
The God Who Peter Molyneux Forgot - danso
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who-peter-molyneux-forgot
======
MrJagil
It's interesting, I started following development of Godus and
[https://wftogame.com/](https://wftogame.com/) at the same time, both
spiritual successors to early Bullfrog games. None of them are out of
beta/alpha/early-access/whatever yet, both having been delayed for YEARS.

It's such a strange thing to witness; this developer passion and designer
dream just slowly withering away. Play Godus for 2 minutes and you will _feel_
why people ache for that experience. It's beautiful. Like The Witness. Calm.
And WFTO, watch the trailer. The speaker is the same guy who did dungeon
keeper in 1998. These games are pulling your heartstrings, no wonder they get
their money. In some way, I would _still_ throw money at another one of these
games, if only because a slim chance of a new Bullfrog title is better than
none.

At least Blizzard is still going strong; if anyone want a truly unique and
_delightful_ experience I can recommend Hearthstone.

Maybe the indie game world need an incubator, like YC.

~~~
TeMPOraL
A tangent - don't know if it's intentional on the part of the developers, but
I can't stop reading [http://wtfogame.com](http://wtfogame.com) as "WTF
ogame". I honestly expected to see a browser MMO under that link.

~~~
MrJagil
The name "War for the Overworld" was the first sign that this game was going
to lack in aesthetics, which was such a big part of the old Bullfrog games
(sound design, graphics, general feel, humor etc). To be fair though, Dungeon
Keeper III was going to be named something along those lines, and actually,
despite the delays, WFTO seems to be doing pretty good.

------
javadocmd
Godus is really an extended performance art piece. Molyneux is showing us that
real gods appear, make big promises, and then leave their followers -- even
the most sainted among them -- to wonder their whole lives if the promises are
true.

------
frik
Peter Molyneux. He was a great game designer in the 1990s at Bullfrog. I mean
Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper (to a lesser
extend also Black & White and Fable) were great games.

He is really good at PR, he always promises a lot and he almost never delivers
(game functionality, not about the article). He has a bad reputation IMHO at
least since Black & White 1 in 2001, his earlier games were great! Though he
is a charming guy and get away with it. The article is rubbish, just like
Molyneux latest 22Cans's "Godus" god game.

~~~
the_af
Was Syndicate (an all time favorite of mine) designed by Molyneux? According
to Wikipedia, it was designed by someone named Sean Cooper. I have to
wonder... is it a coincidence that it's not a God game?

(To give Molyneux his well-earned credit, I also loved Populous and Dungeon
Keeper!)

~~~
AlyssaRowan
Yes, but Molyneux's design was called _Higher Functions_ \- all you controlled
was the "mood" bars (adrenaline, blue funk, don't remember), no direct control
over the agents. Used to have some assembly source from it, I think.

------
minimaxir
It's worth noting that it's highly likely that Curiosity itself was rigged;
infinite layers of the cube, until the marketing died down.
([http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/1/4287428/curiosity-
ending-22c...](http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/1/4287428/curiosity-
ending-22cans-peter-molyneux-interview) )

It's also worth noting that startups do exactly similar tactics with
waitlists. (what, you really think 100,000 people would be willing to join a
wait list for a random startup with no publicity?)

~~~
furyofantares
> what, you really think 100,000 people would be willing to join a wait list
> for a random startup with no publicity?

Anything specific you're referring to?

~~~
minimaxir
It mostly started happening after Mailbox's waitlist of hundreds of thousands
and subsequent buyout from Dropbox _during the wait list period_.

I saw this article this morning and it made me raise my eyebrows:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-league-app-
has-a-75000-pe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-league-app-
has-a-75000-person-waitlist-2015-2)

A waitlist isn't inherently impossible for startups; I'd expect a few hundred
at most, but 75,000?

EDIT: All email clients have the same name. :p

~~~
thirdsun
You meant Mailbox, though Google's Inbox followed with that waiting line
model.

------
VikingCoder
"Peter Molyneux breaks promise about how awesome something he's making will
be. Film at 11."

