The man might be insane, but he's a great interview. And he really can be inspirational. That was a fantastic interview, Patrick. Keep up the awesome work. :)
Peter Molyneux
Peter Molyneux is a veteran British game designer renowned for his pathological lying, innovation with AI, and business simulation and RPG/God genres.
It Came From the Molyjam: Peter Molyneux
Fantastic interview Patrick!
Peter Molyneux may over-promise a lot, but most of the games he's worked on is some of my favorite games.
One Monday morning at school, back when I was a teenager, my friend Chris came up to me and told me the following: At the weekend he'd been into Ultima (our local indie videogame shop in Guildford) and there was some guy there showing off this game he'd made himself where you played god and managed the lives of tiny people. Crazy to think that Peter Molyneux once demoed his game to a shopful of teenagers. So glad he's going back to the small-scale operation.
I'm way excited Molyneux is done with Microsoft. Maybe he can focus on a good game now instead of rehashing Fable.
Wow I think back to that video with Nolan North a while ago, and then think about this article. Tricky has come a long way in such a short time.
@patrickklepek has really turned a tough welcome into becoming one of the premier content creators for Giant bomb.
Great series of articles Patrick. I've decided to work on brushing up my FL Studio skills over the next year and attend Sydney's Molyjam. Always been a dream to work on Music for games, it's fantastic that there is now a way for me to experience it in such a great way.
Anyway, Inspiration is undervalued - so Thankyou. :)
@patrickklepek: Fantastic interview. Couldn't help but smile when reading it. You kinda touched on this being "beyond the indie scene" in a sense, so I wonder if you've read any of Anna Anthropy's works (like "Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form"), which deals with games as 'folk art' (I think that was the wording used), as a D.I.Y. thing everybody could and should try to do (like the anecdote on the married couple with no prior experience making a game in 36 hours) - the barrier to entry in making games is lower than ever, and I love that. There's just an incredible diversity in the D.I.Y. scene, and a case where I think quantity is much more fascinating than quality.
@AdMordem said:
Wow I think back to that video with Nolan North a while ago, and then think about this article. Tricky has come a long way in such a short time.
@patrickklepek has really turned a tough welcome into becoming one of the premier content creators for Giant bomb.
Great series of articles Patrick. I've decided to work on brushing up my FL Studio skills over the next year and attend Sydney's Molyjam. Always been a dream to work on Music for games, it's fantastic that there is now a way for me to experience it in such a great way.
Anyway, Inspiration is undervalued - so Thankyou. :)
FL Studio is a great piece of software, but may I recommend you to try out some tracker programs? Tracker music is very versatile as video game music (and can be really efficient when it comes to file sizes as well - as size is determined by the quality and length of the instruments/samples used, rather than the length of the song), as it is played back (and can be manipulated) in real-time by the game. They're not the most user-friendly programs you'll come across, but I think Renoise, MadTracker 2 (discontinued, but still available, was used for the music in VVVVVV), OpenMPT and MilkyTracker might be easy to start with. The file size thing isn't quite as important these days, and most games use entirely pre-recorded music (in which case something like FL Studio will do fine), but in the indie scene and for downloadable or mobile games tracker music is still very prevalent.
@mnzy said:
@fisk0: What would you say is the easiest to get some decent sounding stuff out of? I could need some simple tracks.
Tracker/mod music are open formats, so you can go to http://modarchive.org/ (which has almost every song released since 1987) and download some of the more highly rated songs to see how they were made, they also have lists sorted on license, with some songs in the public domain and creative commons which you can extract instruments and samples from to have some sounds to get started with. On the front page they also have a link to the Kiarchive, which is an old but huge collection of samples for tracker music, some of the stuff there is probably pretty dated now, but there's still some great sounds to be found there too,
It would be amazing to see international game festivals as Molyneux was talking about at the end. It would depend on where the events would be held. They're s not as expensive as film festivals I assume, so they could be held in a major city in every state.
Also, I didn't know that Patrick the embodiment of Giant Bomb itself. Hell of a step up from a staff member.
I leave you with this thought: Why can't guns shoot anything but deadly projectiles?
I love Peter Molyneux because of Populus, Syndicate, Theme Park, Black & White, and most of all Dungeon Keeper, probably my favourite game of all time.
I had a Prima guide for Dungeon Keeper that had a really great section behind the scenes of the game's development at Bullfrog, which really really fascinated me. This was a game that the Carter brothers (creators of Fable), Jonty Barnes (now at Bungie) and Mark Healey (Media Molecule) all worked on. I have since lost that book unfortunately, but from the age of about 11, I was a huge fan of Molyneux and his team at Bullfrog.
I don't know.... Every time I read about him I can't help but think about the utter failures the Fable series has become....
@Seastalk said:
"maybe indie it the wrong word"
is.
I could only find one typo in this. It's good to see the editing process getting better.
By the way, great interview.
"And people are going in and I though “Oh god, they look so smart and clever and brilliant” and I was winding myself up as usual."
RAAAGE!!!
Glad I finally got around to reading this. I really do love Peter Molyneux's enthusiasm, passion, and knowledge. I've never played any of his non-Fable games. Maybe someday soon.
I am a huge fan of Molyneux, even his Fable games have had a glimmer of his brilliance, but the games that really made me a fan were games like Syndicate and Black & White (Populous would also be one, if I had a PC at the time. Was at a gameless era in my life then.)
Molyneux is a developer that actually has valuable ideas. He's not a "studio". You can easily see the difference between games spawned out of one guys(or a tiny group of guys/gals) brain over games made by committee. (Bastion would be a much played example of the tiny team one, and CoD would be the perfect example of the latter. Not saying CoD is bad(although I feel it's completely overrated and boring) but you can really feel the lack of focus in games like that. They just feel flavorless and unfocused. Like a car commercial VS a loose sketch done by someone who has passion for what they're doing.
More devs like Molyneux, please. And I think we're getting there. Already we see some developers who are not afraid of being out there. I don't particularly like the crassness of John Snow on a personal level, but I have no trouble seeing why he'd be like that, or how it would benefit him. Single minded focus is an asset as far as creative endevours go.
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