Nobody in the games industry takes Peter Molyneux seriously any more. Worse, nobody in Lionhead takes him seriously either except when he gets into one of his legendary picky moods. Even more hilarious is that Peter the Mouthpiece has turned into one of the blandest corporate whores ever since his failing ailing money-losing studio was bought/rescued from self-destruction for a small amount of chunk change to save Fable 2.
The image around this guy is legendary, with his OBE and his ability to craft a perfect message for journos, but just as legendary is his lack of actually doing any work on any of the games that are “his”. The Movies, Black and White 2, Fable, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate are basically games built by other people. Everybody knows it, even most journalists, but they give Molyneux a blind pass because he occupies that untouchable space reserved for industry mouthpieces. As long as the man is good copy, whatever he says goes.
So Moulinex can come out with these daft “YouTube of games” and “I only code with 23 tracks” lines if he likes, but I challenge him to actually show us any actual coding that he has done in the last ten years, any actual design documents he has written. Since the man is the greatest game designer that Britain has ever produced, it stands to reason that his footprint is somewhere in all this work.
Rule Number 2: Most of the industry luminaries are full of shit and behind every one of them stands an army of silenced developers who know full well that they are nothing but windy bags of air.
December 21, 2006 at 3:54 am |
A lot of this stems from the fact that at one point you could make a game pretty much by yourself, and that the media really hasn’t realized this isn’t the case anymore. There are a few people in the industry with big reputation and press coverage that actually deserve it; but it’s usually because of thier way of thinking, not what they actually do on a daily basis anymore. Will Wright certainly doesn’t code like he used to, but his approach to understanding problems is what makes him valuable now.
January 13, 2007 at 5:00 pm |
[...] creativity into games? Probably only three groups. 1. Huge studios that are trusted; studios with famous designer on front and self-publishers. 2. Indie developers, who don’t give a dung about mainstream. 3. Lucky [...]
January 17, 2007 at 9:45 pm |
The question is: did that mouthpiece attract money or not?
January 18, 2007 at 8:21 pm |
It errked me the way he wrote himself into the dev history of Fable…
He is let off the hook by so many journalists because “he’s passionate”: he’s often actually distorting the truth, or knowingly taking personal credit for things in which he’s had little involvement.
I recall a GDC talk covering Fable where he said they had co-op play 99% implemented and blamed it’s removal on microsoft. So a year later then lost chapters comes out, it’s still missing – so was the original statement untrue?
February 14, 2007 at 10:38 am |
I worked for him. He IS a cunt.