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[TheChosen]

There are plenty of great video game developers that I like. People like Shigeru Miyamoto, Warren Spector, Will Wright and Sid Meier. While the first half is also known for good stories and characters, they all are known for doing games that have great gameplay and great ideas. Types of games that I love playing all over again.

Then we have guys like Peter Molyneux, who like to talk.

Keep in mind, Molyneux has done good games. Problem is, he talks, talks and talks about all kinds of ideas and features he's planning on putting in the game. He's really good at hyping and he's an excellent talker. He builds our hopes too high with his great ideas and then we great really disappointed when the results are definitely not as expansive as Peter said it would be.

Has it always been like that? Inspired by this little picture Lulu_jane posted on Facebook ("Almost, but not quite"), here's my little retrospective on Peter Molyneux.





So before we jump into his life and time in Bullfrog, one of first commercial games Molyneux did was Entepreuner, a text business simulator. Of course this being in 1984, not much hype could have been generated on that, even with game magazines and such. However, it does seem that Molyneux had little too big expectations even back then. To quote Wikipedia.

Molyneux published the game himself in 1984 by duplicating hundreds of tapes on two Tandy Corporation recorders. After taking an advertising space in a game magazine, he prepared for the game's success; he later stated in an interview, "I was utterly convinced that this game would sell tons. I thought, 'You know, this letter box is just not big enough. It's just not going to fit all the envelopes.' So I cut – and this is no joke – I cut a bigger letter box". However, the game received only two orders, one of which Molyneux speculated was from his mother.

After that he drifted to doing office work by starting a boring export company with Les Edgar. With a bit of luck and mistake, they managed to acquire free Amiga hardware and created a database program which became a moderate success. With that money, they founded Bullfrog together and one of first games Molyneux did for that company was Populous which was a huge success. (Actual first game was a SHMUP called Fusion, which was to quote Atari ST User magazine: "yet another vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up". It got 9 out of 10)

If the game were made today, Molyneux would probably go on about how all the villagers would be individuals and such. In reality though, Populous is a pretty simple god-game where it all comes down to just raising and lowering the land. Some people like it and I guess for its time it was something huge. Now, its just seems so simple for a god game.

Molyneux then went on to create other games: Powermonger which was more heavier version of Populous, Populous 2 which expands the original game a lot more (still there was lot of raising and lowering the land) and Theme Park, his well-known second hit which he co-created with Demis Hassabis. For other big Bullfrog games like Syndicate and Magic Carpet, he was just a producer. Then came the horned reaper.



Dungeon Keeper was made in 1997. It took couple of years to come out and it was Peter's final game before he left Bullfrog. Today the game is regarded as "revolutionary" and "instant classic". In reality it was supposed to be something else.

I think this was one of the first games Peter hyped up in the sky. From reading early previews and articles, this was going to be lot different game. To quote a review from local game Magazine Pelit:

Dungeon Keeper promised at the time to turn the fantasy-clichés upside-down: Heroes gather up to invade the dark dungeon with glowing heart and countless of treasures in the middle. But this time player is the evil dark lord whose traps and creatures stalk the adventurers.
Yes, quite so, but what we got here are different Dungeon Keepers. Few years ago the promised revolutionary RPG has become a real-time strategy game with hints of C&C/Warcraft. Clichés are clichés, even when turned upside down

Despite this, game was still fun to play. If made today, the game would have probably be not as popular now. Goes to show that time heals all the wounds and paints the memories into gold and such. This was however, the start of the big Molyneux hype-train.

So Peter left Bullfrog to form Lionhead Studios. Bullfrog went on to make games like Theme Hospital and sequels to Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park before Electronic Arts merged them with EA UK. With such "Hits" like those games, I really wonder why people keep crying for this loss.

For his first game there, we got Black & White. Hype machine was in full effect during the 3 years he spent developing it and this time, thanks to magazines and the rise of the internet . Again, it was supposed to be big god-like game with micro-levels of interactivity, incredibly smart AI and tons of cool ideas. In the end plenty of ideas were dropped and the game turned out to be rather simple. Critics loved it though for some weird reason (PC Gamer for example, but some believe all the hype and advertising they've done to the game had some affect to it), but afterwards many agreed that it was really overhyped. Compare the user reviews on Mobygames to magazine reviews and you'll get the idea

Next, there's Fable which I think is still fresh in our minds that there's not much I can say. But again, let me quote from what I remember at the time.

"Every action has consequences". A penalty for a crime of murder is a fine of 2000 gold pieces, which is forgiven in 8 minutes

AND still, despite the fact that he overhyped both games from Earth to Jupiter, giving big promises about some sort of gaming revolution, he went on to create Black & White 2, which was pretty much the same and two more Fable games. Even though he even admitted that first Fable wasn't as good as he promised, he started the hype train again and people were just as disappointed to the sequels as they were in the first time. In between these, he also made The Movies, a strategy game were you run a movie-studio. In truth, this one's actually quite good and I don't recall any hype going around this one.

And its not just the games, its also the technology. As Lionhead was somewhere down the line purchased by Microsoft, Peter eventually started developing a game for their latest device, Kinect. This game, Project Milo, was going to be a big AI thing with lots of interaction and such, just like Black & White was going to be. He was also really excited about Kinect, which is pretty much like Molyneux himself: Big on ideas, but so far none of those have been put to full use. Then all of sudden, project was apparently halted. No reason was given, but Alex Kipman of Microsoft said that "Project Milo was never a product" and "It was never announced as a game". I don't think anyone bought this poor explanation as we've been shown plenty of this "not game" before. Despite this, Lionhead announced the next title in the Fable saga, Fable: The Journey and its gonna use elements from Project Milo like voice and emotion recognition, despite the initial previews making it look like an on-rail shooter.

History is repeating itself. Like with Dungeon Keeper, Fable: The Journey will be Molyneux's last game on Lionhead Studio (which will probably go on doing sequels to Movies, Black and White and Fable before being fused to some other Microsoft studio with much crying and complaining). He's already co-founded his next studio, 22cans, and planning on entering the fascinating world of social gaming on IOS and Facebook. Peter has announced his first game for such platforms: Curiosity, where players chip away a big cube in order to find out whats inside it (sounds pretty much like any of his newer games). He seems to have dropped the ball though, as he's said that there's gonna be a 50,00£ DLC which can be only purchased by one player. "It's a social experiment testing the psychology of monetization". He sure keeps finding new ways to disappoint people.

On another point, despite really liking Kinect, he said he doesn't really know what to think of WiiU, the Nintendo's new console which has kind of a tablet interface in the middle of a controller. Now that Microsoft has announced doing same kind of thing called "Touch glass", Im sure he'd hype that thing too if he were still fully working with them.

To repeat what I said at the beginning, Molyneux doesn't really do bad games. He just raises our hopes and expectations too high and what we get is just another game with none or less of stuff he said it would have. His games are still enjoyable and I believe in about ten years or so we look back and consider Black & White and Fable as great games just like we do now with Dungeon Keeper (but hopefully not revolutionary).

And thats all I have to say about him. This is TheChosen and this is my Peter Molyneux retrospective, a story about developer promising a lot but delivering less since 1997. Have a nice day.