To most gamers, Peter Molyneux needs little introduction. Not only is he a great British games designer, he is one of the gaming industry's most high-profile developers.
Inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) and awarded an OBE back in 2004, Peter was most recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Game Developers Choice Awards, in addition to receiving a BAFTA Fellowship at the 2011 British Academy Video Games Awards.
So it's already been a great year for the man widely credited with inventing the god game genre with 1989's Populous, the second major title to come out of his first studio, Bullfrog Productions. That company was acquired by Electronic Arts in the 1990s, where Molyneux worked for a few years before founding Lionhead Studios in 1997 to launch the massively ambitious PC title Black and White.
Fourteen years later, Peter is still making games with Lionhead, and is still a vociferous supporter of PC gaming - with the PC version of Fable III set for release later in May this year. He is also creative director of Microsoft Game Studios, Europe (with Microsoft having acquired Lionhead back in 2006).
TechRadar recently caught up with Molyneux to find out a little more about his thoughts on the past, present and future of the UK's games development scene, the latest on the forthcoming PC version of Fable III, and to pump him for more info on the latest status of Milo and Kate for Kinect and lots more.
The early Britsoft scene
Firstly, we wanted to revisit those halcyon early days of 1980's Britsoft games development. What was it that originally inspired the younger Mr Molyneux to make games back then?
"Back in the 1980s I was running small business coding and developing business software for the Amiga," he reminds us. "However, I had always had this fascination for computer games - ever since I saw my first Pong machine - so in my spare time I did games coding and that eventually turned in a game called Populous. I've never done any business software programming since then!"
Many British developers and games publishers of a certain age have a tendency to look back on those pre-console days of the ZX Spectrum, C64 and (later) the Amiga with rose-tinted specs. While Peter remembers them fondly, he has no truck with that type of nostalgia.
"It was not better or worse, just very different. To start with there were no reference books, infrastructure or real community so it felt like you were inventing more than evolving in those days. I suppose the greatest difference now is that console games require a big team to produce AAA titles."
A kinship with PC gaming
All of which brings us nicely on to Lionhead's latest PC update of 2010's Xbox 360 hit, Fable III. The PC release of the game is a big deal for Microsoft, with the company taking considerable critical flak from PC gamers in recent years.
"With Fable III we tried to make the RPG elements clearer and the story more dramatic," he explains. "The PC version of the game is due out mid May and I am pleased we have been able to do this version and that we have had the time to adapt it sympathetically, as I still feel a kinship with the PC and mouse gaming."
Continuing along the PC gaming theme, Molyneux is also incredibly enthused by the recent success of Minecraft, which he describes as "truly original, a real breath of fresh air... [Minecraft designer] Markus Persson has not only shown the world that a game can be creative and that the rules of questing and levelling up can be broken but he did this singlehandedly.
"It is probably the most impressive game I've seen in the last ten years."
Strictly business: game investment and new platforms
As far as the business side of the games development industry goes, there is an increasingly wide chasm between innovative indie titles, such as the aforementioned Minecraft, and the big-budget well-known franchises and licensed games with massive development teams (and equally large marketing budgets) behind them.
The real problem nowadays for many British devs and studios is the fact that they are struggling more than ever to get the investment they need in order to produce big games.
"I don't think this issue is confined to British developers," Molyneux is quick to argue. "It's across the board worldwide. The investment needed to create big games is tens of millions of dollars and the teams need to be supremely world class to compete for this level of funding."
Does this trend suggest that the best route to success in the industry for smaller, independent games creators looking to make their mark might be to focus on low-budget games on, for example, XBLA or iPhone?
"It's certainly easier to access and there's so much innovation on platforms like XBLA," says Molyneux, noting how, "games like Limbo and Sword and Sworcery are fine examples of how creative these games can be."
Lionhead launches Creative Week
While refusing to be drawn any further on commenting on Apple's plans for iOS gaming, it's recently been noted that Lionhead seems to be taking a lead from Google in terms of the way the company allows and encourages its developers to pursue the opportunity to work on their own mini-projects.
"We recently had a Creative Week at Lionhead where we gave everyone the freedom and time to come up with any creative endeavour they wanted to work on," Peter explains. "We then had company day where the result of these endeavours were shown to the rest of the company.
"All in all we saw 35 different projects which ranged from tech, ideas, prototypes to almost finished games and we all mutually impressed each other. I can safely say that personally I was blown away by everything I saw that day."
Whether any of those ideas and projects makes it to fruition as commercially available PC or console games over the next five years, of course, remains to be seen. Still, gamers are obviously keen to know more about where Peter Molyneux thinks the industry is headed over the next few years.
"Using your body as a controller is now proven and I'm sure the type of new innovations that will start to happen using Kinect will redefine our relationship with games," he says. "And I'm also certain the 360 will continue to go from strength to strength."
At which point, we have to ask, what about that Milo and Kate project? That tech demo which first wowed (or, in some cases, unsettled) games journalists back at E3 2009, when Microsoft first unveiled its motion control plans?
"Sorry, nothing to add on that right now."
Ah well. It was always worth a try?
Lionhead's Fable III is set to be released on PC on May 17
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