Peter Molyneux is a game developer known for his innovative ideas and his broken promises. Some people believe he is a marvel of gaming and others believe he is a con artist. Let's take a look at Peter Molyneux more closely and see what he has brought to the gaming world.
Even as a child, Molyneux was a devious entrepreneur. At age twelve he started his first business by hiring his sisters to mow people's lawns. Molyneux paid them only $.01 for every $1 he made off of their work. Peter Molyneux started off as a floppy disc salesman. He started to add video games to the floppy disc to improve sales. What he realized was consumers were buying the product not for the floppy discs, but for the games on them. This is where he found an interest in the gaming industry. He created his first text-based game called The Entrepreneur. Although he believed this game would sell tons, only 2 people actually bought the game. With this shortage of sales, Molyneux ended his career with gaming. Or so he thought.
Molyneux started a baked bean shipping company called Taurus. This is where Molyneux is set up for his first lie coming into the gaming industry. Commodore International, a computer selling company, called Molyneux explaining how they heard about his company and were offering him a chance to see their new product. After they took him on a tour, had lunch with him, and showed some of their hardware, Molyneux realized they have mistaken his company, Taurus, for the company Torus. They asked him when the network will be ready and he went with it and told them it would be ready in a couple of months. With this opportunity, Molyneux created a database system called Acquisition and it was moderately successful.
In 1987, Peter Molyneux founded a game development company called Bullfrog. Struggling to develop a game, Peter came up with the idea for Populous, a game where you play as a god.. He said, "Populous was born out of my incompetence as a programmer." Which couldn't be more true. He didn't know how to make the game automatically flatten land for the villagers, so he decided to make it a gameplay mechanic. Players had to flatten the land themselves. This one of Molyneux s most innovative ideas for gaming.. Electronic Arts offered to publish the game and it was released in 1989 and was a big hit. He then released Powermonger, Populous II, and Magic Carpet. All of which winning many awards and becoming more popular. He decided to leave Bullfrog to start a new company so he can go back to programming.
Lionhead Studios was founded by Peter Molyneux in 1997. Their first game in development was Black and White. A game where you play as a god that has the choice of being good or evil. It was the same ideas as Populous but moral ambiguity was emphasized in the creation of this game. When it hit the shelves, it became another huge success. It even made it into the Guinness's Book of World Records as the smartest artificial intelligence. He moved on to making a series called Fable. This series was considered a disappointment for many of Molyneux s fans. He claimed there would be so many new innovated ideas in the RPG game and many of them were not met to the expectations of the gamers. This started happening with each Fable to come out up to fable: The Journey.
During an E3 conference, Molyneux introduced a tech demo for the Kinect called Milo. The game was suppose to have an AI that interacts with absolutely anything you do or say. This unfortunately wasn't the case for what the Kinect was actually capable of. Fable: Journey was said to have the same amount of interaction as the Milo tech demo. This game was yet another disappointment for the fans of Molyneux.
He left Lionhead Studios to make yet another game developing company. This one is called 22Cans. They released an experimental game called "Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?" The gameplay was simply clicking the screen to remove cubes until one player reaches the middle. Molyneux promised there would be something in the box that was life changing. People spent countless hours picking away at the block . A person finally reached the middle and was revealed a video to which he chose to share with the world. In the video Molyneux reveals that the person who clicked the last box will become the god above all players in the new game Godus and will receive a portion of the profit made from the game itself. This may have been life changing for the one who was lucky enough to reach the middle, but it was a disappointment to everyone else who put their share of work removing the boxes hoping to get to the middle.
With his new game, Godus, releasing soon, gamers aren't quite sure whether it will be a innovative gaming marvel, or if it will be another big disappointment. Although his recent games did not live up to player expectation, maybe with this game going back to the roots of what made him great will win back the fans' trust.
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