Peter Molyneux: a fallen god of game design seeking one final chance
Masters of Albion arrives in early access next year.
By the time you read these words, Peter Molyneux will have taken to the Opening Night Live stage at Gamescom and formally announced his new project to the world. Masters of Albion marks Molyneux's return to the genre he is widely credited with creating. It ditches his studio 22cans' previous focus on mobile development to instead target consoles as well as PC. And it's being made with help from several of Molyneux's old colleagues at his previous studios - Lionhead, Bullfrog - whose design CVs, like Molyneux's own, include a litany of 90s and 2000s classics.
On paper, all of this should inspire a positive reception. But, sitting opposite Molyneux a week before today's announcement, in the quiet boardroom of his small Guildford development studio, the veteran video game designer is clearly nervous. Those 90s and 2000s hits are now a long time ago, and much, of course, has changed. It's been 12 years since 22cans was founded and Molyneux's Curiosity cube caught the headlines, for good and bad, and the subsequent decade has not gone smoothly - crowdfunding concerns with Godus, continued accusations of broken promises, a fractured relationship with the media, and, most recently, an odd foray chasing the NFT fad with a blockchain game unfortunately titled Legacy.
Molyneux, now 65, is visibly older, softly-spoken. Last year, on social media, he described his mental health as "fragile". As we sit down, he asks if I mind whether he vapes as we talk - a habit he tells me he's picked up due to stress. He's not been sleeping well, he says, due to the anxiety of talking to the press once again. At times, when we discuss what this new project means to him - what it potentially could still mean for the latter stages of his career - his voice slows, emotion rising. But, at others, when he's discussing game mechanics, or keen to tell me more than he's strictly allowed, his old enthusiasm shines through, at one point swinging back and forth like a child on his chair.
"About three years ago I had this flash of lightning from a clear blue sky moment," Molyneux tells me, introducing the Masters of Albion trailer that premiered tonight at Opening Night Live. "Mobile games are not the kind of games I should be designing for. Free-to-play is a formula that goes against all my crazy idiotic thoughts as a game designer.
"I'm in my 60s now," he says, solemnly. "My lifestyle is so awful. My life expectancy is probably measured in seconds rather than years. So if I'm going to design another game, it's got to matter." He then adds, in a tone that suggests he really means it, "It could be my last game. I'm not saying I'm going to retire - if I was in the hospital I'd still have my laptop. This game has to matter."
Seeking to find new success in familiar places, Molyneux has been looking back at his greatest hits - "some of the games I'd made with some incredible people" - to see if there's still more of the same riches to be mined, some new combination worth pursuing.
"I looked at Dungeon Keeper - I really liked the flow of the way you built something up, and something attacked you. I really liked the possession mode but it was a bit of a gimmick and didn't have much substance to it. I really liked playing the dark side. I looked at Black & White and really liked the hand, the interface, the open-world, the moral choices through the game. I looked at Fable and I liked the epic nature of the story and the humour.
"And I thought, if I'm going to make this game - why don't I cherry pick some of the features from those and put them together in a new package?" Ultimately, this laid the groundwork for Masters of Albion being "a reinvention of the thing I never invented in the first place: a god game back in the days of 1989, when I stumbled across Populus," Molyneux continues. "I never set out to make a genre, it was just the game that came out of me while coding."
Backing Molyneux for this project are a string of former colleagues - Russell Shaw, Mark Healy, Kareem Ettouney, Iain Wright. As we talk, Molyneux points out the window to the buildings in the distance, to the old Lionhead and Bullfrog offices where he worked on Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable. 20 years ago, he made memories with these returning faces, working on those classics. Masters of Albion feels like it's being pitched as a homecoming - and one last chance for glory.
"I think god games should be about power, man," Molyneux says, when I ask what the genre means to him, now he's returning for another go. "They should be about making you feel fucking powerful. And it's not just about destruction - it's about creation just as much as it's about destruction. I hope the trailer gives the feeling of that."
Certainly, there's plenty of Molyneux's career on show, wrapped up in visuals clearly targeting platforms beefier than mobile. Pressing play on the trailer, we watch Master of Albion's building and customisation by day, before night falls and the monsters arrive. It's here the game's ability for you to switch from playing as a godly hand to controlling one of the world's inhabitants, such as your hero character, becomes key. It's a stylish snippet, though it's unclear from today's look how far the scope of the game spans.
