That Time I Demoed an iOS Game to Peter Molyneux
In case you’re not familiar, Peter Molyneux is a British game designer. You might know him from games like Populus, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, and Fable. Or, you might know him from his somewhat…mixed reputation. Or you might know him for his somewhat…interesting game ideas. Truly he is a man of multitudes. It’s the last one that’s particularly relevant, as someone started a parody twitter account of him to tweet joke ridiculos game ideas, called “Peter Molydeux”. Things like “What if [in a driving game] you drove the road instead of the car?”, and “A village with just 2 houses. You control a doorbell for both houses. Can you bring the 2 inhabitants together and make them fall in love?”.
Someone had the absolutely fantastic idea to hold a game jam where the aim was to make a game based on a Peter Molydeux tweet. I couldn’t make it that year, so was very jealous when I learnt that Peter Molyneux himself turned up. So when I heard of the plans to do it again the year after I cleared my calendar. The only difference was this year the organisers decided that Peter Molyneux’s ideas themselves were ridiculous enough to base games on, and that we could cut out the parody middle man.
It was a great, if exhausting weekend. I didn’t live in London at the time, and ended up pulling an all nighter at London Hackspace on the Friday night, before going home Saturday afternoon to return early Sunday morning, all just so I didn’t have to pay for the coach any more times than I absolutely had to since I was still a student. It was nearly as exhausting as that run on sentence.
All the FOMO that had built up over the last year evaporated when Peter Molyneux turned up early Sunday afternoon with his son. He went around each of us to see our games, which meant that I then demoed a game taking the piss out of him, to him and his 8 year old son. It was weird and great.
Peter Molyenux talks about emotions a lot, so I made a stealth game where you played as a chameleon, and had to find ways to change your emotions so you could blend into the background and avoid being seen (I had a brief disagreement with Peter Molyneux here about the cause of chameleons changing colour, but luckily his son backed me up). You had to infiltrate Peter Molyneux’s secret lair, where he was hiding nuclear weapons and threatening to blow up the games industry. I tried to explain to him that this didn’t make any sense, that the games industry is more of an abstract concept, but he has always been more of an ideas guy than an execution one.
So you can imagine me demoing this to him and his son:
“…and now we walk into the giant stone carving of your head…”
Despite this, he seemed to like it, and tweeted about it, which remains the highlight of my game dev career.
Even if he hadn’t turned up, I think it would still have been the best game jam I’ve been to. Sometimes hackathons and game jams attract a…type, and people get weirdly competetative. But here we were all united in our one, noble goal: taking the piss out of Peter Molyneux (in the most affectionate way possible) through hastily assembled video game prototypes.
Other highlights included him getting into a spirited debate with someone about microtransactions, and him playing Space Team with a bunch of people.
I don’t think he stayed for Cards Against Humanity though.
