When things go wrong for modern game developers they go spectacularly wrong. This is an era of endless rolling news and mass social media judgement. There is no respite. Peter Molyneux knows this now – if he didn’t before. The veteran designer, famed for inventing the “god game” genre with his 1989 title, Populous, has spent the last three days under intense press scrutiny. His latest project, Godus, is in disarray, his reputation in tatters. Everyone wants a piece.
“The only answer is for me to retreat,” he says, speaking via Skype from his office in Guildford. “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.”
Awarded an OBE in 2004, Molyneux is one of the most prominent members of the UK games industry. In the 26 years following Populous, he oversaw classic strategy and adventure titles like Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and most recently the Fable series. But ever since leaving his seminal studio Bullfrog in 1997, he has become just as well-known for enthusiastically hyping his projects, only to deliver products that fail to live up to the impossibly grand expectations.
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