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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Populous, Powermonger, Magic Carpet, loved them all. Dungeon Keeper (which the article doesn't mention) is still one of my top 10 games.

Black and White... OK, yeah, I enjoyed them, but it always felt like the full experience wasn't developed. It talked the talk but never walked the walk.

then... Godus. Yeah. Good concept, I played > 50 hours on it. but it never delivered at all.

It's like the more able the hardware and software was to deliver Molyneux's vision, the less deliverable his vision was.

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I'm not sure it's to do with more capable software or hardware. Instead it was far more about economic incentives. When Molyneux was earlier in his career he had strong constraints from his bosses and from his publishers. This forced the compromises needed to actually deliver achievable visions. As his reputation grew and he had more and more power in those relationships he was less and less constrained to adhere to an achievable vision. By the time of Black and White core parts of the game were just unbalanced and the economics of the game were broken because it was busy with the creature gimick. By the time you got to 22 cans he owned the company, he didn't need a publisher, hell he could just kickstarter the games. So suddenly all bets were off, he could make any promise he wanted and there was no one around to actually force him to deliver something.

I don't think Molyneux would've created Populous if he had had the reputation he has today. He would, and did, create Godus instead.

I feel his strength was being an endless fountain of interesting ideas combined with ability to inspire lots of hard work from his development team. I forget if it was Dungeon Keeper or Black and White where they talked to the development team while he was on a junket and they had no idea about of a bunch of the features he was promising. Ultimately I think he had a really talented team at Bullfrog who slowly burned out and over time people were less willing to kill themselves on death marches trying to carry out his whims.

> Godus. Yeah. Good concept, I played > 50 hours on it. but it never delivered at all.

That was a painful year or so. So many restarts and hopeful explorations only for it to.. never in any useful way ever give the game it promised.

A shame, as the basic mechanics were seemingly all there - I never could wrap my head around what went wrong.

The worst of it though is I now can't stand to listen to a childhood hero's bullshit.

It's ok, I still have Populous II and Syndicate on WinUAE

The first time I heard a musician refuse to interpret their own song, I found it odd. It made a little more sense as I got older and heard more examples.

When I started seeing people talk about the personalities behind video game franchises, it made a lot more sense. We don't need all of your vision, just some clues.

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