Peter Molyneux Interview

Kieron Gillen of The Guardian had the chance to interview Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux “on the problem of superstar game designers.”

“Behind the scenes, I think it’s more true than ever before that a director or producer – or a ‘vision holder’, if you don’t want to think of it in film terms – is pushing a franchise forward,” he says. It’s because how mainstream games have grown, from the single bedroom programmer into teams which, at their operational peak, can have well over a hundred people working.

“It’s not as if these teams are run in a communistic way, where everyone has their view and you can’t point and say well, this game is being driven by this person,” he says. “It’s just not true. You can’t have 100 people working on a project without there being really clear creative leadership. Games aren’t done in that sort of way no creative vision is”.

Not that all teams will necessarily publicly agree – the flip of publisher paranoia are the internal politics of the development team, which don’t necessarily like the idea of a creative visionary.

“For a long, long time I’ve been credited unduly,” he says, “Not so much these days, because the role of a designer is much, much more understood. But for a very long time, I was way, way over-credited for many things.”