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Peter Molyneux

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Peter Molyneux

Born Peter Douglas Molyneux
May 5, 1959 (1959-05-05) (age 50)
Guildford, Surrey, UK
Nationality British
Occupation Video game designer
Awards Order of the British Empire
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Peter Douglas Molyneux OBE (born 5 May 1959 in Guildford, Surrey, UK) is an English computer game designer and game programmer. He is responsible for well known God games Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White, among others, as well as business simulation games such as Theme Park and more recently, hit adventure role playing games Fable and Fable 2. In August 1997, Molyneux left Bullfrog Productions to establish a new development team, Lionhead Studios. Molyneux was inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame in 2004 and was honoured with an OBE in the New Year's Honours list announced on 31 December 2004. He was awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in March 2007.

Lauded as one of the world's most brilliant and inventive game developers, Molyneux has nevertheless acquired a reputation for issuing over-enthusiastic descriptions of games under development, which are found to be somewhat less ambitious when released. The most well-known case of this was with the game Fable, released in 2004 without many of the features talked about by Molyneux in press interviews during development. After the release, Molyneux publicly apologized for overhyping the game.[1] His role has also changed from designer and developer to more of a publicist and executive producer role. Though credited in part for lending his name to several recent projects, Molyneux is in fact not the principal designer of Fable, The Movies, or Black & White 2.

On 6 April 2006, Lionhead Studios was bought by Microsoft and now forms part of the Microsoft Game Studios. At E3 2006, Peter Molyneux gave several interviews in the press, in one of which he stated that "I think you're going to see a lot more fantastic games from Lionhead because of that relationship [with Microsoft]."[2]

In July 2007, he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Southampton.

On 4 June 2009, he was promoted to Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios, Europe, although he will still continue to produce video games with Lionhead Studios.

Contents

[edit] Early career

 This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. (February 2007)

Peter Molyneux began his career in 1982 by distributing and selling floppy discs which contained video games for Atari and the Commodore 64. The company was called Taurus and was founded by Molyneux and Les Edgar in 1982. The company name would prove fortuitous when Commodore, confusing them with a larger company named TORUS, provided them with Ten Amiga computers.

Circa 1984, Molyneux began to focus exclusively on game development. His first attempt was a game called The Entrepreneur, a text-based business simulation game, which was a commercial failure.

It wasn't until 1987 that he decided to re-approach the video game industry with the foundation of the company Bullfrog.

In this period, Molyneux worked with David Hanlon, Simon Hunter (game sound developers), and Andrew E. Bailey (game programming) on games like Druid and Dragons Breath.

[edit] Media fame

Presentation of Fable 2 with Molyneux at Festival du jeu vidéo in 2008

As one of the industry's leading and best-known figures, Molyneux has appeared on many television shows and video gaming news discussion or documentaries. He has been repeatedly interviewed for shows that include: Gamesmaster, Game Over, Games Wars, Gamezville, Bad Influence!, Gamepad, CHEATS, Gamer.tv, Rapture, Games World, Blue Chip, LanJam, Ultimate Gamer, and GameStars. These however are just the UK productions, and there are a huge host of international broadcast media outlets that have also interviewed him since Populous first debuted. In the Scottish web series Consolevania, he is often portrayed as a dull, uninteresting character.

An entire episode of G4's games retrospective series Icons was devoted to him, during its third season. More recently, a comprehensive two part interview was filmed of him during the 2006 Brighton Games Developer Conference by leading UK website Eurogamer.[3] He was also featured in the fourth episode of the Discovery Channel mini-series Rise of the Video Game alongside Will Wright and Sid Meier, fellow developers of simulation titles.

He gives keynote addresses and speaks extensively at worldwide conferences, including Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, Games Convention Asia in Singapore, Develop in Brighton, England, and the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California.

Molyneux was given the tenth position in "Top Ten Game Creators" Countdown by GameTrailers website[citation needed].

Molyneux has gained a bit of infamy in regards to his over-hyping of games he has worked on, dating back to Black & White. He has a habit of making too many promises about features and content in his games that end up either not being included or not actually as good as he made it seem.

[edit] Games

[edit] Pre-Bullfrog

[edit] Bullfrog Productions

[edit] Lionhead Studios

[edit] References

  1. ^ BBC News Interview
  2. ^ Kikizo interview
  3. ^ Eurogamer's interview

[edit] External links

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