- [Chris] This video is
sponsored by Skillshare, an online learning community with thousands of classes covering topics from game development to salsa dancing, check the link in our video description if you'd like to find out more, and are interested in a
two-month premium membership to the site, free of charge. - Hello, I'm in Peter
Molyneux's dining room, I am supposed to be here, we're going to do what
is our first episode in a new series called "The Games I Made." Now this series will probably
be fairly infrequent, because we wanna only do it with some of the most interesting names in video game development, and the idea basically
is that we're gonna go through their entire
game development career, and we've got a bunch of physical
objects to represent that. We've got pretty much every game that Peter Molyneux has made, right here in front of us, as well as some extra bits and pieces, and before we invite
Peter in to take a look and join us in this nostalgia journey, I just wanna say a big
thank you to our patrons. This is by far the biggest
project we've ever done, it's required buying quite a lot of stuff, hiring a camera operator, lots more than we usually are able to do, and that is thanks to everyone
that supports us on Patreon, so yeah, this video is for you, and I guess it's time to talk to Peter. (upbeat music) - Welcome to your own dining room. - Oh my God
(Chris laughs) look at all this, how the hell did you find all these? - It tool a little while.
- Geez. - We have the surprise here that you're not allowed to see just yet.
- Alright, okay. - Peter Molyneux, what does
your gaming career have to do with a can of baked beans? - Well, it really kinda started with this person called Camille de Koch, and she was this girl I
really, really fancied, and her dad was this amazing, kinda entrepreneurial bloke
and he said when he met me, he said, "Oh, you should start
an import-export business." And I, you know, because I was just had
one thought in my mind, (Chris laughs) I just said, "Yes."
- Right. - We had a little advert and one of the people that contacted us was this bloke in the Middle East who
needed a container load of baked beans. - Alright. - And then that gave me enough
money to just to survive, and I started a company up called Taurus, the head of Commodore phoned
us up one day and said, "Oh, we've heard about your company, we really, really think you're fantastic and everything like that, we wanna send a car over, pick you up, and show us what you've been doing." And of course I was just, I had an Amiga at the time, I thought they were complete gods, (Chris laughs) I didn't have an Amiga actually, but I had heard about the Amiga.
- [Chris] Right. Thought they were complete gods, they drove me up there, they looked after me, I had lunch, and they kept talking about, you know, "When you can do your product?" "When you can put your product on there?" and it turned out that they had got the
wrong Taurus company. - Right. - There was another Torus,
which was T-O-R-U-S, and so at the end of
it, they said, you know, "Are you gonna be putting
your developers on this?" And I said, "Absolutely."
(Chris laughs) They said great, fine, we'll
send you all the computers, and that's where my first Amiga came from. And then a friend of mine
had this, this is the one! This is the, this- - It's almost like we've
prepared this ahead of time. - How the hell did you find this? This is the game, which he wanted converting
over to the Amiga, because we had the first
Amigas in the country. I did the conversion not knowing anything about how to do games. - [Chris] Right. - And it's true. I think you, have you got "Fusion"? - We have indeed.
- You have, Jesus. (Chris laughs) I don't believe it. I haven't seen this for absolute years. How the hell did you find that? - How many of these games
do you have personally? Do you keep your old ones? - I don't have any of them. - Wow. Very well, if anything catches your eye from the games that you made- - Right right, oh no,
I do have "Populous". I have "Populous"
- Okay, that makes sense. So yeah, with "Enlightenment Druid II", so you and your business
partner blagged the fact that you could do a successful port. - Yeah, we could do a successful port. I knew nothing about how to code games. My answer to the frame rate issue was to make the screen smaller
and smaller and smaller. If you ever played
"Druid II" on the Amiga, the screen was about a
quarter of the thing, because I just couldn't get
the frame rate fast enough. - [Chris] Oh my gosh, wow. - But this then led to "Fusion", which had the same problem. And this is the first game that I worked with Glenn Corpes. - Is this the very first
game Bullfrog produces? - This is the very first original
game that we've produced. - What was "Fusion" for before the-? - It was a weird mixture
of a puzzle based shooter. - [Chris] Wow. - What happened is we got the Amigas, we did the conversion,
Glenn did the artwork and we got paid 4,000 pounds for doing it. That was it. - Wow. - That's all the money we got. Which then in those
days, when I was getting like a hundredth of a penny
(Chris laughs) for each bean tin, that seemed like an absolute fortune. - All right, "Populous". - Yes. - That game changed your life. - It's a complete change. - Unbelievably right? - Yeah, unbelievably. Before then we were destined for, well nothing really. At its peak, it accounted for a third of all Electronic Arts' revenue. - Wow. Gosh. - And that was incredible. And I got this phone call and he said, "How's it feels to be a millionaire?" What he omitted to tell me is that
our royalty rate was so low and it was months before
we got any of our money. But that was a life
changing moment for sure. - I think this might be
a nice time to reveal a little something extra that we've brought.
