After the recent controversy concerning the broken promises over his game, Godus, game developer Peter Molyneux has announced his retirement from public life, swearing off all future press interviews.
“The only answer is for me to retreat,” Molyneux told The Guardian via Skype. “I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It’s this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn’t worked.”
Molyneux, creator of such classic games as Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and Theme Park, and notable for the recent Fable series, has a fractious history with the press. His tendency to over-promise on in-development games, only to fail to deliver once the game has been released, has not gone unnoticed. The same pattern repeated itself with Godus.
“I suppose the big mistake was estimating how long the game would take to make,” Molyneux explains. “I very stupidly and naïvely didn’t build in enough contingency time into my predictions and I was 100% wrong. When you’re creating something that hasn’t existed before, it’s very, very hard to be precise about those things.”
Responding to the angry investors who funded Godus on Kickstarter, he said, “My hope is that in six to nine months time, people start to finally see the game they really did pledge for. That will be two to three years into development but that’s kind of what it takes when you do an original game. I wish it didn’t. Up until mid January, every single moment of this company was dedicated to Godus.”
“My answer to this is this simple,” Molyneux says. “I love working on games, it is my life. I am so honoured to be a part of the games industry, but I understand that people are sick of hearing my voice and hearing my promises. So I’m going to stop doing press and I’m going to stop talking about games completely. And actually I’m only giving you this interview now in answer to this terrible and awful, emotional time over the last three days. I think honestly the only answer to this is for me to completely stop talking to the press.”
However, reports suggest Molyneux made the same pledge to Rock, Paper, Shotgun a day earlier, and spoke to another site after this Guardian interview. Old habits die hard.
Source: The Guardian
I think Molyneux just dreams too big and so he often starts these huge game projects and hopes to get them done in a normal amount of time. I can understand the pressure he is under to give a time frame for his games, but if you’ve played his previous titles, you know that giving him an extra year or two to develop them would be worth it because he really has great vision when it comes to making games. He just needs the extra time to accomplish that.