Peter Molyneux
I'll always love the time I spent making 'Black and White.'Collection: Time
The thing about 'Fable' is that it was such a rich world. It was, well, what the name says it is. It's all about Fable and Albion and this idea of legends and humor.Collection: Humor
I think that PC gaming is as healthy as it's ever been. I think there's probably more people playing games on their PCs, I just don't think they're gamers.
Mystery and curiosity are real motivators.
I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It's this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn't worked.
The biggest was me running Lionhead at its peak. That was about 305 people. I'd say that was, for me as a creative, one of the most hellish times of my life. Normally running a team is like herding cats. This was like herding the entire African plains.
I think that games like 'Braid' show us that the 'new kids on the block' can do some really inventive, smart things with a genre like the side-scrolling platformer that has been around for 25 years. It's proof that people can 'come up' and surprise us all the time.
I've been in the industry doing games since the BBC Micro, the Acorn Atom, the Commodore 64.
I love working on games, it is my life.
I am so honoured to be a part of the games industry, but I understand that people are sick of hearing my voice and hearing my promises. So I'm going to stop doing press and I'm going to stop talking about games completely.
People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they've threatened me, they've threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can't.
That's what 'The Trail' ended up being, this delightful way of exploring and managing your backpack and crafting and collecting and trading with other players, doing all that in this really delicious way. When we finished that and released it on iOS and Android, tens of millions of people loved and enjoyed it.
'The Trail' on PC is far more challenging by nature. The flow of the game is completely changed, because I think that's what the audience enjoys.
The important thing is authoring a game for an audience that will enjoy the experience. That's a tough thing to do.
Some games work well as straight patches, but 'The Trail' wasn't one of those.
When EA acquired Bullfrog there were, like, 35 people, and within nine months there were 200. And any feeling of culture and inventiveness was diluted by that.
You know, Kinect... I'll be honest with you. It was a disaster.
Consumers don't give a damn about what device they're playing on. They just want to play it everywhere. They want to be playing on the console and then take it off to the bus.
The temptation, when you go into Kickstarter, is that the first three days are wonderful, and you believe you're a god. You go in your spreadsheet and think, 'If every day's like day one, we're going to have suitcases of money arriving at the front door.' Then, it dips into this slump.
I just think the days of me doing press and getting excited about games before they're done is over. That's not how the world works anymore.
I do miss talking in the press, I miss meeting journalists at shows and stuff but maybe that's more out of habit than anything?
When you're external to a publisher, most independent developers live on paranoia. The mainstay of every day is paranoia - every indie company believes their publisher in some way has these Machiavellian plans that will cause disaster for the game and the studio.
With 'Black and White' we laid down the canvas for what's possible in 'Black and White' 2 and 3. We gave you a creature that you could nurture and build up and we focused an awful lot on that creature with the add-on disc.
With 'Black and White 2,' I want to put it in a setting where you're actually using the creature. I want the little people within the land not to just be a resource but actually be in conflict and fighting and battling against each other.
I felt that the moral side of 'Black and White' was slightly confused. That's why I want the world to be in turmoil.
I think that with any act of creation, you can't ever be satisfied. There's always more that you feel you should have done.
I'd been away for about 10 days, and literally the first thing I did, even though it sounds very... it just shows you what a boring person I actually am, because the first thing I did was kiss my wife and hug my kid, then I turned on 'Fable 2' just to see how much gold I'd accrued over 10 days.
There was a whole sequence of concept art about a 'Fable' set in a kind of steampunk Victoriana age.
It was an amazing thing to see how Bowerstone, the capital of 'Fable,' progressed. It went from, in 'Fable 1,' to just 20 houses and then in 'Fable 3' it felt like a city that had districts. You could see that sense of progression in it.
In the original 'Fable,' Albion was kind of run by heroes and heroes were the thing, and there weren't any lords or kings, there were just heroes, and greater and greater heroes.
I love the mouse, I love designing games for a mouse-based system. I think it's still a way of playing games which, you know, everyone's really excited about the Wii and all that, but for me, the mouse is for the PC an awful lot what that pointing device did for the Wii.
I'd love personally... this is not an announcement at all, but I would love to see 'Fable 2' on the PC.
That's what my objective was, to reinvent myself from a console designer to starting a new business and embracing multi-platform, relearning the skills necessary to make successful games. It's been an amazing journey.
If you don't think of yourself as being someone who needs to go back to school, needs to reinvent yourself, then you're not able to do the thing you're passionate about. That's to create and invent and innovate.
Well, I'm always a bit harsh about the things I'm doing.
We experimented with different monetization techniques in 'Godus.' We had some events that you could go on which were time-limited. That didn't work terribly well.
Innovation, surprising people and creating a sense of wonder is what consumers want.
You don't meet computer game characters when you use a controller. You control computer game characters.
What we found while making Milo, is that part of the skill of designing this whole new experience is in making people comfortable with the fact that they can be seen.
Derren Brown doesn't really predict the lottery numbers. But there is an enormous amount of entertainment in there.
As a designer, as you get used to Kinect, it's such a different experience for me as a designer - for any designer.
I'm not a PR person. All I am is a designer.
Absolutely not every idea is anywhere near mine at Lionhead. It's a real collaborative effort.
When we transitioned from the PC to the console with 'Fable,' it took us five years to do that. And that's just going from a mouse to a controller.
You don't do hero films about old men. They smell of wee, don't they?
In 'Fable III' we have taken away the experience system.
You know, the health bar in 'Fable III' was destined to be this pixel-high line at the top left-hand side of the screen. No one was looking at it! No one even knew it was there!
I play role-playing games, and I love the concept of leveling up.
Well, the most incredible thing about 'Fable' is the fact that there are lots of examples where people play the game in a certain way and things happen that were never designed to happen.
The Fable story hinted at a dramatic time before 'Fable 1' when the Guild was founded, this would be a perfect setting for 'Fable 4.'