On the one hand, opening an interview with "Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?" is pretty fucking rude, personally I would've put the phone down on the cunt at that point. On the other, Molyneux's over-promised and under-delivered on every single game for the last decade and a half, and the last one more so than the rest, so he's probably due a bit of shit.
I think he's a grandiose bullshitter, and that his reputation is largely undeserved. He is often credited for the work of Bullfrog, when in fact their work was an ensemble effort.
Without Les Edgar to reign in his flights of fancy and a team of virtuoso programmers around him, Molyneux has produced largely unremarkable work wrapped in a great deal of hype. He has no real understanding of what is possible or practical in software. When he had Microsoft's money backing Lionhead, that meant games running massively late and over-budget; I think that Godus may well be his last hurrah, as he has burned any last shred of credibility.
Peter Molyneux is a brilliant developer. He is an optimist and an idealist. However in the video games industry, the role of idealists is to be shat upon from a great height.
Yes he is late and overbudget, and he has sold out to publishers to some extent, but show me a game released this decade that wasn't.
Molyneux is a personality, he puts in a great deal of effort into making a good game, but yes sometimes he gets ahead of himself and makes promises that are impossible to keep, but at least he tries. Every other developer hides behind a faceless company, all the development is behind closed doors, every screenshot from the early development, every bit of gameplay footage, every press release is screened by lawyers and marketing professionals to make sure an image is maintained. Yes Molyneux is probably entirely to blame for the shit he's gotten himself into, but when you look at it objectively, he really is no worse than any other developer. The difference between him and anyone else is simply that his honesty and openness makes him an easy target.
He is a brilliant producer of games and we should be proud of all that comes out of the industry he has setup around Guildford, Surrey - because of him, it has become one of the epicentres of gaming companies in the UK.
The problem is that he's from a different era - back in the 80s/90s, he never had to deal with fans on the internet, he isn't used to such communication, feedback and scrutiny (to put it politely). Crowdfunding is a bitch....
He is an ideas man. Without someone to reign him in, he goes crazy and overreaches.
A good publisher, like Sega or Nintendo or even Valve, with a strong willed project manager behind him to steer him and keep him on track he'd make a good game.
My autistic cousin can paint better than anyone I've ever seen, but I wouldn't let him run an art gallery.
>The difference between him and anyone else is simply that his honesty and openness makes him an easy target.
What about all the indie developers, quietly plugging away at brilliant but achievable games? What about studios like Bethesda, who produce amazing work without a three ring circus of hype or a personality cult?
I'd have no problem with Molyneux if he spent less time talking to the press about how his next game is going to be "revolutionary", if his decades in the industry had taught him anything about project scope or realistic schedules. I've listened to his bombast for fifteen years, and it hasn't changed a bit - the next project is always going to be the greatest thing in the history of humanity, and it always turns out to be an OK game that is years late.
As the linked article emphasises, the fundamental problem is in taking half a million quid in Kickstarter money and then failing to deliver. He was just gambling with other people's money - he knew that the funds raised were nowhere near enough to deliver what he promised, so he should have had the basic decency to come clean and either massively scale back his ambitions or raise enough money to make it come good. He should have hired a competent project manager rather than trying to steer the ship himself. I think he's a delusional megalomaniac, plain and simple.
Compare Molyneux's behaviour with David Braben. Braben raised a lot more money for a game with much smaller scope. E:D wasn't perfect and a lot of people are bitter about the lack of offline play, but it got finished and it was pretty good. He delivered a playable alpha within a year, and a full release within two. He kept backers updated on the state of development and was honest about which features were definitely achievable and which were aspirations. He used an experienced and battle-hardened team, rather than a bunch of wide-eyed ingénues.
