Molyneux Kickstarter seeking funds
Gaming legend Peter Molyneux has had a very busy, and very stressful, three weeks.
The man behind Black & White and Fable has launched Curiosity, the maiden voyage for his new studio 22cans, and attempted to fund another upcoming title with a Kickstarter project.
The Kickstarter is to fund Godus, Molyneux’s new project that he hopes will reinvent the god game, a genre Molyneux himself pioneered.
Godus could potentially be an attempt by Molyneux at a magnum opus, but at the moment it seems a little bit doubtful the game will ever get off the ground.
The Kickstarter’s goal is £450,000, and the project currently has more than 7,000 backers pledging £206,379 – not even halfway there with just 15 days to go. But Molyneux says the move to use the Kickstarter for funding wasn’t taken lightly.
“I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it was to make the decision to do a Kickstarter because it’s like being naked in the middle of a shopping mall.
"People are just going to point and laugh. For someone like me it’s been an unbelievably scary thing but seeing people’s feedback from that and really engaging with people has been an incredible experience,” he told IGN.
You might think the man behind the genre would be proud of his achievements, but he actually believes the god game genre has been bastardised over time; he wants to right that wrong.
“This genre of game that I helped to create has been abused. In a very real sense, it’s been abused…if it’s not reinvented it’s just going to die off. It’s going to die off like slapstick comedy died off in the films and I owe that genre too much. It made me, I didn’t make it really,” says Molyneux.
He argues that elements of god games went into free-to-play and Facebook games that exploited the mechanics of the genre and made them less effective.
Promises to fix what’s wrong with the god game genre should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, however, as Molyneux has overpromised in the past – but what do you guys think? Is he a visionary, or a hopeless dreamer?
