drag your followers to where you want them to go and there's a voyage bit with really exciting terraforming minigames like build a bridge over the sea this uninspiring mix of gradually more complex puzzles and really annoying ai is truthfully the most game that there is in this package and um yep i think that's it there is literally nothing else to be done in this game and no purpose aside from just gaining more followers oh and peter molyneux drones on about how they'll all be big skyscrapers here one day in the dev commentary i'm not seeing it honestly we really in design terms i really want you to the reason why we've slightly paused the game here i really want you to get used to leashing i want you get to get used to this way of gameplay if something is taking a long time focus on something else if building is taking a long time focus on picking up rocks now that they're worth 10 times their belief when you're not this card to be honest there is more but getting to it is just beyond tedious the terraforming or sculpting doesn't work really it's not fun to do not even as fun as clicking around in populous there's no depth to it it's more like a sparsely populated god sandbox where you spend a load of time just unlocking things that you can just screw around with it all feels like what it is a poor conversion of a mobile game that clearly took precedence and something that as a game feels utterly incomplete like i said maybe it could be an okay proof of concept even if it seems as though it's a hodgepodge of classic molly games only with all that's good about said games taken out cod touchscreen controls and a level of depth that makes farmville look like a freaking paradox game there could be something there but alas this may be what goddess looks like now but it's also what goddess looks like jeez uh almost two years ago and since then we have seen nothing at all on pc there's apparently a bit more on mobile if you give a toss this lee serene side of goddess is in all likelihood how it is always going to look and there is pretty much nothing there this half of goddesses well it's basically dead it's not worth another word all that you see is dead [ __ ] dead followers dead a star eye dead big sacrificial die for me here pit dead it's dead jim like walking into a nightclub and finding nobody but a depressed coke dealer goddess is the what in dead ascend of a saturday night look i could basically recreate the parrot sketch here but i think he got the message okay it's dead let's move on goddess wars is the other side and is goddess's biggest update so far so big that it necessitated its own steam page apparently 11 people worked on it including the aforementioned conwad who was pissed off at how goddess was going and ended up hired for it she's no wonder he was pissed anyway brian henderson is also apparently here as one of the opposing deities essentially this is supposed to take all that sin goddess and fashion it into a god come real time strategy game also the game featured a micro transaction on release where you'd have to buy the second continent if you wanted to continue playing the game because someone obviously thought that goddess hadn't pissed people off enough after a staggeringly negative reaction this was pulled after a day now of course this is still an early access game and i guess that should be kept in mind all the terraforming and whatnot is still here but now once enough boats have been built you can fashion them into a citadel and from that citadel you can make warbands warbands smash up the enemy's troops and the ultimate goal is to capture the enemy's belief vault simple enough really indeed very simple this is bog standard rts player flat with a little bit of god stuff thrown in but again it is early access isn't it i should keep that in mind there's a little splurge at the start for molly himself saying that he always envisioned goddess as two separate games the peaceful side like we've already seen and this which i find very hard to believe as this has clearly been knocked together very quickly indeed again it's an average proof of concept at best it's almost like there could potentially be some sort of rts here but it's nowhere near close to ready nor is it in any way fun to play nor does it inspire any sort of enthusiasm it shouldn't surprise anybody to hear that impressions of goddess wars were terrible but i think that would be the case even if it hadn't have been full of [ __ ] surrounding goddess even though that obviously had a lot to do with it rumors had it that even the statement that 11 people were actively working on goddess wars was an exaggeration and that in terms of actual game design there may have only been one conrad it's easy to picture him sitting in a corner chaining through the day's third bottle of vape juice trying to get something anything workable out of goddess i have a lot of sympathy for the guy in all honesty still this all feels a bit immaterial why because there hasn't been any update on goddess wars since march four months and not a pip squeak has been hurt the 22 cans website doesn't help much either the last update on there is from the summer of 2015. goddess wars isn't even mentioned on it to put things in perspective here's another formerly early access game prison architect by introversion a team relatively comparable in size to 22 cans if not smaller the alpha felis was made available in september 2012 and again there wasn't a whole lot there but the team updated constantly always making new builds available it was always clear that something was going on from the first alpha to the game's eventual final release in october 2015. that's what should be expected needless to say goddess as a whole falls massively short of these standards so is goddess wars dead too well there's a bit of news that wins this whole video right up to date it's about conrad and it came out a couple of days ago has he had some new ideas for the game is he about to take people through another new build i mean goddess may be virtually damned already but is he still fighting the good fight no he's been let go conrad no longer works for 22 cans his contract went out and was not renewed according to most people conrad nazinski was indeed the last person who was working on goddess in any way shape or form simon phillips the company ceo has gone on records to say that of course goddess is not dead obviously it's just westin pining for the fields no there's no release date or even a rough idea of one let's face it it's pretty clear that everyone at 22 cans is now working on this game called latrail but what even is the trail it's a monu game apparently he's