guest fresh issue the podcast My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin became the legendary game designer Peter Molyneux, the creator of the god simulator genre and the author of games and series Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Black & White, The Movies and Fable.
One of the themes of the issue was the famous feature of Molyneux: to promise much more than was subsequently realized. He often spoke to the press about the games he worked on, and often the fantasies about the future of the project sounded like a promise of gaming opportunities.
I would say: “Yes, yes, we will have flying pigs!”, because in the course of conversations with journalists, I come up with a game.
Molyneux himself called this behavior disgusting and said he felt remorse. But he justifies himself by saying that in the 1990s and 2000s, his job was to show how amazing the process of developing brand new games was.
We created genres almost every year, it was an act of real creation, and it is very easy to lose yourself in a fit of passion.
Molyneux stated that all his stories about games should be taken “with a pinch of salt”. Sometimes what he told reporters came as a surprise to the development team.
And when I came back from the interview, a lot of the team members said, “Peter, we didn’t know we’d have this feature in the game until we read about it in the press.”
Molyneux first found himself at the center of a scandal in 2005, when Fable: The Lost Chapters, released as the “best game of all time”, did not contain many of the features promised by the game designer. In 2009 an ambitious game Project Milo turned out to be fake. And the scandal with the deception of the winner Curiosity — What’s Inside the Cube finally cemented Molyneux’s reputation as a liar.
Molyneux is currently working on a new game but hasn’t revealed any details about it, down to the title.
