Loinhead

The excerpts of Interviews with Peter Molyneux that have previously been quoted here on Loinhead.net gave us a couple of intriguing hints about the new, “Secret Game”, the concept for the next big title from Lionhead (alongside Fable 2) that they’ve been kicking around the office.

What do we know about this game? Probably only what he has said (almost nothing), which is mostly concentrated on this website. - Read on »

Molyneux: Making Games > Girlfriend + Pub
When XNA Express, Microsoft’s game-making software designed for anyone, launched in early December ‘06, Chris Satchell, general manager at MGS, announced:

Where our vision’s really heading is taking that YouTube concept and bringing it into games. Think about a Community Arcade, being able to share your own games with the whole community on Xbox Live.

(This could mark the rise of the emo blog game genre.) - Read on »

Lionhead seem to be hiring a few more folk now, especially animators & tools people. That’s only to be expected - like Molyneux said, in the first stage of any game you need very few people, but that number quickly and drastically increases as soon as you have the design mostly figured out. - Read on »

It’s fairly trivial but Lionhead moved offices again - there’s been at least one a year, every year, so it’s hardly surprising (one of the first ones was written up here). They’re still based in a Research Park in Guildford, but now they’re all in the same building rather than spread out all over the place. That’s probably largely enabled by the employee count shrinking to two-thirds in early 2006.

The move means new computers, new crazy-bandwidth internet connection and various other things. Requested was a condom and a pain killer vending machine (it is a male-dominated industry), but I don’t think Peter got his wishes.

As of December 11th, Lionhead is at 1 Occam Court, Surrey Research Park, Guildford, Surrey. - Read on »

In the second part of his interview, Cliff Harris - aka Cliffski - spoke to us about The Movies, going indie with his games company Positech and his new games. - Read on »

Cliff Harris, aka Cliffski, a Lionhead ex-pat who worked on The Movies for several years, spoke to us about playing games and being at Lionhead in the first part of his interview. - Read on »

James Leach (wrote at Bullfrog, wrote the storyline for B&W and Fable ~ we suspect he’s still working at LH ~ edit: is not) talks about Molyneux’s inspiration in one of his Inside Lionhead articles from a few years ago. It’s the most info ever given about his inspiration, though, so here it is: - Read on »

It’s official - Lionhead have licensed Havok for Fable 2.

Havok is a ‘physics and animation solution’, so that even though Fable wasn’t exactly heavy on physics and, if it keeps Fable’s style, neither will Fable 2 be (physics don’t tend to give you quite the cinematic feel), but it seems that Havok will be of use to the animators, too.

Apart from Havok, Lionhead is using a whole bundle of stuff to make Fable 2 - seems like they’re going with the buying the technology, making the content model to some extent.

- Read on »

It seems that Lionhead is now owned by external companies to a fairly significant extent. Multiple VC firms (Ingenious Ventures, IDG VE and Add Partners) were involved at some point in Summer ‘04, and how far their ownership went is unclear, but they certainly had a big influence. Much like trying to please future investors when Molyneux considered floating LH on the stock market, he probably had to work to please the investors working there, which probably influenced the way the games turned out. It seems like it was a tactical, rather than strategical, move at the time. Molyneux says:

- Read on »

Why aren’t we going to see B&W3 in the forseeable future? There’s a simple reason. - Read on »