Interface
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Developer Profile / Peter Molyneuxe looked back at
Bullfrog a few issues
back, but since then
it’s been twisting about
in the back of our
collective hive mind: we need to talk
more about the Peter in the room.
So here we go: Peter Molyneux.
The man of a thousand tall
tales; who invented the
god game, but who also
popularised massively
over-egging the contents of
his games in some bizarre
self-aggrandising routine that
went on for many a year,
before he was called out
one too many times over it.
He’s a complex character,
it’s fair to say.
But he’s also a man with a fun
story of entry to the games industry,W
Britain’s most controversial gaming legend: profiled
Peter Molyneux
Developer Profilefirst making a game after seeing how
popular the software he’d coded had
been, and then seeing it utterly fail and
moving on to becoming a baked bean
exporter. Yes, really. At least that’s
what we’re told. Molyneux’s true entry
to the industry came a few years after
Commodore mistook his business
creating productivity software, Taurus,
for a much bigger company of a similar
name and handed him multiple free
Amigas on which to make software,
because they thought he was someone
else. Wait, what?
Yes, Commodore handed over
thousands of pounds of free hardware
in a case of mistaken identity and
kickstarted what would – eventually –
become the birth of a gaming legend.
After the productivity market proved
somewhat arid, Molyneux and his
cohorts (who had since cleared up the
misunderstanding with Commodore)
pivoted to games, forming Bullfrog
in the late 1980s and porting a
friend’s game to the format they were
now rather familiar with. Druid II:
Enlightenment was fine, but it wasn’t until
1989 and Populous that things really
started going well for the team.
Inventing a new genre isn’t something
you do every day, so it’s no surprise
Bullfrog – under Molyneux’s stewardship- became known for making games
where you acted as an invisible, floating,
all-seeing super-manager. Being a literal
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