Interviews// Peter Molyneux

SPOnG: The focus seems to have shifted a little at E3, because although there was a lot of excitement around it and a lot of spectacle, there weren't so many new announcements. I know Sony in particular announced a couple of big games in the weeks before E3. I know you had the Xbox 360 slim...

Peter Molyneux: That was a well-kept secret, actually. It was code-named, I knew about it months before, but to actually keep it a secret and to have it at retail a few days after was really cool.

You're right... but, hang on a second, aren't you just expecting too much? We can't do this every year! We can't pull rabbits out of the hat every year and it is, because of the sheer number of people that are involved in E3 - hundreds and hundreds of people - it's very, very hard to keep a lid on all that. It's incredibly hard, because there's a lot of stuff going on. There are a lot of 'pre-announces' going on, so that rather than it leaking out it's actually controlled to be out.

So, you know, I think last year, 2009, because I think Natal (now Kinect) did seem to come from nowhere, and it did seem to be very different. We all hoped for a similar rabbit this year and it wasn't quite there, I agree.


SPOnG: I wanted to ask about Milo, because of all the recent confusion (about whether it will be released as a game). I think some of the confusion comes from people not really understanding what it is. It does look like a very well-polished tech demo.

Peter Molyneux: Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

SPOnG: I don't think people understand in what way it's a game. You mentioned 'narrative' in your talk earlier. Is there anything you can say that might explain that a little bit?

Peter Molyneux: I mean, here's the thing - it's a very very brave, very unique title that is very hard for me to talk about without you seeing. So, I've been asked not to talk about anything at all about it.

We did show it at E3 behind closed doors to some celebrities and to some very high profile people in Hollywood. And, universally everyone loved it. But they didn't show it on the press briefing and oddly, strangely, a lot of the Cirque du Soleil event was actually about Milo, weirdly enough, which you'll see at my TED talk in two weeks time.

So, what I'm doing in the TED talk, because a TED talk has to be 18 minutes, you can't go over, so I spend two minutes talking about the tech and then we are just going to play the game. So you're going to see the game. You're going to see little bits of the first hour of the game. And I think you'll get what the game is, then.


SPOnG: OK. Well, a lot of what we've seen for Kinect is stuff like Kinectimals and the sports title, and as you were saying in your talk, a lot of that stuff seems kind of obvious. Is there anything we've not seen yet - or maybe it's Milo - that's going to make us go, 'OK, that's how this is going to really do something different games-wise'.

Peter Molyneux: Now, you said a word there, you said the word 'gamers'. Now, I think gamers - and we are doing work on Kinect in Fable, we haven't announced what that is, we've announced that we are doing work on it - and I think gamers are going to have to wait a little bit longer. Because Kinect is more for a broader audience than it is for gamers. The challenge that I put down to everybody, as we kind of said, is 'you've got to think of it in a completely different way.'

So, I'm sure there will be games that have more core gamer [elements] for Kinect, but at the moment the focus is on those titles that you saw at E3. Which, as a gamer I would definitely play them, but there's not a first-person shooter. There's a racing game, Forza, which is fantastic, but so far as core gamers are concerned I think there's a lot of work behind the scenes going on.