Molyneux: Lionhead's Next Title Inspired By Game Image

Author: by Staff

Lionhead's Peter Molyneux has been discussing his post-Fable II projects with Gamasutra, teasing on the evolution of the Dimitri prototype currently in development at the Microsoft-owned studio. As part of an in-depth interview with Molyneux, we asked him how the prototyping that's been happening at the company over the past few years is affecting the current projects Lionhead is making. He commented: "If it were up to me, I would be talking about what Lionhead is doing today. I think we're doing some pretty astounding stuff, and some of that is a result of the experiments. Certainly, the thing that I hope that we're going to be in a position to announce soon is very, very different from what you expect. We're a little bit of, "Lionhead is Fable, Fable Lionhead." I don't think Lionhead should just be that. We should be able to try very challenging things. So, this big thing that we're working on is very, very different. You could possibly see where it came from in terms of our history. But if you look at it, there's nothing like it." Continuing on with some explanation of how previous Lionhead projects and prototypes evolved to become the currently in-creation game at the Guildford, UK studio, Molyneux shared: "But there's this idea, an idea or an ambition that I have had, and that people at Lionhead have shared for many, many years... A long time ago, I was talking about a project -- it was actually an experiment called "Dimitri", which was a project that we were kind of working on for a long time. That kind of evolved and changed as these experiments do. The core of this idea, the thing that it lacked, was the way to describe it to you, what that kind of wrapper was. And then, this moment, this evangelical moment came to me while I was sitting in a meeting. I was sitting in a meeting looking at someone else's game from another studio, and I saw this one picture. It was just this single image of a picture. And when I actually show the game finally to you, I'll show you the picture. I thought, "That's it. That's exactly what it needs." And so I rushed back and said, "Right, we should do this." It was one of those, so rarely happens in your life when you see something and you know so strongly that it's the right thing. This is horribly teasing you, isn't it?" The full interview with Molyneux is currently available at Gamasutra, including lots more detail about the creation of Fable II and his thoughts on the the essence of game creation.