used all sorts of words like communication and discovery to describe it but not much else and it's a mobile game also when molyneux announced the game in 2014 it came as a bit of a surprise to folks at 22 cans who didn't know a whole lot about it either nothing ever changes does it seriously to be honest it barely matters what the trail is goddess will forever leave a bad taste in the mouth at the merest mention of peter molyneux's name it has sullied his reputation forever it is to say the least an absolute [ __ ] show again just to show how steep the decline is in almost four years this is where goddess is at in the late 90s it took a len 30 strong lionhead studio four years to make black and freaking white how the mighty have fallen this is it now he may not be a ceo but peter molyneux can never go home again even if he appears in the press and of course he has a number of times since that farewell tour someone will be there to say that they thought that molly wasn't ever going to speak to the press again and quite right too but molyneux needs to be in the press who else can sell his games except him no one else has ever tried selling games is kind of what he fricking does without molineux in public the games will fail and so well the trail it's already dead it would have to be quite literally the greatest game ever made for it to repair the damage done to 22 cans and solar reputation of peter molyneux this whole sorry episode is one of the most tragic ends to a glittering career or at least it should be that i have covered and it's painful but not one bit of it was undeserved summing up goddess isn't easy it feels like a shame to cap off this look at peter molina with the absolute worst fin he's ever produced but that's the way the cookie crumbles i mean it's a completely average mobile game at best so even without everything else it would still be a bad ending but of course molly had to go ahead and promise that the game would redefine the god genre he can't ever just deliver the damage it did to his reputation has already been discussed but less the damage it did to other fins like say kickstarter this whole thing could be a cautionary tale something to stop people from donating to any kickstarter at all it's a sad fact for all the good projects that come out of kickstarter one goddess can wipe away the achievements of 20 shovel knights undertales and hell even elite dangerouses david braban who came onto kickstarter at the same time as molly and was also greeted with a fair bit of suspicion he managed to do a pretty good job with his game but people are always going to remember the failures that came from kickstarter ravel and the successors and few have failed harder than goddess did worst of all though is the damage to the studio itself 22 cans was a good team a healthy mix of youngsters and vets including several who have been lulled to molyneux since the beginning and they've all been screwed by this whole thing that to me is one of the most important parts of molyneux's legacy the talent that has come from under his win and here that's well that's just a washout it's a black mark on a cv oh and speaking of peter molyneux's legacy well perhaps it's time to finally wrap this whole thing up what exactly is the legacy of peter molyneux it's tough to say or even to break it down into what's good and bad especially after all that bad but we have to look at everything as a whole there is that passion and [ __ ] question because there are a lot of contradictions when it comes to even the most commonly received opinions for example if molyneux was a serial bullshitter purely interested in money why did he ever leave both ea and microsoft molly was able to climb close to the top of the greasy pole not once but twice and both times he ditched it all right at the point where he could have just buggered off and counted his cash for the rest of time and then there's the interviews i mean peter molyneux in interviews is pure chaos in motion when it comes to selling a game an experience there is arguably no one better in the history of the industry he is a master salesman he was a trendsetter here during a time when most games people could barely look a camera in the eye molyneux stood out as a man in his element if making games is where molly feels most alive being in front of the camera is a close second being a salesman low comes with faults especially when you end up breaking all the walls arguably there are few people who are actually worse at pr than he is he promises too much he talks excitedly about concepts years before their weddi he screws up admits he's made mistakes and then makes those same mistakes again he'll admit behind the scenes that hey you've got to sell these fins or that he's made stuff up on the spot but it won't stop him he gets carried away because he genuinely does love what he makes and thinks that it's capable of so much i mean remember that a molly new game does tend to evolve after all something likely acorn for example that came very early in the original fables development when it was still project ego there's no record of an acorn turning into a tree that i can find in any of the full-on junkets molly did for fable in 2002 or 2003. it was an early fantasy and the idea was probably dropped early on but it is just one example of many it is easy to get carried away with him because of how much he gets carried away the acorn is special though as it is one of the few times that molyneux gets caught on a sticky wicket sometimes he is careful those bigger lies such as having multiplayer in the original or children easy to dial back they're big they couldn't be done in time they'll be in the sequel and so they were an evolving acorn is never big enough to be a major focus it requires a lot of resources and so forth and so it just gets dropped again and again the development of a peter molyneux game is not conducive to such little details being planned out in advance as opposed to them just happening as panicked flourishers but then molyneux always goes on and on about those little details anyway instead of actually talking about a freaking game which is why well he should really just stop hitting himself of course there are bigger lies out there which brings me to the question of what exactly went on how did peter molyneux fall so hard so many of his games deal with the concept of evolution but it seems to me that one person never truly evolved and that was him certainly in the business sense in the 90s everything he touched turned to gold bullfrog were one of the best companies around and with that molly news business practices and games development practices were set