Peter Molyneux says he's 'coming home' to PC, but should we welcome him back after everything that's happened?

GamesStrategyPeter Molyneux says he’s ‘coming home’ to PC, but should we welcome him back after everything that’s happened?When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Edge Magazine)

Peter Molyneux in a chair.

Peter Molyneux is at once known as a legendary game designer and as a legendary bullshitter. He’s credited with creating the “god game” genre with 1989’s Populous, and was the frontman for the Fable RPGs of the 2000s. Many of his games were hits, and some are regarded as classics. His personal reputation hasn’t fared so well.

Among the reactions to the announcement were pleas to snuff out any emergence of a Molyneux redemption story. He hasn’treallyanswered for failing to deliver everything the Godus Kickstarter backers paid for, and perhaps worse, he promised an 18-year-old kid godhood and gave him squat (more on that weird saga below).

The past decade of Molyneux’s career has been full of blunders, but while reading those takes I was thinking, alright,true, but Masters of Albiondoeslook kind of fun. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for one of my favorite Molyneux games, Black & White, but I just love little grasping hand cursors you can use to fling your subjects around. Is it wrong to give Masters of Albion a chance, not to redeem Molyneux in the eyes of aggrieved Kickstarter backers, but just to be a fun game?

My automatic reaction was,nah, it’s fine,butthat’s not a satisfying answer, so to work out why I feel that way, I’ve examined the history of Molyneux’s career below, as briefly as I could manage (which is admittedly not very briefly). Given that I was a teenager when Black & White released in 2001, this might also be helpful for anyone who reacted to Molyneux’s Gamescom Opening Night Live appearance with the question, “Who’s that?”

Acorns and oak trees

Following Molyneux’s success with ’90s sims like Populous, Theme Park, and Dungeon Keeper, he co-founded Lionhead and developed Black & White before moving onto the Fable RRG series. This isn’t where Molyneux’s habit of making wild promises began—a great2014 Kotaku featuretraces that behavior back to the start—but it’s here that I recall his reputation as a loose cannon pitchman really solidifying as a stock subject of internet mockery.

He loved to tell press about the unprecedented complexity, player freedom, and emotional resonance hewantedhis developers to achieve, but seemed not to care much whether or not they really could. Among many other examples, the designer famously told press that, in Fable, players would be able to plant an acorn and witness it grow into an oak tree as years of in-game time passed. That wasn’t true, and the claim became one of the most repeated Molyneuxisms.

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A screenshot from the 2014 Fable remaster.(Image credit: Lionhead Studios)

Fable Anniversary screenshot

For me and the people I was around at the time, Molyneux was endearingly over-excited about his own ideas, an incorrigible scamp whose words you couldn’t take too seriously. After he left Lionhead in 2012 and founded a new independent studio, 22cans, however, Molyneux’s relationship with the press and public dramatically declined.

Curiosity: Molyneux’s weird cube

Molyneux took his hype-building skills to another level at 22cans. The company’s first game, Curiosity, was a mobile app that contained a cube made of billions of smaller cubes. Players, working collectively, tapped on the small cubes to destroy them, slowly revealing the layers below. We were told that whoever reached the center of the cube first would win a “life-changing” prize, and Molyneux framed Curiosity’s microtransactions, which allowed players to buy cube-smashing tools, as just a part of the social experiment.

“This is not a money-making exercise, it is a test about the psychology of monetization,” hesaid at the time.

We were having fun with it at the time.(Image credit: 22cans)

A Curiosity screenshot

Did we buy it? As I recall, the whole thing was regarded as weird, novel, and more or less ridiculous—classic Molyneux—but wedidwant to know what was in the cube. How could we not? Molyneux’s reputation for overpromising meant that if the prize really sucked, he was going to be absolutely lambasted for getting us worked up about it. And if the prize reallywasamazing, we obviously wanted to know what Willy Wonka had in store.

If you weren’t following it at the time, you can probably guess how it turned out. When an 18-year-old kid named Bryan Henderson clicked the final cube in 2013, it quickly became apparent that there was no “life-changing” prize, except in the technical sense that his life was briefly, mildly disrupted.

