Peter Molyneux
| Peter Molyneux OBE |
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Molyneux at the University of Southampton
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| Born |
Peter Douglas Molyneux 5 May 1959 Guildford, Surrey, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Video game designer |
| Years active | 1982- |
| Known for | |
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Peter Douglas Molyneux, OBE (/ˈmɒlᵻnjuː/; born 5 May 1959) is an English video game designer and programmer. He created the god games Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White as well as Theme Park, the Fable series and Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? His new studio 22Cans currently works on Godus and the brand new hiking resource-gathering game, The Trail-A Frontier.
Peter Molyneux began his career in 1982 by distributing and selling floppy disks which contained video games for Atari and the Commodore 64. He believed that including games on the disks would improve sales, and later concluded that the games were the main selling point.
He created The Entrepreneur, a text-based business simulation game about running a fledgling company. "In those days you could literally call a game 'Space Blob Attacks Mars' and sell about 50 million copies. So what did I do? I did a business simulation", Molyneux later said. Molyneux published the game himself in 1984 by duplicating hundreds of tapes on two Tandy Corporation recorders. After taking an advertising space in a game magazine, he prepared for the game's success; he later stated in an interview, "I was utterly convinced that this game would sell tons. I thought, 'You know, this letter box is just not big enough. It's just not going to fit all the envelopes.' So I cut – and this is no joke – I cut a bigger letter box". However, the game received only two orders, one of which Molyneux speculated was from his mother. In 2007, a GameSpy reviewer commented that the economic gameplay mechanics in Molyneux's Fable II may have been a descendant of The Entrepreneur, stating, "I'm a little concerned that it's Molyneux sneaking in a remix of his first game, Entrepreneur".
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