This is the transcript of the Peter Molyneux interview with Game Head’s Geoff Keighley, who insists he’s “hanging out” with Molyneux. Not many new things (everyone seems to ask the same questions …), but there’s a couple: Molyneux feels TM was a waste of great ideas, he says “never say never” about Dimitri and that digging “deeper” on September 23rd ‘05 for that game idea is still worthwhile. There’s also reiteration of some Fable 2 stuff, love is just part of the lineup, how Fable 2 will be great so Molyneux can stay out of Alcatraz etc.

He’s one of the biggest names in the video game business and tonight on Game Head we’re hanging out with game design legend Peter Molyneux. From Theme Park, Magic Carpet to the epic RPG Fable, Peter’s created some of the most classic and memorable games ever. Tonight we’re gonna here about his philosophy of designing videogames, his thoughts on the state of the industry and what he has planned for Fable 2, which is coming next year to the Xbox 360.

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Everybody welcome to Game Head, I’m Geoff Keighley and this week we’re here in San Francisco with game design legend Peter Molyneux, just off the plane from England. Yeah. Welcome to San Fracisco and I gotta say, it’s a great honour to have you on the show, I’ve been playing your games for a couple of decades now and you’re still making them! You’re not tired of making games? You know, everyone’s thinking, he’s gotta drop it soon, he’s gotta throw in the towel, I’m starting to, this question’s coming a lot, you know, “you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?” Oh, your games have been here a lot, you know, the first thing you did back in the day, Entrepreneur, was that, 20+ years ago? That was, ehh, 1984, so, yeah, that was 23 years ago.

So how has the industry changed from, you know, Entrepreneur, to something as epic as Fable 2 now, are you still as excited about building games as you were, back as a young guy, making Entrepreneur? I am as excited, it’s very very different, because well, back then, and after Entrepreneur I did a game called Populous, I was kind of the only guy working on the game, and that was it. No-one knew about computer games. It wasn’t, there weren’t billions of dollars that were made in computer games, it was like - and you weren’t a big-time videogame celebrity? There was nothing like that, I was a tramp on the street.

[... Quick Review of Def Jam: Icon ...]

Now Peter, over the years you’ve done a lot of games that have very big, epic focuses to them, I mean, you’re not a guy that does a little simple game, you have the fantasy ideas, you’ve done these god games, you know the idea of controlling a lot of people, and also a lot of your games seem to have sort of this interesting sort of morality, metagame, on top of them, are you going to be good or bad, where does that come from? Is that just an interest of yourself in psychology? I hate being told what to do. I really hate being told what to do, and I hate being told what I should be! And that’s the whole way of the whole idea of morality came from, is that if I want to be a bad guy, I should be able to be a bad guy! This game should be tailored around me, not some crazy whimsic English designer!

[... Something about the Independent Games Festival, and a preview of Part 2 ...]

Part 2 of the interview Peter Molyneux had with Game Head’s Geoff Keighley is below.

Everybody welcome back to Game Head, this week we’re here in San Francisco hanging out with game design legend Peter Molyneux, and the real lion heads, the sea lions back there. I remember seeing you a couple of years ago about how you had just so many games in development at Lionhead, Yeah, one of the mistakes we - what a mistake that was, it was terrible, I mean we, you gotta understand, when you develop a game, you have to put your passion into it, for some reason, mainly because Fable was late and then B&W2 was late and then The Movies was late, they all came together, and it was the most nightmarish time. Do you feel you had to compromise? Massively, I mean, I actually feel that was an incredible waste. An incredible waste of good ideas in The Movies, it was, pushed people at Lionhead really really hard, they worked really really hard for a very long time, and it kind of ended up that everything was, just a bit good, rather than really good.

[... Warhawk preview for the PS3 ...]

Now with all these games that you’ve done, you know, some people, they keep hearing these great promises that you’re making for these games, and then, as you sort of admit, the last couple haven’t fully fulfilled the original vision that you had for them. You know, I’ve realised, that it was a promise that I put down, a promise that incidentally I really firmly believed that these games were really gonna do, and I didn’t quite deliver on that. For a long time you did those demos about the acorn, I talked about it before, I mean you had this little acorn that would grow into this tree, everyone online was like, where’s my damn tree about Fable? You know, the funny thing about that, it wasn’t just a, because the idea was, all the trees and the foliage would grow, and you could plant that acorn, it just was a dumb idea really. It’s just something about that idea caught people’s imagination, my idea was, because you were playing over a life you could walk past a little tree and it would grow into a big tree! But that took so much of the available processing power to do, it was just silly.

[... Kotaku stuff, preview of part 3 ...]

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