"This is just a tiny part of the world of Albion, there are many places, towns and villages you can explore, and if they're under your control you should protect them at night," Molyneux says. I have to ask - how explicitly is Molyneux suggesting this world of Albion is the same one as from the Fable series? "Well, Albion is, of course, a folk name for Britain," he replies. "A lot of what Fable was, a lot of what Masters of Albion is, is inspired by Guildford - the green rolling South Downs and the ancient ruins that were dotted around.
"Playground Games is doing what looks like a fabulous job on Fable, and I hope they see this is not me trying to make Fable 4 or 5 or whatever it's up to now. It is just saying that Albion - England, old England - is a great setting for a game. Just like New York was a great setting for Grand Theft Auto - and they didn't call it New York, they called it Liberty City, but we all knew it was New York." Indeed.
I ask for more detail on Masters of Albion's wider world, and word of the game's story. And it's at this point Molyneux sighs. "Well, this brings me to the problem, Tom."
"The problem of me doing press is - well, I hope I've learned what mistakes I made all those years ago, when I started talking about games and waving my arms around excitedly," he says, hands now by his sides. "I should only now talk about features that I can actually demonstrate. And if I start talking about the story in the story arc... I can't demonstrate it to you.
"But suffice to say we have this full epic story," he continues, "which will be familiar - it is populated with lots of interesting moral choices, and a huge amount of humour." The humour, Molyneux says, like Fable, will often come from what the player does, given opportunities to express their funny side.
That same sense of expression will also extend to the game's moral choices, which will see you wrestling over resources. How long will your game remain a pristine countryside? "You can create these uber factories that will churn out stuff you've designed," Molyneux teases. "So you can make the money, but after a while the landscape will morph to become more like - well, I was going to say Grimsby, but maybe that's a bit bad on Grimsby. The landscape will blacken and the trees will go. Workers will develop interesting medical conditions like bronchitis and stuff like that."
This is, after all, a god game, Molyneux says. You should be allowed to make bad choices, to have that freedom and consequence. I can see him itching to say more. "I can't talk about the start of the game, can I?" he asks a colleague, hopefully. They shake their head.
Molyneux's history of promising additional features to the annoyance of team members who then have to actually go make them is legendary, but today's Molyneux seems to know when to take a pause. Still, though, I ask - with that history, and Masters of Albion likely a year away from early access launch - why start talking about it now at all?
"If I'm completely honest, part of it is the opportunity," Molyneux says. Gamescom Opening Night live host Geoff Keighley took him to lunch a month ago and convinced him to make a trailer and appear in tonight's show. "If I hadn't had lunch with Geoff, I don't think we would have chosen now to announce it," he continues.
"But we're playing the game every day, refining it and balancing it and that's given, I think, all of us, the confidence to actually reveal part of the game to the world. The problem is, Tom, when you're creating something which is not quite like anything else that has existed, that can cause real confusion in people. The trailer is only three minutes. It gives a glimpse, but we need at some point soon, ish, to start creating a community. We're not ready to do that yet, we're only 20 people, and all of us are just hard working developers, but you need to."
Excitement for the game needs to start sometime, in other words - and without a glowing recent reputation, or a publisher (yet) to pay for marketing, I can see why the allure of Keighley was so tempting - it's the same reason I'm sat opposite Molyneux now. 22cans still wants to find a publisher, of course, something tonight's high-profile announcement and a positive reception could help secure. Landing a deal would bring security, continue funding the game's current promise - and likely be a relief.
"Tom, it's terrifying," Molyneux says. "I mean, I got an hour's sleep last night just from the fear of talking about games again. Part of me is childishly excited to show off. And it is showing off, really. But another part of me is deeply terrified by it. Because, you know, I think 10 years ago..." He trails off, the memory of his most infamous interview seemingly still on his mind. "It was harsh. Justifiable," he quickly adds, "I totally understand the mistakes I made, and I put them on my shoulders completely. But you know, this is... it's a big step for me."
A year ago, Molyneux finally launched Legacy, a long-in-development "play-to-earn" title that arrived just as the NFT bubble finally burst. Players reportedly invested $54m on virtual land in the hopes this gold rush would subsequently pay out. It did not. "We were sold by a company called Gala Games on this idea - and I'm very susceptible to these ideas - that play-to-earn gaming could be a big thing," Molyneux says when I ask him about the project, and if he was happy where it ended up.
