Interviews// Peter Molyneux talks exclusively with SPOnG

Have we seen the last of the Black and White and The Movies franchises?

There are some very interesting things that we're working on the moment, in Fable 2 and this other project, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to have anything from Black and White and The Movies in the future.

We had a real choice at the end of Black and White, Fable and The Movies: do we keep Lionhead that size and continue doing three or four games at once, or do we keep as many of those people as we can and concentrate on just two?

Did you find that the unsuccessful Satellites programme also spread you a bit thin?

Yeah - that was an experiment that didn't work because we made a fatal mistake. And the fatal mistake we actually made was not becoming a publisher. If we had been a publisher, the Satellites scheme would have worked really well, I think. But because we had to ultimately negotiate contracts with publishers, what did they want? They didn't want some new Satellites thing, they wanted a contract with Lionhead. What we should have done is take someone on board with experience of publishing and become a publisher.

Let's talk platforms. Obviously, now, you're not going to slag off the Xbox 360, but you must at least be intrigued by the Wii? You've said good things about it in the past.

I think Nintendo have done a fantastic job. There's something at the end of Game On that says: "Never underestimate Nintendo". They have got the worst-performing piece of next-generation hardware - it's only slightly better than the original Xbox. But the genius of what they did was realise that consumers don't give an arse about how many bits and bobs and flips and flops and that malarkey consoles have. When we were at 32-bit and 64-bit, it was fine, but how many bits do we have now? What they care about is that they're going to get something that they haven't seen before. What they have done, brilliantly, is to say: "Right, we're going to revolutionise not the box but what you hold," and they've done that very well. I think Sony jumping on that bandwagon, quite blatantly, and not coming up with such a sexy message, is poor. I've played with the Wii and I still think it's a challenging name. You do get used to it, and they've made it unique. But I'm waiting for the Nintendo Poo and then they'd have the set.

You could call them number one and number two. But do you feel that Sony seems to have lost the plot? They seem to be obsessed by Blu-Ray.

Purely as an individual, it seems to me that Sony are the king of the hill, and it's that king of the hill syndrome. When you're at the top, you've got nowhere to go - you don't need to fight as hard as people scrambling up the hill. You don't need to revolutionise like the Wii did. You don't need to think so strategically, like Microsoft did so fantastically. I'm not saying this because I'm a part of Microsoft, but what Microsoft have done for gaming in general with Xbox Live is brilliant. The gamertags and Live Arcade are fantastic. And when that gets fully entrenched, it will totally change the way we think of gaming. I think Nintendo have done a fantastic job with their controller and the message that it's all about excitement, but what I would say is that, as a designer, it's not about fully using all the capacity to move the controller around, but how you can make people feel comfortable about playing your game. It's fine for party games, but you certainly couldn't play Fable with the sword being slashed around by the controller - your arms would fall off. So it's more about clever little ways of using that controller.

I think Microsoft have done a fantastic job with Xbox Live, and making the Xbox 360 an entertainment box.

Also, the developers seem to prefer their devkits to Sony's.

It's true, but we always complain about our devkits. Sony have taken the Live stuff from Microsoft and the controller stuff from Nintendo, and they've got this Blu-Ray stuff which offers much more capacity, but it's a lot more hassle. So there's everything to prove for Sony, but then 70 per cent market penetration is pretty good...

Things might have changed recently with regard to Satellites-type schemes, because you can start developers off now with games for Live Arcade, the Wii and so on?

Yes. There's this new model emerging, and it's a combination of mobile, Live Arcade, online, PC development and work-for-hire, and that's a viable model. If you wanted to go out tomorrow and start up a developer, it would be better to do that than trying to do an epic, all-encompassing game. I think the heart of the Satellite scheme was right, but the way in which we approached it, considering the size that we were and the experience we had, wasn't.

And also the UK developer community was depressed then. How do you see the state of UK development now?

You are seeing little teams bubble up again, which is a great sight. But the people who are left are a lot leaner, meaner, more efficient and more professional. You're not seeing the people leave companies and set up businesses any more. Bullfrog spawned a huge number of little companies and there are none left. They tried and did well for a time - the likes of Mucky Foot, Elixir, Lost Toys, Razorback and Blowfish. That goes to show that that particular time was very challenging for small developers. I think you're right, in that as long as you don't try to conquer the Earth with your first game, you can make a business. So I'm a little bit more optimistic about it.

Did you make more money selling Bullfrog to EA or selling Lionhead to Microsoft?

That's a very loaded question. Obviously, money wasn't the issue in either of those transactions. I don't know, really. I haven't done the math. But we had shared quite widely the ownership - it wasn't like Bullfrog which, principally was owned by me and Les Edgar. But tens of people owned shares in Lionhead. So it was nice to spread that quite widely, although some people thought that they were going to get billions of pounds, as you do.

What would you rate as the best game you've ever made?

Probably Fable. It was the biggest challenge, certainly. You know, firstly to go out and do a role-playing game - which we'd never done before - and secondly to do a console game. And for it to go on and then sell almost three million units - I don't think any other role-playing game on the Xbox got near to that. I really feel proud of that. And I guess Populous is always going to be the other one I feel proud of, because there wasn't any history before that: it was just designed as a game. But those days have gone for everybody.

All the bases are covered now, I suppose?

No. There's going to be more originality in the next ten years than there has been in the history of games so far, I think. Because we're going to have to. We've got everybody who wants to play games; now, we've got to create the games for the people who don't even think of games as entertainment. To do that, we're going to have to approach it in a very different way.

And which games were you least happy with? I enjoyed playing The Movies but it didn't sell.

Yes, that was a mystery. I seeded the idea, but I was doing Black And White 2 while Mark was doing The Movies, so it was still a joint effort but, for me, The Movies had two big flaws: it was a little bit too frantic and making a movie still wasn't quite simple enough. But I was surprised it didn't do better. The best reviews we ever got were for The Movies. It definitely came out at the wrong time of year, and at a time when the PC market is in ruins.

And is Dimitri still ongoing?

Erm, I do forget I say these things and they always come back to haunt me.

You've been talking about Dimitri for years.

I have - and it has been going on for years. It's a very brave concept. But if you did go up to people here, they would definitely be able to tell you about Dimitri.

Thanks to Peter for taking time, yet again, to speak with us.