| 5th | Top video game industry people |
| 7th | Top video game designers |
| Peter Molyneux | |
|---|---|
 Molyneux at the University of Southampton |
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| Born | Peter Douglas Molyneux May 5, 1959 Guildford, Surrey, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Video game designer |
| Awards | Order of the British Empire Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres |
Peter Douglas Molyneux OBE, born 5 May 1959 is an English computer game designer and game programmer. He is responsible for well known God games Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White, among others, as well as business simulation games such as Theme Park and more recently, hit adventure role playing games Fable and Fable II.
Despite the success of his games, both critical and financial, Molyneux has acquired a reputation for issuing over-enthusiastic descriptions of games under development, which are found to be somewhat less ambitious when released. The most well-known case of this was with Fable, released in 2004 without many of the features talked about by Molyneux in press interviews during development. After the release, Molyneux publicly apologized for overhyping the game.[1] Molyneux was inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame in 2004 and was honoured with an OBE in the New Year's Honours list announced on 31 December 2004. He was awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in March 2007. In July 2007, he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Southampton.
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Peter Molyneux began his career in 1982 by distributing and selling floppy discs which contained video games for Atari and the Commodore 64. He believed that including games on the discs would improve sales, and later decided that the games were the main selling point.[2]
He created The Entrepreneur, a text-based business simulation game about running a fledging company.[3] "In those days you could literally call a game 'Space Blob Attacks Mars' and sell about 50 million copies. So what did I do? I did a business simulation", Molyneux later said.[2] 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.[2] (The effort may not have been totally wasted; in 2007, a GameSpy reviewer commented that the economic gameplay mechanics in Molyneux's Fable II may have been a descendant of The Entrepreneur, stating, "I'm a little concerned that it's Molyneux sneaking in a remix of his first game, Entrepreneur".[4])
Due to the game's failure, Molyneux retreated from game design, and started Taurus Impact Systems—a company that designed office databases—with his business partner Les Edgar. Commodore International mistook it for TORUS, a more established company that produced networking software, and offered to provide Molyneux with eight free Amiga systems to help in porting "his" networking software.[2][5] "... it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn't know who we were", Molyneux later said. "I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, 'If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.' So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office".[2] Taurus redesigned the database system for the Amiga, and after clearing up the misunderstanding with Commodore, the program was released and became a moderate success.
Using money earned from the database program, Molyneux and Les Edgar founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987.[2][5] Molyneux provided the original concept for Populous, the first god game for the personal computer. Released in 1989, Populous was a major success for Bullfrog and went on to sell over 4 million copies.[6]
Electronic Arts, Bullfrog's publisher, acquired the studio in January 1995.[7] Molyneux had become an Electronic Arts vice-president and consultant in 1994, after EA purchased a significant share of Bullfrog. Molyneux's last project at Bullfrog was Dungeon Keeper, which was released in July 1997 to high critical praise. Molyneux left Bullfrog in August 1997 to found Lionhead Studios. The last title released with the Bullfrog logo was published in 2001 and in 2004, Electronic Arts would merge Bullfrog Productions into EA UK.
Molyneux came up with the concept for Lionhead's first game, Black & White, and convinced his small staff to take on the task in late 1997.[8] He paid the $6 million in development costs himself.[9] After three years, in 2001, the game was finally released.
In April 2006, Lionhead Studios was acquired by Microsoft Game Studios. At E3 2006, Peter Molyneux gave several interviews in the press, in one of which he stated that "I think you're going to see a lot more fantastic games from Lionhead because of that relationship [with Microsoft]."[10] On 4 June 2009, he was promoted to Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios, Europe, although he will still continue to produce video games with Lionhead Studios.
As one of the industry's leading and best-known figures, Molyneux has appeared on many television shows and video gaming news discussion or documentaries. He has been repeatedly interviewed for shows that include: Gamesmaster, Game Over, Games Wars, Gamezville, Bad Influence!, Gamepad, CHEATS, Gamer.tv, Rapture, Games World, Blue Chip, LanJam, Ultimate Gamer, and GameStars. These however are just the UK productions, and there are a huge host of international broadcast media outlets that have also interviewed him since Populous first debuted. In the Scottish web series Consolevania, he is often portrayed as a dull, uninteresting character.
