God-game creator granted Bafta gong Lauded game designer Peter Molyneux is to become a Bafta Fellow at this year's British Academy Video Games Awards. Molyneux began his career in 1982 distributing Atari and Commodore 64 titles on floppies. Soon after, he created a text-based simulation game, The Entrepreneur, which failed to take off, pushing him away from …
I worked at Bullfrog from around the Powermonger days to just before EA consumed them. Whilst Molyneux was clearly the leading figure there the games created were far more of a team effort than perhaps people are commonly made aware of.
In many ways Syndicate was even les to do with Molyneux than some of the other titles and that may be why it was omitted here, but for that matter Magic Carpet had very little to do with Molyneux.
Still, Syndicate was, by far, the best title I ever worked on.
Don't get me wrong though, Molyneux is a nice enough fella.
Syndicate was a superb classic...but as long as a dev's on hand, I have to ask: What's with the AI? I replayed it recently, and noted that in spite of the mission briefings saying that smaller teams attract less attention, enemy agents often make a beeline for me from across the map anyway.
...and other times I could walk right past them without them ever noticing.
(amusingly, the game appears to be unwinnable on a modern machine -- some quirk about the last level makes it load and start playing so fast that the enemies are already mauling me before the display appears. No fault of the dev team though -- technology marches on.)
Dungeon Keeper was a great game too - so good it's being remade. Or reimagined. Or ripped off. One of those.
Dungeons - http://home.dungeons-game.com/
"You will play a despicable Dungeon Lord whose job is to create fiendish dungeons to lure and trap heroes who dare to try and steal your treasure. Dungeons was developed by Realmforge, a Kalypso Media studio."
Mind you, god games have certainly moved on in the graphics department, From Dust looks fun : http://fromdustgame.com/
Hmmm? .... I was quite surprised that the following was not thought worthy of mention ..... "Lionhead Studios (also known as Microsoft Game Studios Europe) is a British computer game development company led by industry veteran Peter Molyneux, and acquired by Microsoft Game Studios in April 2006."
PS ...... The Title is not a Question, It is an Alien Program Proposal ..... and hereby Live BetaTests the Present Power of the Internet to Connect Dots ...... and Transport Subliminal Steganographic Messages Automatically ..... for Future Idealised Projects and Programs requiring the Virtual TelePortation of Super Sensitive Matter for Super Sensitive Matters.
Ahhh Syndicate, brilliant game. Give your agents some rocket launchers and then go to that mission with a parade with lots of people lining the streets…the explosions, the screams, the little people on fire… *blissful sigh*
And Dungeon Keeper was brilliant. Beating up heroes and dropping them into torture chambers convert them to your side and use them against their friends, fantastic fun…
Flame icon because little people on fire make me happy. :>
He made some truly great things but the latest efforts are awful :(
Fable II was acceptable - barely. Seemed to care a lot about banning people from their forums and bringing out expansion packs, not to mention putting in achievements that you needed to buy extra stuff to get but didn't much care for actually fixing the game breaking glitches - oh and of course you can't back up the save files easily either.
Fable III - yuck. Dumbed down kiddy rubbish.
Stop - making games dude, you had it once but you've lost it.
No? How about Fusion? Looks like Molyneaux's less successful titles have been swept under the Magic Carpet.
My favourite Bullfrog game was "Flood", even though it sold in criminally low numbers. A genuinely original take on the platform game genre.
Molyneaux is a PR and marketing man. famously prone to over-promising and under-delivering. A trait that has only gotten worse over the years. He's either a terrible game designer, or an incredibly unlucky manager.
I agree with the Anonymous posters: most games were already team efforts by the early '90s, and have become even more so. That Mr. Molyneaux seems quite happy to take all the credit for their work too speaks volumes.
It's almost become a standard for when someone lies through their teeth to promise all sorts of things that don't come to fruition, or when they intentionally mislead people in order to make money, for them to be classed as 'Molyneux'd'.
After the early games PM has been a steadily dishonest git, and if he'd been given awards for the early games and not the last ten years I wouldn't have minded.
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