>He is a brilliant producer of games and we should be proud of all that comes out of the industry he has setup around Guildford
Again, what about Les Edgar? He was the guy who actually made Bullfrog happen. What about all the other Bullfrog developers who spent their time coding rather than bullshitting to C&VG? It's a pure personality cult. Steve Jobs was nothing without Woz, Burrell Smith, Bill Atkinson, Jef Raskin and Jony Ive. There are any number of people out there doing brilliant, visionary work without touting themselves to the press. Creative and technical work is a team effort, and no individual can be more than a small part of that, regardless of how brilliant they might be.
>>19850 I think part of the problem is that the scale of these operations has exploded over the years. Wozniak, for instance, designed the Apple II by himself, the whole thing, if I'm not mistaken. By contrast, there's probably no one person on the planet who understands, at a low level, the workings of every component that goes into a modern Mac; the complexity of the devices has risen stratospherically. Creating something so complex requires many layers of management and all the usual "big business" shit. From what I've read, Woz left Apple because he realised that he was bad at management and didn't want to be involved in organising teams and dealing with bureaucracy in general - he was good at engineering and wanted to pursue that instead, which wasn't possible at Apple due to his seniority in the organisation. It may be that Molyneux is a gifted game designer and an appalling manager, but unlike Woz he just doesn't have the presence of mind to realise the latter.
Molyneux's an easy target because he is now independent. You won't see RPS slate Bioware with the site covered in their advertising banners, it's just like when a magazine would put on critical airs to review a title from a small publisher while giving 11/10 GotY to any big publisher that wants it enough to buy ads.
I couldn't care less what he's promised, the Fable series and Black and White are both very enjoyable. Incidentally I was trying to reinstall black and white today but I couldn't get it to work.
The games press have been levying similar accusations at Molyneux for years, when he was both an independent and when he was working for EA and Microsoft subsidiaries. They're particularly harsh now because he has never previously been accused of ripping customers off on a massive scale - both his failure to deliver Godus, and his failure to honour the "truly life-changing secret" that drew so much attention to the non-game that was Curiosity.
RPS weren't around at the time, but even the most fawning, PR-puff reviews of Fable by the most lickspittle magazines couldn't help but mention the interminable development time and the gulf between hype and reality. PC Gamer's archives aren't available online, but I distinctly remember them taking the piss out of Molyneux's grandiose pronouncements.
In the past the mainstream press may have noted Molyneux's tendency to exaggerate, but the tone of this interview is unprecedented, and I certainly don't think RPS would have attacked him like this while he was working for EA or Microsoft.
I'd also point to their treatment of Tim Schafer, who took $3.3 million for an "old-school adventure game" and produced a four hour halfgame for his two-year-old daughter instead. It was also released 18 months late.
I'm not saying Molyneux shouldn't be called out on his bullshit, but I think there's more going on here.
I would lije to echo this sentiment and especially so direct my ire towards websites like RPS. Theirs is a position of supreme hypocrisy, touting themselves as a smaller, more independent, thinking man's videogame site, but they are every bit the same breed of spineless corporate arse kissers, toeing the same fucking asinine line as their bigger print brothers.
I feel bad for him. I don't think he's a pathological liar, or malicious, or lazy. He reminds me of a child - he gets so enthusiastic, and has all these great ideas, but due to a lack of resources or technology they can't be implemented. His passion has been his downfall, because it makes him look like a liar when in actual fact he's someone who tries his hardest to make unique experiences but always falls short in the practical side of things. RPS's main line of attack is annoying - they're going with the "gamers bought your game on Kickstarter and it's still not finished" thing, when RPS have even written articles about Kickstarter not being a preorder service due to its inherent risks.
In the gaming industry, there are a lot of practices built on lies and on conning people out of money. Aliens Colonial Marines had a trailer that had nothing to do with the game, and wasn't even developed by Gearbox despite them being on the cover of the box. So many games nowadays have review embargoes, so buyers can't be aware of their flaws until the week after they've been released (and after they've already shifted hundreds of thousands of units). Bethesda are known for lying, like with the living breathing world they promised in Oblivion with its quests differing for every player and reacting to what you do in the world - all stuff they didn't put in the game, but gaming journalists didn't seem to care. Evolve recently came out, with over $100 of day one DLC, and the guy at 2K games said "There are three playable monsters, so the game is worth at least $90 but we're selling it for $60, so you can't complain about DLC because you're getting a bargain" which is the cuntiest thing ever. Every big publisher nowadays is using the Season Pass model, using microtransactions, slicing up their games and churning out tried and tested formulas and franchises.