- Right. - So I hope I got this right. So do you remember why or how you came up with the name Bullfrog for the studio? - That was actually in a pub
called the Prince Albert. - Right. - And we were talking
about all sorts of names, like Digital Dreams and you know, something clever with words. - I've seen an old magazine article where someone else
asked you that question. How many years ago would that have been? Like in the early nineties? And there was a picture of
a ceramic bull frog that was in the building.
- That's right! That's right! I'd be amazed if you, oh my God.
(Chris laughs) Where the hell did you find that? - So we saw this picture
in the magazine article that I mentioned.
- That's it! And there was someone selling these online and they had one left. - Do you mind if I? - Oh no, absolutely. - Gosh, that's incredible. How the hell did you find it?
(Chris laughs) You must have spent a fortune on it. - I mean, I think it was more just, it was good luck that we
found the last person to own. - That is it! That is it! That's amazing! I haven't seen that for what? 30 years, probably?
(Chris laughs) Yeah, just about 30 thirty years. Mind you I haven't seen
any of these things for all that time, so
yeah, that is incredible. And this point we were
acquired by Electronic Arts. - Right. So that's
after making "Populous", which they must've been thrilled by. - Yeah, totally thrilled by.
And we made "Powermonger". - Which, I think, was that
one of the first, like, because the difference between
"Populous" and "Powermonger", well there were a few differences, but one of the big ones is that you can manually pick the units and tell them to move, but in "Populous" they
react to what you're doing. - [Peter] Exactly, exactly. - That is one of the earliest RTS games. - I think. Well, you see. - It depends how you define RTS, but. - This could have been
the first true RTS game. - Wow. - Except for one slight problem. And that was me being
rubbish as a designer, (Chris laughs) this is the thing about design and this is the game that
taught me this thing. When you're designing a game, you let reality get in
the way of gameplay. What I thought with
"Powermonger" is, well, we can control these units
and send them places. And that felt okay but how are these orders
getting to these people? - Wow. Okay. - And because it was set
in a mediaeval world, how are these orders
getting to these people? And that's when I came up, I got obsessed with, well, we could have a little runner
running across the land. I thought, I know it'll be carrier pigeon. We'll have a carrier pigeon take it. And that was such a stupid
idea, because it meant that the point and click
side just wasn't immediate. And you compare that with
something like "StarCraft", it's all about the immediacy
of that point and click. - That's incredible though, what you saw as an issue was actually
the thing that would go on to define a genre that is
doing all sorts of things. - But if I hadn't have put that in, then I think that "Powermonger" would have been an
exponentially better game. I think if you said, which game did you enjoy doing the least, I think it was "Populous II". - Across the whole lot? - Yeah, I reckon so. I just made the mistake of
adding too many features into it. When we were acquired, I
made this stupid request to be a vice-president of Electronic Arts. Mainly because I was just
really curious, you know, here was this big American company. You know, I realised that after a while, this is just, I'm not designing anymore. I'm not programming anymore. I'm sitting in meetings over
in America all the time. So I got really, really frustrated. So frustrated that at this point, when "Dungeon Keeper" was going on, Actually, a year before
"Dungeon Keeper" was finished, I actually told them I wanted to leave. So around at my house, we're pretty drunk. And I'm talking to Tim. I said, "Tim, you know,
I'm thinking of leaving." And so he said, "Right,
let's send the email." - Yeah this is it. - And well, this is it,
we'll send an email. So literally we typed, "Effective immediately, I
will leave Electronic Arts." Pressed return. - Nice. - And then I woke up in
the morning, I think, "Oh, what the fuck have I done?" - Aside from maybe the way that you handed in your resignation, was that the right time for you
to step away, do you think? - It was just a stupid idea. It was a stupid idea at the time, here I had a team of, I
think, 150 people there. Because one of the things
that they wanted to do is to use Bullfrog, to
found a studio in Europe, which is actually still in
Guildford now, even today. And, you know, I hadn't thought through any of those consequences before I sent the email off. But then this started, you know, it was kind of lighting
a blue touch paper. It was impossible to reverse. I couldn't kind of say, "Hey, by the way. I did it when I was a
bit drunk last night. Sorry about that."
