Molyneux: “I’m on a quest to make a truly great game”
Simon Williams September 30, 2012 - 11:30 amNews: Peter Molyneux has been talking about how he considers nothing he has worked on before to be the truly great game he is capable of creating, and that the smartphone space that 22 Cans is working in is ripe for innovation because the majority of smartphone games are “plainly shit.”
“I’m on a quest now to make a truly great game. I look at all the games I’ve done now and ask myself are they truly great?” Peter Molyneux says. ”I look at Populous and I ask is it great? I think it’s a lovely little world, I think it’s interesting but I don’t think it’s great.”
So for Molyneux, talking at a developer session at Eurogamer Expo 2012, leaving the comfort of Microsoft and founding 22 Cans was the start of a journey to create the truly great game he believes is within him.
Looking at the current state of the mobile platforms, Molyneux said: “There’s a million smartphone games are out there and they’re plainly shit.”
He went on to talk about using cloud gaming and mobile devices to sync our game experiences across multiple platforms, allowing players to consider their experiences wherever they go. He felt that developers had still not grasped the impact these could have.
“We’ve gotta use that stuff in a way that truly surprises people,” Molyneux asserted. “The only place I can’t game at the moment is in my car, and believe me I’ve given that a damn good try.”
He gave an example of how save games can not only be transferred but could be far more ubiquitous across consoles, PCs, handhelds and mobile: “Now we can keep these save games in the way we keep photographs, they are like memories of these fantastic things we experienced.”
He still is hugely excited by new and innovative ways to interact with games: “To touch a world, to touch and manipulate a world, that is like candy to me,” he said. ”Don’t think these new controllers – touchscreen, Kinect, SmartGlass – are the end, they’re just the beginning.”
And Molyneux was blunt in his opinion on where the AAA studios are at: “There are no games around now that define this generation. There are a lot of games out in the [Expo] hall that define the last generation.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the Eurogamer Expo 2012 here at BeefJack.
