Feature: 'Being Peter Molyneux'

In this exclusive Gamasutra interview, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux discusses his next-gen technology choices, his troubles with the press, and his overwhelming drive to succeed, revealing new thoughts about Fable 2 along the way. When asked in the interview about his press-related issues surrounding hype that can spiral out of control on Molyneux-related games, he comments: "After Fable I gave an apology and said: ‘Look, I’m sorry – when I went out there to explain what was going on, I was explaining what was happening in development. I wasn’t saying that this, this, and this were going to be in the final game.’ I think a lot of people got quite upset that some features weren’t in the game. But in some cases, the features I’d been talking about were there, but they weren’t exploited the way the players thought they would be. Again, in Black & White, almost uniquely, I was talking about gameplay features when I should have been talking about experiments. We experimented with stuff far too late for it to be exploited. But you know, again, people came around. And now we still experiment with ideas. But we used to wait until the game got to a certain stage in development and then experiment. Now we experiment first – they’re mad, crazy things - but they’re small things that we can play around with. This means that after we’ve done these experiments, we have a palette of thing that we are happy with, and the game then can then exploit these kinds of things." You can now read the full Gamasutra interview on the subject to learn more on Molyneux's thoughts regarding next-gen tools and his drive to succeed (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).