- Yeah, just kidding. - I flew over to America. I handed my notice in, properly this time. And they said, "Right,
here's the consequences, "Dungeon Keeper" does not
have a designer anymore." And so I said, "Well, look,
rather than leave, now, I'll leave when "Dungeon
Keeper" is finished." And they said, well, "That's no good because, you know, how do we know you'll be off,
recruiting the team." And I said, "I tell you
what, I'll take the team, which was only seven of us, I'll take it, and we'll work in my house and we'll finish the game
off. And then I'll leave." - How how'd you feel
about the Bullfrog era? Like in front of you, is
this mostly happy memories? It was an amazing time. It was, you know, I went from being a kind of degenerate, almost bankrupt- - baked bean salesman.
- Baked bean salesman, desperate to get their approval of a girl that would never even look at me. To being one of the most
renowned people in the industry, in the space of seven years, seven and a half years. And when you go through
something like that, it's an incredible adventure. - That seems like a nice place to move on to the next chapter then. - So yeah! So this is Lionhead! - No red velvet unveiling
this time I'm afraid. - But you've got the Xbox Kinect! - Yeah, I figured that might
be part of the story. - You want me to throw it across the room? (Chris laughs) - When you start
anything, the big problem actually isn't the game idea. It's the team. - Right. - It's the team and I had this incredibly restrictive covenant, meaning I couldn't take any of the people from Bullfrog, completely fair enough. And that was pretty challenging. But we did end up finding probably I think one of the greatest teams, the industry's ever known, really. - Yeah. So "Black and White", it ends up being in development
for quite a long time. Is it four years?
- Four years. - Four years, well- - Hang on, let's just get that in perspective. It took a year to build the team. It took another year to
make all the tools because, it's so different nowadays
because we've got Unity and we've got Unreal
and we've got, you know, an enormous amount of middleware. Every pixel that was on the screen, every song that you heard,
(tiger whistling) that was driven from an engine. And so there was a lot of infrastructure that had to be built up. When we went into E3, we got Game of the Show at E3, which was an amazing thing! I mean, that E3 probably has to be one of the most incredible
experiences in my life. - Right. - The queue of people to get in, to see the game was incredibly long. - And it sort of happened at the show- - And it all happened at the show. And I don't, really, to this day, understand why. - Well, I think you are
very good at talking about your games. - And that's got me into a lot of trouble. - Yeah. I guess we should talk
about that a little bit. More recently, you said at one point you were going to stop talking to the press. - Yes. It was a stupid thing to say. Because, it's like sulking. The rule, which I think
I should adhere to, for as long as I possibly can, is I shouldn't talk about a
game that hasn't been released. I shouldn't hype a game. And what I did with all
of these games really was, and this is not an excuse
at all because I fully take on my shoulders, what people's perception
of what I was saying was. Really what I was doing
is talking to people in the same way as I talk to the team. You're gonna make a game like "Fable". Why wouldn't you say let's make the greatest game,
role-playing game of all time. What possible reason would
you want to make a game, a role-playing game without
trying to make it the best role-playing game of all time. And so I would talk very much about the passion of what I was doing and the ideas that I was having
at that particular moment. And what I didn't realise
until right after this, is that became a promise
in people's minds. That became a promise. Now, if you were to go into 22cans today, and you were to talk to
any team member in there, they'll probably turn
around to you and say, "You know what? Working with Peter is fine, but the number of ideas that we implement that are then thrown
away, it's just legion." - Okay. - And that's always been true.