It's unfair that the big publishers with their cynical bean counting practices are targeted less than Molyneux, a guy who tries his best to innovate, who runs a very small indie studio, who seems to be one of the most vocal people in the industry who still has the passion and creativity that AAA games are losing at an alarming rate.
>>19862 >I'd also point to their treatment of Tim Schafer, who took $3.3 million for an "old-school adventure game" and produced a four hour halfgame for his two-year-old daughter instead.
Is this hyperbole? If not it sounds like the sort of fraud that should result in someone being mercilessly ripped to shreds.
>>19868 That's fairly accurate, unfortunately. He got over three times the amount he asked for, but they still went over budget and over their deadline, for a game that was fairly basic and less professional than a lot of games made for peanuts by novice teams.
>>19867 I agree with the bulk of what you're saying, and
>I don't think he's a pathological liar, or malicious, or lazy.
is spot on. However:
>It's unfair that the big publishers with their cynical bean counting practices are targeted less than Molyneux, a guy who tries his best to innovate
From what I've read Godus borrows liberally from F2P mobile games in many ways, but most notably with its system of microtransactions, which has been ripped into in reviews precisely for being cynical and money-grubbing in its design - and far from innovative. Apparently the game can be quite good fun if you spend a tenner or so right at the outset and start playing the actual game rather than slowly grinding your way through a mire of repetition and cooldown timers, but fuck that - especially when Molyneux had the gall to call out the new mobile Dungeon Keeper as shit for having exactly that kind of design. That's just hypocrisy, plain and simple.
Anyway, he was responsible for a half-broken game again, no surprises there - with his games it's been "caveat emptor" for a long time. Maybe they'll fix it, maybe they won't. There's no excuse for dropping the ball so completely with the lad who won the Curiosity cube thing, though, that's just not on.
>>19872 That's no excuse. Adventure games are generally cheaper because they're less likely to experience bugs, due to the restrictive nature of the gameplay, meaning they need less time for playtesting and polishing. This means the main things they need to focus on are art and writing. Double Fine asked for 400 000, and got 3.3 million, and years later have still only released the first act (after requiring more money to finish the second act) which was four hours long.
Daedalic Entertainment are German devs who currently have a team of about 120 who have made a lot of adventure games, many of which have been critically acclaimed. The production of all 11 of these games released over a five year period, each one about 6-10 hours in length, each of them with art that's on the same level as the art in the Double Fine game, cost less than was raised from Double Fine's Kickstarter alone (not taking into account the additional backing out of Kickstarter).
>>19872 You are right that a lot of indie developers go for "retro" art direction to cut costs and comparing this to actual '90s pixel art (pic related), well...
I don't think anyone has mentioned this man's drug use. Like I wouldn't hire a person like him and expect him to do the work on time, I'd expect him to be weird and doing silly things.
I used to like being a kid and driving past where the BULLFROG building used to be.
>>19883 Molyneux likes a spliff? Are you telling me that games programmers sometimes take drugs when they work? I never knew this.
Tell me, do any other programmers or developers do this? Are you seriously telling me that some of my most favourite websites are written by people ON DRUGS!!!???1111
>>19886 During the development of Black and White, Molyneux ordered one of the artists to model penises for the creatures. The artist was so incensed he threatened Molyneux with a knife. Molyneux insists there were no Class A drugs involved. The knife-wielding artist in question, Mark Healey, left the company and co-founded Media Molecule, who made Little Big Planet.
This is all according to Peter, who -as mentioned- cannot be trusted.