Interviews// Peter Molyneux

'People working for me tend to go insane.' I'm paraphrasing, but that's the general message Peter Molyneux is giving to a student he's chatting with as I wait to steal a precious few minutes of his time at the GameHorizon conference up in Gateshead.

That may sound slightly terrifying, but he's taking the time to actively encourage the chap to apply for an internship at Lionhead, the studio he heads up. This is a man who moments earlier was signing Fable inlay sleeves for another attendee. He might be the games equivalent to a rockstar, but he's also thoroughly approachable.

Hang on, you want an introduction to Mr Molyneux? Well, to slip into thoroughly clichéd territory, he's a man who needs little introduction. Founder of Lionhead, creative director of Microsoft Games Studios' European operations, he's worked on titles such as Populous, Black and White and, more recently, the Fable games. Perhaps more significantly right now, he's also been front and centre in Microsoft's push to get the recently-named Kinect at the top of the gaming agenda. His studio is also the one behind the currently controversial Milo project.

Speaking to him, he's clearly a man who's passionate about his work, while simultaneously keeping a curios distance between himself and Microsoft. He refers to the corporate entity as something distinctly separate to himself, even while praising its work. He's thoughtful and engaged and there's a constant sense that he wants to share more about the projects he's intimately involved with, media training just getting the better of his enthusiasm.

Intimately involved with these tentpole projects, or not, before we got to Milo, E3, Fable and the ins and outs of what Kinect means for gamers, I wanted to know if he's still making the naming slip many around the SPOnG office are...


SPOnG: Do you still call Kinect 'Natal' by mistake sometimes?

Peter Molyneux: Yeah. All the time. I have to say 'Kinect' three times before I go to sleep at night. You know, it's like when you say any name a hundred times it becomes locked in your brain and then when it's changed it just doesn't seem right. It's like suddenly you're calling your kid by [a different] name. It doesn't work. But it's going in there now.


SPOnG: I was a little outraged by it. We were talking in a podcast the other week about what we thought they were going to call Natal and I decided it was 'Xbox Space'. It would have been brilliant! And then when they take it into the office they could call it 'Office Space'.

Peter Molyneux: Oh, very good. Yeah, I like it.

SPOnG: I thought I'd nailed it, but then the conference came around...

Peter Molyneux: They kept it very secret. I didn't know about... they were very clever. What they did, was they kept calling it different names internally, because there were so many people. So, every week there would be a different name for it. So, with lots and lots of different names buzzing around and Natal being just being the original codename of the South American village, but [the name 'Kinect'] kind of made sense. I don't mind it. I'm completely neutral.


SPOnG: How did E3 go, do you feel? The Microsoft show at the start was something quite different to what you normally get at E3...

Peter Molyneux: It was kind of what I said in my talk. In one sense it was amazingly exciting, it was this nuclear arms race, everyone was rushing from press conference to press conference.

For me I expected a little bit more out of Sony, especially. I thought they were going to really up their game and I was slightly disappointed by their press conference. I think, hats off to Microsoft because they went large. They had the Cirque du Soleil event and then I think the press briefing was über-professional - it was rehearsed so many times it just came across as über-professional.

3DS looked pretty cool. Then just walking round the show, it just seemed that it was bigger than it's ever, ever been before. But the amount of noise that was being generated was just really focused on a few things.