~~~
swang
Unfulfilled promises since 2001.

~~~
VikingCoder
Because he's not satisfied...

...until you're not satisfied.

------
cannonpult
...A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an
email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded
after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind.

Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won,
he asked? An email appeared with a the message "Be sure to drink your
Ovaltine."

------
alasdairnicol
I have a happier experience of winning a Molyneux competition. Back in the
day, I entered a Theme Hospital competion on the Bullfrog website, and
received a copy of Syndicate and a Bullfrog leather jacket in the post. I was
maybe 12, so the XL jacket was far too big for me, but I was still thrilled.

------
spiritplumber
Crowfunding not delivering seems to be a fairly standard thing. What are the
advantages of overdelivering?

~~~
IvyMike
Molyneux has a personal brand that he has damaged through this kickstarter. If
you don't consider your reputation to be valuable, it soon won't be.

~~~
minimaxir
The issue is that Molyneux has had his personal brand tarnished for awhile
(Fable + Project Milo), but he still received reputation and respect.

------
peterashford
It's poor that the developers didn't keep in contact with Bryan but that's not
Molyneux's fault - I'm sure he's not the company's PA.

It's a bugger the game isn't released yet - but he explained in the article
the external unforeseen issues that caused the delay. Software often gets
delayed. Why is this illegal for PM?

PM's only fault was getting excited about features he wanted for Fable which
they weren't able to implement. That's a communication style issue which I
think he has learned from. Other than that he has an enviable backlog of
titles which prove his ability to deliver. I don't believe he deserves the BS
he gets from gamers who seem to think PM owes them something.

------
3am
So this is a non-story. The royalty was based around a feature the company
hasn't been able to deliver and was not contractually obligated to by any
time. The kid doesn't seem particularly upset, and while it's not
heartwarming, there doesn't seem to be any wrongdoing anywhere (other than
etiquette-wise for the studio staying in touch more frequently... and perhaps
they didn't want to spill dirty laundry about execution/financial issues to a
contest winning teenager).

edit: Surprised by the negative reaction to this post. At least 5 downvotes
altogether. I'm not endorsing Monyneux's actions in any way. I'm just saying
that it's obvious what happened. They promised royalties on a product they
failed to deliver for business and technical reasons. Now they are pivoting to
a new game to try to stay in business.

They should have owned up to it, and given the kid an apology, a check for
1000 GBP, and modelled a character in "The Trail" as damage control.

~~~
JimmyM
I think it's a story because of Molyneux. Peter Molyneux has failed to deliver
completely for a long time.

With Godus, with Curiosity, it increasingly seems as though he failed to
deliver even a finished game and in addition it seems as though he failed to
even try.

For many gamers, it's the end of the final shred of Molyneux's respectability.
People may snark about it, "Oh, what a surprise", but this was his last
chance.

The royalty (or at least some prize) formed part of a concept that was at the
heart of _Curiosity_ \- some grand, real, reward that justified all the cow-
clicking nonsense. As such, it was an essential part of the game that people
played. Meanwhile, _Godus_ continues to languish without the promised
features.

Comparing him with Shyamalan, this would be his _Last Airbender_. Not earth-
shattering news that he messed it up completely, but final confirmation that
his talent - if he ever had it - seems to have deserted him.

~~~
actsasbuffoon
That's harsh. Molyneux has done incredible work in the past. He played a part
in Populous, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, and Black & White. All of those games
were ground breaking.

Peter Molyneux's greatest strength is also his greatest weakness: he's
incredibly creative and ambitious. He aims very high, often a little beyond
his reach. Frankly, that's what we should all be doing. I don't quite remember
the quote, or the person who said it, but it went something like, "If you're
not failing the majority of the time, you're not aiming high enough."

I'd rather play a game that was trying to be incredible but fell just short,
rather than a game that aimed to be passable and hit the mark. Maybe that's
what bugs me about Curiosity and Godus; these aren't the big, ambitious games
I've grown accustomed to from Molyneux.