Godus: The Kickstarted god game

The cube’s treasure was a special “God of Gods” multiplayer role in 22cans' first proper game, a Kickstarter-funded successor to Populous called Godus, as well as a percentage of the game’s revenue. That would’ve been an incredible prize if Godus had been the next World of Warcraft, and Henderson was about to rule over millions of players while earning enough passive income to fund any lifestyle he wanted. It even would’ve been a pretty cool prize if Godus had been a modest success. But on PC, it was a dud, and the multiplayer features that would’ve made Henderson an in-game god were never even finished.

(Image credit: 22cans)

Godus key art

In an infamous 2015Rock Paper Shotgun interviewin which he was asked if he’s “a pathological liar,” Molyneux said that he had never knowingly lied. He said he’d had to change course and make sacrifices out of necessity, because making something new is unpredictable and hard: “Making a computer game that’s entertaining and that’s incredible and that’s amazing is almost impossible, it’s almost impossible to do.”

It’s not an unfamiliar story—lots of Kickstarted games have been delayed, gone over budget, and underdelivered, and the notion that ‘game development is hard’ is repeated constantly—but at that point, Molyneux was out of goodwill to turn in for forgiveness.

Also, there was that NFT game

(Image credit: 22cans)

A screenshot of 22cans NFT game Legacy

For his next big move, Molyneux and 22cans teamed up with blockchain company Gala Games to launch a Web3 game called Legacy. If everyone’s already mad at you, what’s the harm in selling some NFTs, right?

Legacy is a business sim that, at the height of NFT fever in 2021, started selling “land NFTs” to speculators eager to get in on the Web3 gaming revolution that they kept saying was happening, and that was clearly not.

In this week’sinterview with Eurogamer, Molyneux admitted that he never fully understood the “play-to-earn” economic model (me either!) and has since decided that it “doesn’t really work financially, or in gameplay terms.” He said that he’d become disillusioned with the free-to-play model, and that Gala Games sold him on the idea that blockchain would be the next big thing.

The people who bought those NFTsdid not get rich, but for Molyneux and 22cans, it doesn’t look like the project was a financial mistake. Molyneux says they didn’t make $54 million off the game like some reported, but did make enough to fund Masters of Albion, the new god game Molyneux announced on stage with Geoff Keighley at Opening Night Live this week.

And now: Masters of Albion

After failing to deliver a complete PC version of Godus, it was certainly artless for Molyneux to get on stage this weekand wonder aloudwhat the hell he’d been doing “messing around on mobile.” Your backers were asking the same question!

It’s also easy to be suspicious of Masters of Albion, which looks remarkably similar to the NFT game that funded it. Molyneux knows he has to overcome his reputation here: “It’s got to go into early access and be really fucking amazing,” he toldEurogamer.

Masters of Albion Interview and Trailer with Peter Molyneux | GAMESCOM Opening Night Live 2024 - YouTubeWatch On

Masters of Albion Interview and Trailer with Peter Molyneux | GAMESCOM Opening Night Live 2024 - YouTube

If anything, the infamous Fable interviews make it more believable that Molyneux genuinely felt that 22cans could do what he said it could with Godus and release a hit game. A guy known for falling in love with cool ideas that he can’t deliver on is really not who you want with the keys to a Kickstarter page, and it doesn’t look like the studio plans to repeat that irresponsible mistake.

It’s disappointing that there’s no comment from Molyneux this week on what he’s going to do, if anything, to make good with disappointed backers or the god he neglected. I’ve asked the studio for an interview, and haven’t heard back.

A screenshot of Masters of Albion. What can I say? I think it looks cute.(Image credit: 22cans)

Masters of Albion screenshot

But 22cans is hardly the only developer to have ever botched a crowdfunding campaign, and we’re in no danger of somehow being tricked here. Either Masters of Albion will be fun or it won’t. While I don’t recommend backing the Kickstarter projects of chaotic people like Molyneux, they do occasionally make cool games with their friends.

“Sometimes he’ll shoot for the stars when he tries to instill ambition in his team,” said Gary Carr, who worked with Molyneux for 20 years, in that2014 Kotaku feature. “And if it doesn’t always work, it can be taunted back at him. But I still remember those people who he dragged out of the gutters to some extent and made them into great developers. So I tend to have a much more balanced view of that. It’s something he can’t switch off. He’s ambitious, he sells dreams, he sells people to themselves. So therefore if it works, it’s great, if it doesn’t always work, then I think that’s just the chance you take.”

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Acorns and oak trees#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Curiosity: Molyneux’s weird cube#

Godus: The Kickstarted god game#

Also, there was that NFT game#

And now: Masters of Albion#