Peter Molyneux, rightly or wrongly, has acquired a reputation for making promises he and his team simply can’t keep. In a recent interview with Develop, he discussed this reputation, and how the creative process tends to take a ‘perfect jewel’ of an idea and muddy it all up in the final product.
“In my mind, as a designer, whenever I’m making a game I have this perfect jewel in mind,” he said. “Fable for me was this beautiful, incredible, amusing, funny, artistic, wonderful gem of a game that anyone could play, that tugged on the heartstrings and that was instantly engaging.
“The gem that was in my mind has never come to be, it’s always flawed in some way.”
Fable II he says, was a step in the right direction. Fable III? A complete disaster.
In his interview with Develop, Molyneux also explains his penchant for getting a little over excited when talking to the press. This is just a snippet, apparently Develop has a full length interview which it is publishing tomorrow.
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10 responses to “Peter Molyneux Will Never Make His Perfect Game”
Ah, I loved his Bullfrog games and Black & White, The Movies, Fable and Fable 2 at Lionhead. He’s a bit of a d-bag, but he has made some incredible games.
Indeed. He just gets people’s expectations way too high to generate hype around his games and most people feel a bit disappointed due to this.
I remember the hype around Fable II and while the end result was nice, it wasn’t anywhere near what he hyped it up to be.
Yet I still loved it. It was a fine game on its own, but you’re right… could never live up to that amount of hype. :'(
Yeah. If Fable 2 is a shitty, incomplete game then the world needs more shitty, incomplete games. =P
I like Molyneux.
He’s an idealist, & he has a massive amount of ambition & most importantly he does what he wants to do, not what some publisher tells him to.
I’ll always prefer someone that sets out to do something new & fails over someone who sets out to copy & paste last years big hit & succeeds.
It’s a shame that the ideas he has for his dream games aren’t always technically feasible.
See, I’m okay with this. What I hate is, how he hypes up the game and the game’s promises. If he knows he can’t make the perfect game, he should’ve learnt by now that she should scale back what he’s selling
He reminds me of Nintendo. They have some shitty weird ideas, but comes out on top with a fantastic and different idea that takes off.
I know the feels. It’s basically Plato’s Theory of Forms. Somewhere there is a world of the perfect design of everything but somehow the trip to our reality corrupts it and we get the less perfect and flawed version.
Dungeon Keeper II and Populous are two absolutely amazing games, but I feel everything else he makes is pretty bare boned. Especially the Fable series which is among my list of least favorite games.
I was really disappointed with Black and White 2. That game was legitimately fun, but suffered from being such an incredibly short game. I really think he should put more time into thinking about a game’s overall balance and amount of content rather than only creative ideas. At the very least get someone else to do that for him. When Peter has full control and say over everything his games really tend to be poorly designed as a whole.
No you won’t, cause you’ve bought into your own ‘i crap magic games’ bullshite. Go and finish Godus.