You know, my philosophy is, and it really kind of goes
back to the "Powermonger" days. If you put something in the game, you can have every idea
for a game you want and you can stuff it in there. But sometimes they're like pieces from another piece of a jigsaw, they just don't fit. My feeling is that I did over promise. I over promised, not because
I wanted to lie to people or because I wanted for people to believe something of
the game that wasn't there. It's something that I
believed at the time. - Do you see any similarities
between yourself, and we've seen more
recently, with Sean Murray and "No Man's Sky" and a
similar kind of exciting, eventually toxic relationship
with the audience? - Now Sean, he just
works down the road. When he was talking about "No Man's Sky", I could hear the tone in his voice. You would have to be, you'd have to either a piece of rock, not to be excited by what he was saying. And what he was doing
was exactly what I did. He was talking about what he
wanted the game to become, not what the game became at launch. A lot of the other companies
in the industry have PR people and they control the message. And that message is, you know, there's a logic to it. And then you've got people like me and Sean go out and do it. - But do you think now
with games like "Legacy", you sort of have the right
relationship with it? - Yeah. I mean, there, there was- - Do you have to fight
that instinct a little bit? Does it come back? - I mean, I'd love to
tell you about the game, I'd love to show you the game. There's every atom on my body
wants to show it off to you. But that would be catastrophically wrong. That's the real promise. Is that I shouldn't hype the game. I shouldn't talk about the
game until it's finished. If you go through the progression of this, what's happening in the industry? - The boxes are getting smaller. (Chris laughs) - The boxes are definitely getting smaller, but the teams are getting bigger. And it's really up until about this point, up until the end of "Black and White 2", the amount a crunch that
went on in the industry. It was just ridiculous. I mean, "Black and White", I think I worked and
most of the team worked every single day without a break or holiday for a minimum of 14, 16 hours, every day,
Monday through Sunday. - I'm right in thinking that, on a personal
level, that you now have a family, and that didn't happen until
after "Black and White", right? Because I guess you- - No, it didn't. I didn't. In fact, I met my wife, who's in the kitchen now, I met my wife before that.
- Okay. But we hadn't been out on a date. The game was due to be finished in, at first it was due to
be finished in December. And then we slipped it to the January. And then we slipped again to the February, and then we slipped it again into March, getting in real trouble from everybody. She had sent me a text,
(Chris laughs) at the end of February saying, "It's been too long. I'm
going to go back up north. And you know, this is goodbye." And I sent her a text back saying, "Just give me another three
weeks. And then I'll finish." As soon as "Black and White" was finished, we went out on our first date. - Huge parts of your career
required a lot of crunch, a lot of overtime. It's
something that feels like the games industry
is starting to push back against that now. - Absolutely. Now, if anyone's in the
office after seven o'clock, then I say "You are going
to have to go home now." - Alright, so we've gone a long way through this interview
without mentioning "Fable". (chicken clucking) So I feel like that might
be a good time to do it. - This is the funny thing,
is that this was designed by someone called Dene Carter and coded mostly by someone
called Simon Carter. And then later on in the Bullfrog days, both of them started
working on "Dungeon Keeper" and we're working away on
"Dungeon Keeper" together. And at that moment, they happened
to mention, and you know, this is after I've been
sitting next to them for years! They happened to mention that they worked on something called "Druid II" - Wow, so they would eventually go on to found their own studio. What was it was called, Blue Box? - Yes, Big Blue Box. And this was partly, this was the problem that we had because we couldn't employ people from Bullfrog.
