Molyneux leaves Lionhead to form 22 Cans

[Stark]

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/07/peter ... t-venture/

I find my disinterest in this fascinating. When Molyneux left EA/Bullfrog to form Lionhead Studios it was a big deal, at least to me. He was famous for making such groundbreaking games (ie. Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet) and ended his time there on a high note with Dungeon Keeper. He then started talking about this crazy Populous like game with mind-blowing concepts called Black & White. It just seemed huge to me at the time, not unlike Sid Meier starting up Firaxis after his time with MicroProse all those years.

Flash forward to today, with this announcement. Peter's last game at Lionhead is going to be Fable: The Journey which is some sort of Kinect thing and I can't get the bad taste of Fable: Heroes out of my mouth. Where is all the creative genius that Molyneux was famous for? It seems like nothing but smoke & mirros lately with him, where he is always apologizing for this feature or that not making it into the final product.

Anyway I guess I am a little sad that this news doesn't have me excited, instead I'm just indifferent. Molyneux is no longer gaming genius in my book.

[GameMasterGuy]

Once he started overseeing Rare, they started all that Kinect Sports crap. I'm hoping that now that he's out of the picture, they'll return to at least BK:N&B levels of quality. As for Lionhead itself, Fable refused to add, only streamline, and I seriously can't think of any way to further streamline 3; they don't even have a pause menu!

[Yancakes]

Molyneux spent the last decade (more than a decade?) making promises that he couldn't possibly back up. Finally the people who gave him money were like "fucking stop it man" so he settled down and started making games that could sell, and unfortunately that's sort of the definition of selling out. It's his own fault, really, if he'd kept making groundbreaking games without hyping up his impossible dreams he may have kept slipping through the cracks, but nooo, he had to open his big mouth.

[MrNash]

Can't say I much care where Molyneux goes nowadays. He talks a mean game, but he hasn't made anything all that interesting in over a decade, and his obsession with motion controls just tells me he's going to continue to make games that I don't care about.

[BoringSupreez]

Add me to the "doesn't care" club. It seems like every time some famous video game creator leaves to join some tiny company no one's ever heard of, they stop making anything notable. Add that to the fact that I've never been a big fan of Molyneux's games in the first place, and you've got real indifference.

[J T]

I was actually really fascinated in the Milo thing he was experimenting with. It seems weird to leave a studio you founded to go independent though. Did he lose control of it under Microsoft? I'm curious to see what happens with him. He has big vision, and I wonder if being under less corporate influence will be good for him because it provides more freedom, or if it will rob him of the resources he needs for such grand ideas.

[MrNash]

Add me to the "doesn't care" club. It seems like every time some famous video game creator leaves to join some tiny company no one's ever heard of, they stop making anything notable. Add that to the fact that I've never been a big fan of Molyneux's games in the first place, and you've got real indifference.

So true. Off the top of my head, about the only exception that I can think of is Platinum Games when they brought the Clover guys over with other Capcom notables. Maybe Sakaguchi as well? Mistwalker got off to a bit of a slow start, but he was going from Final Fantasy to Blue Dragon. He seems to be getting his groove back with Last Story, though. Other than those, it seems whenever a big name developer announces they're leaving the studio where they got famous, they might as well be announcing their retirement because they're likely going to be fading into obscurity shortly thereafter.

[CFFJR]

Well good luck to him is all I can really say.

My allegiance is to Fable really, and its a series I'll continue to support with or without him.

Of course, that feeling may change with the direction the games seem to be taking now.

[Ivo]

He was involved in enough older games I like (and in a big way, because teams were smaller back then and all) that I care about the guy at a more personal level than most of you appear to - even if the last game I played by him was Black & White (which I liked and felt was quite ambitious). I really wish him well and despite his "hype" I don't think he does it with the intent of selling the games. I think he has a lot of visionary and then just isn't able to get all the ground-breaking ideas to become reality.

I spent many, many fond hours playing some of his games on the Amiga.
I remember re-playing the Syndicate demo time and time again before finally getting the original game, for example. That was a great Summer when I finally played it through the finish. If you could picture being back in 1993 and having such an open world - to some extent it was like what GTA did - you could do a LOT of stuff in Syndicate (actually including shooting a car to commandeer it, although you couldn't take it off-road).

Ivo.

[Kemiroch]

The only Lionhead game I really played was The Movies, and I loved it but it could have been oh-so-much more. I'm not even sure if Molyneux had anything to do with it really