Games

Originally he was a well liked, well respected autuer game designer from back in the days when that was still a thing. He made games like Populous, and people thought he was pretty cool.

Around the time of Black and White, the cracks started to show. He had bought into his own hype, and had a real tendency to over promise and under deliver. But, even though it didn't exactly match up to some of his more grandiose descriptions, Black & White was still a very good game, so people didn't mind.

Fable was where things really went off the rails. The thing is, Fable was a very good game, a fun but largely quite contained RPG, feeling more like a western take on a Zelda game than anything (as in the N64 Zelda games).

But it was not the game that Molyneux promised. Not even slightly. The game he described was one that would have nearly photo realistic graphics, and a vast open world where you could literally see a distant mountain peak and set off to climb it. A world where you could kill a man in a duel, and his son would grow up dedicating their life to one day hunting you down and killing you. A world where you could conquer whole nations with armies of darkness at your command.

Think Skyrim crossed with Mount & Blade crossed with Crusader Kings crossed with Star Citizen. Now imagine that game releasing at the same time as Morrowind.

So by this point people were starting to understand that Molyneux was fundamentally incapable of a) reigning in his imagination, and b) operating in the modern world of game development.

And then we got to Curiosity. If you don't know, it was a mobile game where all you did was tap on a big cube made of layers of little cubes. Every time you tapped on a little cube it got destroyed, and everyone was working together on this, so each cube was destroyed for everyone. The goal was to destroy all the layers and reveal the centre, and whoever destroyed the last layer would win a prize. Kind of dumb, very simple. But Molyneux, Molyneux hyped this to the heavens. This wasn't just a "game", oh no, this was a grand social experiment the likes of which the world had never seen before, and the winner would recieve something "truly life changing." Molyneux hammered that point a lot. "Life changing."

What they recieved was that a character would be named after them in Godus, the Kickstarter game Molyneux was making. Oh, and they'd get "a portion" of the revenue from the game (it was never publicly stated how big that portion would be).

That was back in 2013. Ten years later Godus is still in early access, backers are clamouring for refunds after basically none of the Kickstarter promises were met, and the winner of Curiosity has not been contacted by the company since 2016.

He has never seen a cent of the money he was promised.

So, yeah, that's the problem with Molyneux.