Words matter. These are the best Peter Molyneux Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
That’s what ‘The Trail’ ended up being, this delightful way of exploring and managing your backpack and crafting and collecting and trading with other players, doing all that in this really delicious way. When we finished that and released it on iOS and Android, tens of millions of people loved and enjoyed it.
You don’t often talk about the cultural significance of video games in places like China and Korea, but it’s a huge part of culture throughout the world, and very, very accessible too. Now that you don’t have to be locked away in your bedroom to play them, it’s gaming everywhere.
I’d love Bullfrog to be like it was when we did ‘Populous,’ with eight of us all together in the same room, but you can’t stay that way. You’d die.
The biggest was me running Lionhead at its peak. That was about 305 people. I’d say that was, for me as a creative, one of the most hellish times of my life. Normally running a team is like herding cats. This was like herding the entire African plains.
There’s a lot of pressure to release a game early. In Syndicate’s case there was a lot of pressure from us on distributors Electronics Arts to release it in March ’93, and I said no.
Mystery and curiosity are real motivators.
The major change was going from ‘Black and White’ to ‘Fable,’ because I was no longer programming, and I had spent most of my time designing through programming, and only working with people I knew well.
Derren Brown doesn’t really predict the lottery numbers. But there is an enormous amount of entertainment in there.
In ‘Fable III’ we have taken away the experience system.
I love strategy games, but a lot are very techy, and they don’t really give you any human side of what strategy really is.
To see somebody create something from nothing is incredibly impressive.
Why should the televised stuff be only about pro gamers? For me it’s more fascinating to see who’s going to be the next god of gods than watching some pro gamer.
What the press hasn’t realized is that I’m just a big kid showing off, and you’ve got to treat me like that. You know, you don’t make big kids accountable.
With ‘Black and White 2,’ I want to put it in a setting where you’re actually using the creature. I want the little people within the land not to just be a resource but actually be in conflict and fighting and battling against each other.
The temptation, when you go into Kickstarter, is that the first three days are wonderful, and you believe you’re a god. You go in your spreadsheet and think, ‘If every day’s like day one, we’re going to have suitcases of money arriving at the front door.’ Then, it dips into this slump.
‘X Factor’ isn’t just about internationally recognized singers, it’s about all the rest of us. There’s a human interest story there.
The new Peter Molyneux has been born that never ever promises things but always ever shows it.
I think the charm of ‘Fable’ was in the feeling of the world and definitely the humor.
Don’t recreate something that’s already been created and is good. You want to have an idea, think of different idea. Don’t think of someone else’s idea.
In the original ‘Fable,’ Albion was kind of run by heroes and heroes were the thing, and there weren’t any lords or kings, there were just heroes, and greater and greater heroes.
With ‘Black and White’ we laid down the canvas for what’s possible in ‘Black and White’ 2 and 3. We gave you a creature that you could nurture and build up and we focused an awful lot on that creature with the add-on disc.
That’s what my objective was, to reinvent myself from a console designer to starting a new business and embracing multi-platform, relearning the skills necessary to make successful games. It’s been an amazing journey.
Consumers don’t give a damn about what device they’re playing on. They just want to play it everywhere. They want to be playing on the console and then take it off to the bus.
What we found while making Milo, is that part of the skill of designing this whole new experience is in making people comfortable with the fact that they can be seen.
It was an amazing thing to see how Bowerstone, the capital of ‘Fable,’ progressed. It went from, in ‘Fable 1,’ to just 20 houses and then in ‘Fable 3’ it felt like a city that had districts. You could see that sense of progression in it.
In a way, I love being inspired by the production quality that TV and film have got – there’s no question about the amount of skill they use to entertain us.
I think it’s fantastic that people still remember Fable, and some of them are really passionate about it.
I’d love personally… this is not an announcement at all, but I would love to see ‘Fable 2’ on the PC.
I’ll always love the time I spent making ‘Black and White.’
I just feel that in today’s world, where you’ve got computer games of all types – through Facebook, Android and Apple, for example – you put them all together and it’s an incredibly important force in all the world.
We experimented with different monetization techniques in ‘Godus.’ We had some events that you could go on which were time-limited. That didn’t work terribly well.
When we transitioned from the PC to the console with ‘Fable,’ it took us five years to do that. And that’s just going from a mouse to a controller.
You know, the health bar in ‘Fable III’ was destined to be this pixel-high line at the top left-hand side of the screen. No one was looking at it! No one even knew it was there!
When you’re external to a publisher, most independent developers live on paranoia. The mainstay of every day is paranoia – every indie company believes their publisher in some way has these Machiavellian plans that will cause disaster for the game and the studio.
Innovation, surprising people and creating a sense of wonder is what consumers want.
I play computer games every day of my life.
Things like engine technology used to be hugely restrictive. You couldn’t have more than one baddie on screen, you couldn’t have more than three arrows firing at once. Now, you can say, ‘I want 20 monsters, and 30 weapons,’ and there isn’t a technical string attached.
Absolutely not every idea is anywhere near mine at Lionhead. It’s a real collaborative effort.
I felt that the moral side of ‘Black and White’ was slightly confused. That’s why I want the world to be in turmoil.
As game designers, we often assume people are playing from start to finish, and they’re never going to walk away from it. But people are doing that.
When a society is really successful like America, throughout history there’s been this trend for those societies to be obsessed about end of the world scenarios. You know, about meteorites and plagues and destroying things. And you can see that in the American fiction.
There are going to be some real surprises in ‘Fable 2.’
I think the first thing is that if you’re going to make a game which is accessible and which draws people in, you’ve got to start from the beginning.
Imagine if you’re playing at home and your girlfriend is badgering you all the time not to play. Wouldn’t it be great to have a game you could play with her? Because then you can carry on playing the game and not get beaten up for it.
We’ve got plans for ‘Fable’ III, IV, and V. It’s a big story arc, and if you play Fable II, you’ll recognize things from ‘Fable I.’
If you don’t think of yourself as being someone who needs to go back to school, needs to reinvent yourself, then you’re not able to do the thing you’re passionate about. That’s to create and invent and innovate.
‘The Trail’ on PC is far more challenging by nature. The flow of the game is completely changed, because I think that’s what the audience enjoys.
The dream of Bullfrog is that everybody is employed for their creativity rather than their particular skill.
I’d been away for about 10 days, and literally the first thing I did, even though it sounds very… it just shows you what a boring person I actually am, because the first thing I did was kiss my wife and hug my kid, then I turned on ‘Fable 2’ just to see how much gold I’d accrued over 10 days.
The whole point here, and the seed that JJ Abrams laid in my mind is, is the power of curiosity enough? What happens next? That dramatic construct is what has driven soap operas and serialised novels over the course of history.
Some of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever seen in a game has been in ‘Minecraft.’
I don’t question the omnipotence of belief.
With ‘Godus,’ we did Steam Early Access, Android, and iOS. It was quite a rocky road going through all those hoops.
Over the years you just pick up inspiration and ideas bubble away in my mind.
When EA acquired Bullfrog there were, like, 35 people, and within nine months there were 200. And any feeling of culture and inventiveness was diluted by that.
As a designer, as you get used to Kinect, it’s such a different experience for me as a designer – for any designer.
I’m looking forward to ‘LittleBigPlanet.’ I think Media Molecule are doing fantastic work on giving people the tools to create some amazing stuff. I can hardly wait to play it.
I think that games like ‘Braid’ show us that the ‘new kids on the block’ can do some really inventive, smart things with a genre like the side-scrolling platformer that has been around for 25 years. It’s proof that people can ‘come up’ and surprise us all the time.
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