"Could there be a model that allows people to play a game and earn some money? At that time, I was very, becoming very disillusioned by the free-to-play market and formula. We took a branch into play-to-own gaming. We released Legacy, and people played it, but unfortunately, at that time, without the meteoric rise of cryptocurrency that fuelled the real play-to-earn gaming... I think play-to-earn gaming has been flat and gone down. Legacy is still playable on the Gala Games website, but the economic model doesn't, in my opinion - and I'm not a person that deeply understands it - but doesn't really work financially, or in gameplay terms."
So what became of that $54m, two years on? "Well, I exaggerate and so do you [the press]. All you guys exaggerated - it wasn't quite as much as people speculated." So it wasn't $54m? "It wasn't that much, but it did give us the money to fund Masters of Albion. That's what we used the majority of the money for, to bring back Russell and Mark and Ian. It's not cheap to do that. You've got to bring them away from their jobs.
"And we've still got Godus," Molyneux says, unprompted. "It's still going and is still amazingly popular. It was featured by Apple two weeks ago on its 10-year anniversary." Indeed, on the app store, the game remains highly-rated - though its less-popular Steam version was rather unceremoniously delisted from sale earlier this year.
Around the same time 22cans finally shipped Legacy, Molyneux was discussing Masters of Albion - then codenamed Moat - including at a game conference in Barcelona a year ago. Then, he said it would include an idea that had "never been seen in a game before". Was that something he's still keeping under wraps?
"There's things that aren't shown in the trailer, but you know, designing is a little bit like cooking," Molyneux says, before offering a lengthy description of mixing different existing game mechanics, like ingredients in a soup. "If you were to pin me down and say, 'Well, what makes it really feel unique?' It is an open world, man. It's an open world god game." In Masters of Albion, using your possession power allows you to explore the world properly "like any other open-world game" - and play as various characters: your hero, your villagers, and of course as a chicken.
"Just like Fable, you can go off and explore down that path and up that trail and up that mountain," Molyneux continues. "But it's not until you unlock that region in God Mode that it unlocks it for God Mode. This is the feature from Dungeon Keeper - you had the possession mode, but it never had a purpose to it. And I think our realisation is, of course, it's all about exploring in the third person, but you become desperate to unlock a region so you can use your god powers, and that feels pretty good."
"It's got to go into early access and be really fucking amazing."
"The greatest stories, the fiction that I read, the films that I really, truly love are all about discovering power," Molyneux says, when I ask him what it is about the god genre that keeps drawing him back - whether, if this is his last project, he is thinking about it as a return to his legacy. "It was never a choice. It was always an accident. You [the press] defined god games, not me," he continues. "Gary Whitta wrote an article about the original Populus when he was, like, 16 years old - he used to knock on the door at Bullfrog, which was this horrible little office - and he wrote the first article saying, 'this is something different. I'm going to call it a god game'."
As for where the god genre came from? "I'll tell you the absolute truth," Molyneux says, "but it's gonna be so disappointing." "The absolute truth is that when I was a kid, I read this short story - I can't remember who it was by - but in the short story, this person had a cage, and inside this cage was this little house and these little people, and he used to be cruel to them. And that story stayed with me all my life, and this feeling of being in control of something but also responsible for something... that's really what a god game is. It's like being a pet owner. These worlds are your pets. You form a bond with a pet. You know you can hit your dog for shitting all over your carpet, or you can [gently] say 'bad boy, you shouldn't do poo-poos on the carpet'. It's up to you how you train your dog. There's no manual. Same with kids. It's up to you how you do it. But you formed a relationship, and if it worked really, really well, you feel that sense of belonging and love and responsibility towards that thing," he pauses. "So really it should be called a pet game."
Is that sense of responsibility one he now feels for himself, his studio, his legacy? Does he feel better equipped to make this game today, in the autumn of his career, having had more of those life experiences? "Absolutely," Molyneux says, visibly emotional. "It's a sense of responsibility. Really.
"When you're making something that could be your last, you've got to put everything into it. And I think that's really why I persuaded Mark and Ian and Russ to come back. I said, 'Come on.'" His voice is little more than a whisper now. "'One more.'"
Can Molyneux do enough to convince the world he should get that last chance he's hoping for? The reaction to this evening will surely play a part. At least, after numerous missteps, Molyneux seems to understand the work to be done.
"It can't go into early access and be early access, really, can it?" he asks, quiet. "It's got to go into early access and be really fucking amazing." That would certainly help, I say.
"If I were to demo the game to you today, you would say 'release it now for fuck's sake, it's done!'" (His colleague shakes his head once more.) "All the features are there..."