As the years wear on, sorting fact from fiction has become a kind of magical realist paradox with this Very Prodigal Son of Gaming-especially as more and more stories seem to involve the wild and wacky effects of alcohol. But the damage had already been done-Molyneux unceremoniously marched off to found another company which would bring him back to his roots as an intrepid designer, where he could work with a small team and “keep that tribe feeling”: Lionhead Studios.įor years, Molyneux claimed his departure was a matter of creative differences, but in his own modern re-telling, a drunken e-mail was the source of the whole mess. The resulting game would prove to be another hit, and some would argue the best refinement (or derivative) of the god game formula until Dungeon Keeper 2. Molyneux’s apparent dissatisfaction with Dungeon Keeper’s similarity to Command & Conquer even lead to a complete re-write six weeks before deadline (unsurprisingly, Glenn Corpes tells a different version). It was the development of the renowned Dungeon Keeper that would be his undoing: started after the release of Magic Carpet, the game dragged into a two-and-a-half year project and strained relations between the designer and the company. Molyneux’s time at the heights of corporate power would leave him unsatisfied, ultimately leading to his departure from EA in 1997, two years after Bullfrog’s acquisition by the very same. would land him a $625 million dollar deal with Google.īut they were short-lived, as golden years tend to be. With titles like Magic Carpet and Syndicate garnering critical acclaim, Bullfrog proved that it was not a one-trick pony these were also the golden years that made Mark Healey ( Little Big Planet) and Demis Hassabis, whose work on A.I. Populous and its sequel had made Molyneux a star overnight and conferred upon his ragtag crew a respectable name in the industry.
While Molyneux would later say that his new responsibilities overwhelmed him, the paycheck certainly did not-at least at first.
Bullfrog was everything to me, and suddenly I was this character that would have to walk into a room and make instant judgments about things.”īy 1994, Peter Molyneux had risen to the ranks of EA vice-president, and had seen Bullfrog Productions blossom into a sought-after partner to one of the largest publishers of the time. I was walking in, spending half an hour with them, and then walking out.
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