Peter Molineux was like the Western Kojima, but with no funding and no skilled workers. His ideas are/were amazing and he introduced many innovative game mechanics, I still love to this day.
At the same time, he did not learn when to stop. He should have kept quiet for a while. His time is long overdue and he was unable to adapt to the new gaming world.
I loved many of Bullfrog’s games (Theme Hospital, Theme Park World, Syndicate/Syndicate Wars) and games like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Magic Carpet are widely respected (I didn’t get to play them back in the day).
The problem is that Peter Molyneux has arguably become a scammer.
Before even launching his previous “game”, Legacy, he got £40 M selling virtual land where making real money was the key driver (the theory was you would rent to players who didn’t join the pre-sale) .
It was a complete failure and the core gameplay was shit. Like playing an underbaked, extremely grindy mobile strategy game, but on PC. I played about an hour of it out of curiosity.
Molyneux claims money from Legacy is being used for Masters of Albion. That may not be as good of a thing as one would imagine (what he said can interpreted in different ways); as Masters of Albion looks and feels a lot like Legacy.
Maybe a hot take, but I still like him. In the earlier days he gave us some amazing, though clunky titles. One game I remember fondly is Black & White. Is it buggy, hard to control and weird? Yes. But it was so full of ideas.
Something many modern games (AAA) are missing.
Yeah but that doesn’t make his later stuff any good. I think he have failed enough to bring anything interesting to the table to just be forgotten. We can remember the good old games but he lost it.