- Bullfrog. Okay. And they're working on something that's called "Project Ego" to begin with. - It was called "Project Ego", no, originally very originally
it was called "Wishworld". - Oh okay, right! And it was about, this was original idea about
having these different wizards that battled against each other with magic - Okay. - Nothing like "Fable" was finally. - How does it transition then? - We had to had loads of conversations while we were doing "Dungeon Keeper" about the perfect role playing game. What, Dene Carter was just breathtaking, he kind of created this world of Albion, all the creatures inside it, but there was nothing
really linking it together and making it unique. And that's when we started to say, "Hey, why don't we have this idea of good and evil, that we had in "Black and White" and mix it into the role-playing game? We also said, which is another very unique
thing about "Fable" is, "We want to make people laugh." - Is "Fable II" your favourite
of the "Fable" games. Do you have a favourite? - I think it is. I mean, I think, part of "Fable"
was a little bit marred by, everyone's reactions to
there not being oak trees and stuff like that.
- Yeah, the acorn. - "Fable III" was definitely
a game which should have had, in my opinion, another
year of development. But "Fable II", we fought
a lot of battles actually with Microsoft at the time about, allowing same-sex relationships. - Right. Because there
was some backlash to that, from the first "Fable", right? - Yes, there was. And then they, I think they wanted it to
be very politically correct. You know, middle America was still, very anti anything, kind of
straight line of sexuality. And we fought that fight and we won it and I'm still proud that
we won it, to this day. - Yeah. So there's a rumoured "Fable IV", now in development by Playground. - Yeah. - How do you feel about the idea of another core "Fable" game, that you're not a part of the development? Is that strange?
- It's a mixed emotion. I mean, I feel proud that
the franchise can go on and the fans out there
want another "Fable". I feel slightly envious, now, after a while that
they get to work on this, in this cool universe, which is Albion and, but I'd rather
there be another sequel, than it just fade away into nothing. I'm sure Playground
will do a fantastic job. I hope they keep the humour of the game. And I hope they find some way
of just injecting a little bit of innovation in there,
and I'm sure they will. And I think it would have
been so sad to have "Fable", die on the altar of Lionhead being closed. At least there's life after that. - So with the "Fable"
games that you worked on, obviously we saw these
time jumps between "Fable", "Fable II", "Fable III", like significant shifts
forwards each time, would your "Fable IV"-? - That's the logic thing you see. You have this in your mind, this, "We have to have 500 years pass, I mean, we have to have another 500 years pass", - Right, because you did it last time. - Because that's what we did last time. But really and truly if I was
working on another "Fable", although I despise prequels, I despise prequels with
the same cast list, because you kind of know
what's going to happen. - Okay. - I think there's such an
interesting story to be told before the Guild was created. - Are you in communication with anyone? - No. - That's not part of your life anymore. - No one's asked, and if they did, I probably
would be curious enough to take a look. But I definitely, I can understand why they
wouldn't want someone like me involved because they want to make it in their own vision. - Sure. - It's completely understandable. - It seems kind of weird now to go back to "Fable: The Journey", after we're talking about those games so- - What a disaster! When I first saw Kinect, when it was first demoed to me,
it was this blinding device. It could recognise any room, it had a camera that had
enormous resolution on it. It didn't have field of view issues. It had its own processors on board. It didn't take from the game itself. All the data they were
training it on was amazing and fantastic, so it could
recognise finger movements, stuff like that. And then by the time it was
cost reduced down to this, it was next to, it was almost non-functional. - So when you first saw it,
would be around the time you were looking at "Milo and Kate" and- - That's right And I just kept saying the same thing over and over again to Microsoft, "Unless you're playing a party game or perhaps a sports game, I just want to sit down. I don't want to stand up and I don't want to do
this the whole time. I actually want to do
things with subtlety." - Yeah. - I mean, if I was really
going to be a magic user, I wouldn't go like that the
whole time to light a cigarette or something like that.