An entire episode of G4's games retrospective series Icons was devoted to him, during its third season. More recently, a comprehensive two part interview was filmed of him during the 2006 Brighton Games Developer Conference by leading UK website Eurogamer.[11] He was also featured in the fourth episode of the Discovery Channel mini-series Rise of the Video Game alongside Will Wright and Sid Meier, fellow developers of simulation titles.
He gives keynote addresses and speaks extensively at worldwide conferences, including Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, Games Convention Asia in Singapore, Develop in Brighton, England, and the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California.
Molyneux was given the tenth position in "Top Ten Game Creators" Countdown by GameTrailers website[citation needed].
Molyneux has gained a bit of infamy in regards to his over-hyping of games he has worked on, dating back to Black & White. He has a habit of making too many promises about features and content in his games that end up either not being included or not actually as good as he made it seem[12]. In spite of this these games still show a degree of market and critical success bringing a mixed response on his reputation as a game designer. This was especially true of the Fable series, Molyneux was quoted as saying, "Fable will set the standard for which all RPG's are compared". A review of Fable on Zero Punctuation by Ben Croshaw explored this trait of Molyneux, comparing how he had described the game would be with the final product. It was reported by Croshaw in his Fable II review that since then, Molyneux had contacted him and said that he believed the sequel would meet his 'unreasonable standards', which Croshaw described as 'Characteristically Over-Optimistic on [Molyneux's] part'.
Peter Molyneux is regarded as the creator of the God game genre. Some of his work include Populous and Black and White.
Below is the apology that Peter Molyneux released shortly after the release of Fable for the Xbox due to the Hype Peter had created before its release.
There is something I have to say. And I have to say it because I love making games. When a game is in development, myself and the development teams I work with constantly encourage each other to think of the best features and the most ground-breaking design possible.
However, what happens is that we strive to include absolutely everything we've ever dreamt of and, in my enthusiasm, I talk about it to anyone who'll listen, mainly in press interviews. When I tell people about what we're planning, I'm telling the truth, and people, of course, expect to see all the features I've mentioned. And when some of the most ambitious ideas get altered, redesigned or even dropped, people rightly want to know what happened to them.
If I have mentioned any feature in the past which, for whatever reason, didn't make it as I described into Fable, I apologise. Every feature I have ever talked about WAS in development, but not all made it. Often the reason is that the feature did not make sense. For example, three years ago I talked about trees growing as time past. The team did code this but it took so much processor time (15%) that the feature was not worth leaving in. That 15 % was much better spent on effects and combat. So nothing I said was groundless hype, but people expecting specific features which couldn't be included were of course disappointed. If that's you, I apologise. All I can say is that Fable is the best game we could possibly make, and that people really seem to love it.
I have come to realise that I should not talk about features too early so I am considering not talking about games as early as I do. This will mean that the Lionhead games will not be known about as early as they are, but I think this is the more industry standard.
Our job as the Lionhead family of studios is to be as ambitious as we possibly can. But although we jump up and down in glee about the fabulous concepts and features we're working on, I will not mention them to the outside world until we've implemented and tested them, and they are a reality.
Thank you for reading.
Peter.
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   | MobyGames' rap sheet on Molyneux - MobyGames - Peter Molyneux |
| | BBC News UK - Call of honour for UK games maker - BBC NEWS | Technology | Call of honour for UK games maker |
| | Kikizo interview - Kikizo | Peter Molyneux Interview June 2006 - Fable 2 & More |
| | Joystiq interviews Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios - Joystiq interviews Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios |
| | NextGen Interview: How to Make Great Games - How to Make Great Games | Edge Online |
| | Keeper Klan's article about Peter Molyneux - Keeper Klan - Imp Alert! |
| | photo: god talking to Peter Molyneux - a panoramic peter molyneux on Flickr - Photo Sharing! |
| | BBC Blast interview with Peter Molyneux - BBC - Blast - Games - |
| | Christmas Special - Consolevania 1.6 |
| | Report of appearance in Hot Fuzz - Spaced Out Forum -> Hot Fuzz |
| | Keeper Klan's article about Peter Molyneux - Keeper Klan - Imp Alert! |
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