~~~
vacri
_He aims very high, often a little beyond his reach._

The problem is that you used the word 'often' instead of 'consistently', which
has been the case for the past 15 years. Black & White was the beginning of
the end and the pattern for 21st Century Molyneux: promise the world, get
bored, fail to deliver. At a shallow level, B&W looked great, but it was
terrible as a game and an experience; both tedious and failing to deliver on
promised complexity. That trend continues all the way to Godus.

It's not like he's hit-and-miss, and a few failures are okay as long as you
have some hits mixed in. It's that the first half of his career was
consistently hit, and the second half consistently miss.

------
cpeterso
"Molyneux insists 22Cans is in rude health"

~~~
paulannesley
I had to look up “rude health”. It counterintuitively means “excellent
health”.

~~~
cpeterso
oh! I assumed it was a typo for "good health" because there was, what I
assume, another typo earlier in the article: _Does Bryan feel duped, I wonder?
"I should do. You would think. … "_

------
devonoel
Surprise of the century, Peter Molyneux doesn't deliver on his promises. Still
waiting for that acorn to grow into a mighty oak Molyneux, you silly bastard.

------
DonHopkins
I chatted Peter Molyneux up after he hyped up his cube clicker at his keynote
address at the Unity conference in Amsterdam a few years ago. He didn't
appreciate it when I ventured a guess that the secret thing he was hiding
inside the cube was a cow.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker)

I fondly recall the exciting demos and wild claims that Peter Molyneux gave of
Black and White at CGDC during the late 90's, which reminds me of Joe Spark's
exciting demos and wild claims about Total Distortion that he was showing at
practically every computer conference for several years during the early 90's.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Distortion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Distortion)

I think they were both interesting games, over-demoed before their time then
under-shipped after their time. They had a lot of unique original ideas, but
both would have been much better received were it not for all the hype that
set such unrealistic expectations.

The idea behind Total Distortion was that you went out into a virtual world,
explored, fought guitar battles, took pictures, and shot video. Behind the
scenes, the pictures and videos were annotated with metadata about the
subjects.

Then you went back to your multimedia production studio and used a miniature
kid-friendly version of Adobe Premier to produce music videos using the raw
content you gathered from the game. Implementing a music video editor in
Director was an amazing technical achievement in and of itself.

But then (and here's the hard part) you had to sell you music videos to
simulated hollywood agents, who evaluated your videos based on their (very
diverse and whacky) personal preferences. The metadata in the pictures and
video you used would entertain or disgust the various agents in different
ways, and they'd give you feedback along the lines of "I'm a people person,
and I want to see more people in it!" or "I'll be honest fellas, it was
sounding great, but I could have used a little more cowbell."

But Joe Sparks demoed it at so many conferences that it was a running joke
that it would never be released, because he keep adding new cool features to
make each demo more awesome than the last. When it finally was released, it
was a big disappointment, after seeing all those fantastic demos.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20090516110053/http://www.gamespo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090516110053/http://www.gamespot.com/features/vaporware/html/number3.html)

It was a brilliant idea that was way before its time, and pushed the limits of
the technology, incorporating machinima and video editing into a game, but the
execution was mediocre compared to all the great hype. It was terribly
difficult to implement that kind of stuff in Director in the early 90's. It
would be great to see somebody try the same idea again, but with modern
technology.

------
SixSigma
Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
~Karl Popper

------
cpr
Should HN listings correct bad grammar in article titles? ;-)

~~~
kennymeyers
At this point in time, I believe using who or whom is a stylistic choice. It
has long been accepted to use "who" in this context.

~~~
cpr
So, if actual correct grammar doesn't matter any more, then I suppose
everything is a "stylistic choice"?

~~~
rspeer
Don't spread grammatical urban legends. "Who" and "whom" are both perfectly
correct here, and I dare you to find a reliable source that says "who" isn't
allowed.

Reader's Digest, your grade-school teacher, and anything written before
lingustics was a science do not count as reliable sources for this purpose.