I would do it like that! The design of "Fable:
The Journey" came about, initially, it was supposed to be
this free roaming experience. And it was a little bit more story lead, but there was going to be
a relationship with you and your horse and controlling the horse. And it ended up being a game that was sadly on the rails, it was a real shame, because by the time
"Fable Journey" came out, the Kinect was seen by the press and consumers for what it actually is. It was a device that was
put into the market far, too early, far too soon, without any real signature
application on it. - It sounds like there's
a similar story here between the two studios, that you make an incredibly
well-received god game, the studio becomes more
successful, more people join it, you start working on
games, maybe some sequels, the studio's getting bigger and bigger. Eventually there's an acquisition, you get another role that
isn't just being a designer. - Because it is a story
of two chapters yeah. Two volumes. And they're quite similar. - Do you feel now that you you've left and started 22cans, is that working now,
have you figured out this problem? - Anything that you do in life, any road that you take in life, there's always times that you
look back over your shoulder and think to yourself, "Why have I done that?" And there's definitely things I miss. I miss some other people
that I used to work with. Definitely. It's still
a terrifying thing to, to understand this audience
that we're going after and to appreciate that audience and to give them something new and fresh and different, and
sometimes you try things out, and we tried, started with "Curiosity", and that was an interesting avenue to take. And then we moved on to "Godus", which was disastrous to
go on to Kickstarter. And then we went on to "The
Trail" and all the time, where I was, all the time,
thinking about how a person that plays maybe a match three game, how are they going to even
attempt to understand that game? - I should say by the way, it looks like we've been amiss here and documented your entire gaming career without 22cans. But that's because their
games can fit on here. At least for now, like
"Legacy" is a PC game right? Or is that- - We're not going to
talk about it, you see. - But 22cans is very present in this room. It just happens to fit in your pocket. Do you have a game here
that you are, proudest might not be the right word, is there a game here that you
feel the most affection to? Like, that really was a
defining moment in your career? Or they- - The defining moment was
definitely "Populous", I think "Black and
White" was an incredible development experience. And, to take on this
idea of incorporating AI, to have an icon-less interface, to have this world which
allowed you to be good and evil, I think there were so
many unique things I have, that's a special place and then just "Fable II". And I think it was, we use the dog in a way that people remember, and they remember the
moment where they had that, those three choices at the end. If there wasn't a bug with the money, (Chris laughs) but those three choices at the end. So I think those are the three big games. The counter to that is
the three big regrets. It's "Powermonger", that needed
more time in development. - Right. - For sure. - And a little less focused
on what, what you should do? - No pigeons. - Right. Okay. - "The Movies", there's another
game which should have, "The Movies", if it was released
here, would have been amazing because "The Movies" came out. You can make a movie with, there was no YouTube. - Yeah, that's right. It was like about a year before YouTube. - It was a year before YouTube. And if we just thought about how, people distributed those movies, it would have been so
much, so much cooler. So there's "Powermonger", and that, and then "Fable III" could
have been so much better than that actually was And then "Fable Journey",
which should just have never... (Chris laughs) - All right. Well, Peter, I thank you so much for letting
us take over your house. - Well, thank you so much for firstly for taking all the effort of putting all these collections together. And secondly, for allowing
me to talk for so long. I don't know how long we talked. - I have no idea, but I
think our camera crew know. Yeah. Well, this is what we like to do, thank you very much. - Thank you, thank you very much. This video was sponsored by Skillshare, which is a website for getting better at things that you're not very good at. Like how do I write off this
Amiga 500 I've just bought as a business expense. Thankfully, Skillshare has
a bunch of online classes, all about bookkeeping, including this one, which Anni and I found
to be pretty useful as we approach our second
year of working for ourselves. However, if you think
accounting is boring, well, I mean, you've got a point. And so Skillshare also offers tutorials for loads of other creative things like video editing, photography, calligraphy, and game development. A premium membership to the site costs around $10 or seven pounds per month. However, if you would like to take a look around the site for free first, well, 500 of you can do that by
using this link right here to receive a two-month premium membership to Skillshare for nothing, which means you can have a
nosy and see if you think it's worth signing up to after that's run out. Cool! All right. That will do it. Thank you so much for watching what is, by far, our longest
video on the channel to date, we really hope you like
it as much as we do, because we are hopefully going to do more "The Games I Made" episodes in the future. Although that being said, they
will remain pretty sporadic because we only want to do
them with the right people, for the right reasons. And
we had to buy a lot of stuff. So, yeah, maybe not too regularly. If you do have any suggestions for people you would like us to interview in this format in the future. Do let us know in the comments. We'd definitely be keen to hear who you think
would be a fun person to talk to in this way. Alright. Yes. Good. That'll be it, that'll be it, I don't know how to wrap up
a video that's this long. Do you like my Amiga? Bye! (relaxing music)
Remember when Peter Molyneux completely fucked over the 18-year old who won his contest - the Curiosity prize?