in stone never to change with line head fins didn't change all that much even though the manpower and resources required for a successful game studio increased dramatically and he just about got away with it but those original plans to retain a small team and create a single game at a time were unworkable and they fell apart spectacularly the company almost paid the ultimate price back then until microsoft stepped in and then with 22 cans molyneux was still trying to do the same thing only with regular people supplying louis sources it was completely unworkable to create games in that usual disorganized way it was doomed from the start something was bound to go on and so it did and it was the worst possible finn two though one the plans for the kickstarter backers and buying henderson peter molyneux seems to think that just because a business plan a quido worked so well before that it's bound to work again but the world of gaming has changed so much at all levels perhaps i don't know he saw something in the independent world that would allow him to channel that bullfrog spirit but even there the world has changed and suddenly peter molyneux is completely out of touch with it there's a level of openness and planning required that molineu would never be able to truly give and thanks to things like kickstarter that allow indie developers the chance to find resources they'd have never had before the standards are always rising and the rewards are highly lucrative it's a cut float world where everyone is always demanding attention where big games come out of nowhere at a lightning pace it was a world like peter molyneux with his evolving games golden promises and lengthy development cycles was completely unfit to enter maybe he thought that with his cloutened experience the indie gaming world would surely be an easy win if so he was one he came in there like a bull in a freaking china shop and all he did was smash a load of vases and kick a few chickens it goes without saying that all of these fins have greatly damaged molyneux legacy as they should there is a lot of good that he's done it could be argued that molyneux is at the center of a couple of generations worth of excellent british game developers his effect on the british games industry is massive and on the whole very positive we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are in the world of gaming without bullfrog lionhead and mononyou even now there are many successful companies that are set up with molyneux alumni or that have taken their own lessons from molyneux good or bad and he has made some very good games indeed although admittedly not for a while he is always going to be frustrated though because he will never get to be where he wants to be he can't just go back to designing games at the head of a company if peter molyneux is to have any further impact on the world of gaming that's positive he will have to pick one of those two paths at the moment he's designing but can he actually stay there i don't know honestly i doubt it in the end low after everything do i like peter molyneux there is something about him that still makes me like him or really want to like him even after all the [ __ ] there's been perhaps it's that earnestness the ability that he has to make something seem like a truly otherworldly experience or maybe he still has goodwill from the positive stuff he's done giving young folk less starting the industry or just making those great games maybe there's a blind faithful that somehow in spite of all the evidence to the contrary he actually can get back to what he once was there is a force for good in peter molyneux and it wants to get out i honestly believe that all i thought to do so would require drastic changes that frankly i don't think he would be prepared to do and at the core of all of this in spite of all that utter [ __ ] and incompetence there is a rather personable man who would probably be very nice to have a drink with he'd certainly have a lot of stories to tell that's for sure you would just have to prepare yourself from the moment when after a cracking meal and way too much wine he pulls out the briefcase and tries to sell you a plot of land this is my life my passion i don't think i'll ever stop i don't think i would know what to do with my life without making goals it's a fantastic amazing incredible job i get to have a dream and see that as was reality what else could you do thanks so much for watching the last part of the peter molyneux saga and indeed for watching the whole series if you have it certainly has been a rollercoaster of a journey if you like this video then please consider subscribing and also consider following me on my social media and supporting me on patreon okay let's get down to the usual since on antics martin pataki taylor almond mark johnston twisted squirt joel hartman phil tapper ben coker jb hampshire andre russell leonoris and gryffin blackpoor yeah that sounded all right and of course we have more thank yous to deliver we have tim lintz robert kelly alexander baldeck dan roscoe terry anderson francisco pimenta kev gilmore alexander green thomas daniels greg olsen christian earnshaw stuart ashen lee harris thiago pereira dos centro silva dos santos silva james id mike siegler edge reader russell hugo ken bauercloff mark johnson gerald morris matt lee paolo larry graham camach scott mitten nicole ketchum mark brooks 9th demon peter siddorn ludwig holmstrom john ezell kit leary elle o'brien dave parkinson novel and olaf all been thank you all so much for amazing support what a series it has been um truly one of the hardest things that i think i've ever done on this channel but we made it we made it through peter molyneux and now well we can all move on to something else that something else should be coming pretty soon where we will be going to the land of japan for a video either on a really weird kusogi sort of game or a certain sound team i'm not quite sure yet i'll probably end up doing both though but until then it is time to say goodbye thank you all so much for watching and wherever you are whoever you be have a good one take care and i'll see you next time bye for now

Channel: Kim Justice

Views: 108,308

Keywords: kim justice, peter molyneux, molyneux, kim justice peter molyneux, kim justice documentary, kim justice retro, kim justice video, fable, populous, godus, theme park, syndicate, bullfrog, lionhead, dungeon keeper, peter molyneux games, peter molyneux lies, peter molyneux kinect, xbox, amiga, pc, black and white, 22cans, peter molyneux cube

Id: zFZ92jySWe0

Length: 184min 44sec (11084 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021