~~~
nilkn
I'm not much of a stickler for grammar, and I don't particularly care. I'd be
happy if "whom" died off.

However, it's still taught in school, in college, and in any modern grammar
book. It's clearly coming up on the cusp of disappearing, but it certainly
hasn't been written out of the books just yet, and I'm not sure why you're
pretending that it has been. This sort of mistake would have been corrected in
basically every English class I ever took in the last five years. It would
have been corrected not just by the professor, but also by a majority of peers
if peer grading was utilized.

My rule of thumb is to basically never use "whom" in speech and to
conditionally use it in writing, depending on the context and how formal it
is. I'll generally use it correctly when writing posts like this on the
internet as well, but anything less formal and I won't care. I feel like the
threshold of minimum formality to justify using it is always rising, and
perhaps in the next decade we'll see that threshold rise up above the level of
formality of, say, a paper for a literature class. But that definitely hasn't
happened yet.

This reflects my general belief that grammar is a spectrum. It's less about
the mindless application of rules and more about pattern recognition. Rules of
grammar are best understood as being part of a context, and that context is
not just the rest of the sentence or paragraph; it includes the social context
as well, the mode of communication (written, verbal, etc.), and basically
everything else you could think of. My description above is an example of how
one rule -- that rule pertaining to the usage of "whom" \-- morphs according
to context.

To summarize, grammar is the art of satisfying two constraints simultaneously:
(1) making sure nobody else thinks you've made a mistake; (2) making sure your
efforts at (1) aren't going to distract people.

(1) could be seen as maximizing acceptance of your grammatical decisions, and
(2) could be seen as minimizing social offense. "whom" is a great example,
because in certain contexts people might recognize it as correct but they'll
think you're only using it because you're trying to show off how smart you
are. You've unnecessarily distracted them by using it, which violates (2).

~~~
rspeer
I'm not pretending anything. I'm not saying you shouldn't use "whom". You have
a reasonable view of different registers, except for the part where you
believe that "whom" has to "die off" before "who" can be fully correct in this
usage, or that "who" is any kind of mistake.

The words are just both correct. Some people like to argue from authority that
there's some rule against using "who" there, except -- as is the case for many
prescriptive bogeymen -- the supposed authority _actually doesn 't exist at
all_.

Ask anyone who scientifically studies the actual English language for a living
-- fenomas's comment links to a good source at Cambridge, which is very well
reputed in linguistics -- and they will not cast a single bit of doubt on
using "who" to introduce a relative clause. Everyone uses it, including very
good writers.

It's easy to caricature linguists as always saying "as long as you can be
understood, anything goes". And that's unfortunate -- nobody here would put up
with misunderstanding and making fun of the work biologists do, for example,
but for some reason everyone thinks that being literate makes them qualified
to disagree with linguists.

There are linguists who make recommendations about not just how to be
understood but how to write _well_ , based on lots of study and observation on
how people use language in all registers, and if you're looking for an
authority you should be looking to them. If you do look -- I'll point at
fenomas's comment again, because he's the only one who actually linked a
source -- you'll find they don't support your position.

It's too bad you took a lot of English classes that wasted time on correcting
this word. (Editing out a harsh and hasty conclusion I came to about your
English professors here.) If I assume the best of them, I'll say it was a
pedagogical exercise. Sometimes it's important to distinguish different cases.
This _isn 't_ a situation where you have to distinguish cases in English, but
you _can_.

So maybe your classes told you to use "whom" there kind of like a class in
object-oriented programming might tell you to create a "class Rabbit" that
inherits from "class Animal" \-- as a way of showing that you understand the
concept, not as something that you'd actually have to do in the real world.

~~~
nilkn
My apologies, I learned something about relative clauses today. I still like
my general theory that I posted but I accept that I was simply wrong about
this particular case.