Molyneux basically blew him off. The company blew him off. They won't even talk to him any more. And early on they made him sign a contract and NDA.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who-peter-molyneux-forgot
_
Molyneux and the company set up the contract to carefully state that the winner could not get paid unless one specific piece of the game was released (multi-player). And it never was.
So basically, Molyneux lied when he told the winner he would get 1% of the sales of Godus. Godus was up on steam, it's still up there now, and they never gave the winner a cent. They never finished or added in the multi-player mode - so they never needed to pay the winner. Despite claims that winning would result in something "life-changing". Absolute scum.
Here is Molyneux's blatant lie:
"Here is the life changing bit: you will share in the success of the product. Every time people spend money on Godus, you will get a small piece of that pie."
Molyneux lying in video
But then they made sure that the winner would not get any money from sale of the game, but only from the multi-player mode, which they never released. The least they could have done is actually give the winner a small percent of Godus sales on steam.
The man is a compulsive liar. He talked up incredible things for each of those games only to under deliver. Then he'd go on to bad mouth the very games he exaggerated before, in order to build up his next project. "all the things I promised about Fable were a lie, but I promise Fable 2 is going to be the greatest rpg ever made." Then: "Fable 2 was absolutely terrible but we're fixing all of that in Fable 3 and it's going to be absolutely amazing just you wait."
It's insulting when he and other people claim that his big ideas are just being held back by technology and reasonable budgets. I've seen enough high concept indie titles that deliver their insane gameplay concepts all while being developed by a single person on their home PC that Molyneux's "big ideas" are not something he cares about at all but are just falsehoods meant to trick people into buying mediocre games.
I’m surprised 22Cans still exists. I remember watching some developer diaries for Godus and the people in that office seemed not very interested in their own project, I might even say they disliked working on it or resented working with their co-workers. Those diaries were strangely candid. Watching it gave me the feeling the whole studio was going to shut down soon, especially since Godus was such a rotten mess. Looking on Google now though it appears they released a mildly successful mobile game 3 years ago, so I guess that has been enough to keep their studio alive.
That RPS interview with him is still one of my favorite pieces of games journalism ever. They absolutely nuke him from low orbit, and rightfully so
Oh look, the guy who lied to me throughout my gaming career. Why the fuck are we giving him attention?
I know the man is known for over promising and under delivering but you can tell his love for game and game design. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to make his “perfect” game with our current technology, but damn did he make some good ones.
Just saw the video, wish it got more upvotes. However, it's not perfect. I like the idea of interviewing game developers and talking about their works a lot, but the execution is far from perfect. There should be more footage from the games, watching two men standing in a room for over a half a hour is just boring.
Moving on to Molyneux - he's an interesting guy, passionate about video games like no one else, but with a head in the clouds, detached from reality. I cannot be the only person who remembers the first Kinect video, when it was known as Project Natal. It supposed to include an artificial intelligence (!) and let you communicate with it through voice and camera, on a paper, it would revolutionize the whole industry, be something far more important than a VR. But it was an obviously a lie. And Peter was one of the people that promised those ridiculous, unreal ideas.