For Curiosity winner Bryan Henderson, the prize inside the cube has been anything but life-changing.

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The_Imp_ZA

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During the early afternoon of 26th May 2013, 18-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson tapped on Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube for the last time. He had won the game.

A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind. Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked? An email appeared with a link to a video. In it Molyneux, dressed all in black and set against a virtual cube, delivers a message of congratulations.

The prize? In the months before Curiosity's release, Molyneux had hyped it up, promising it would be "life-changing" for whoever discovered it. "Life-changing." Quite the claim, and Molyneux's video message repeats the words. But how? You will become a digital god, Molyneux proclaims in the video, of 22Cans' next game, Godus. And, you will receive a cut of the money made by Godus from the start of your reign to its end.

...

It sounds like everyone at 22cans has lost faith in their own project but are kind of forced to keep trying to push it towards completion.
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Source: Eurogamer

Really interesting article, Eurogamer can put out some really fantastic content. Makes Peter Molyneux and his team looks like massive pricks. All aboard the Hype train?

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Peter Molyneux: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again'.

When things go wrong for modern game developers they go spectacularly wrong. This is an era of endless rolling news and mass social media judgement. There is no respite. Peter Molyneux knows this now – if he didn’t before. The veteran designer, famed for inventing the “god game” genre with his 1989 title, Populous, has spent the last three days under intense press scrutiny. His latest project, Godus, is in disarray, his reputation in tatters. Everyone wants a piece.

“The only answer is for me to retreat,” he says, speaking via Skype from his office in Guildford. “I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It’s this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn’t worked.”

Awarded an OBE in 2004, Molyneux is one of the most prominent members of the UK games industry. In the 26 years following Populous, he oversaw classic strategy and adventure titles like Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and most recently the Fable series. But ever since leaving his seminal studio Bullfrog in 1997, he has become just as well-known for enthusiastically hyping his projects, only to deliver products that fail to live up to the impossibly grand expectations.
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Sure. :rolleyes: Let's just wait until E3 when you need to promote your new game...
 
I've been following the story on Rock Paper Shotgun this last week or so. It was an aggressive interview but it was necessary. I honestly think that Peter is a pathological liar. He talks so well! You almost want to feel sorry for him. But I used to be in awe of him when I was young and he let me down over and over and over again. Empty promises.

I feel so bad for Bryan Henderson. If it wasn't for Eurogamer then he would probably never have gotten anything. Hopefully now there's at least I chance.
 
Solitude said:
I've been following the story on Rock Paper Shotgun this last week or so. It was an aggressive interview but it was necessary. I honestly think that Peter is a pathological liar. He talks so well! You almost want to feel sorry for him. But I used to be in awe of him when I was young and he let me down over and over and over again. Empty promises.

I feel so bad for Bryan Henderson. If it wasn't for Eurogamer then he would probably never have gotten anything. Hopefully now there's at least I chance.
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Yeah I agree. It's a real shame though.

It's very cliche, but this seems a lot like a case of "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
 
Eugene said:
Interview with Rock Paper Shotgun.

This is the most aggressive interview I've seen in a long time.
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I thought this was going to be an overstatement.

Then I saw the first question.

RPS: Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?

Well, that really set the mood.

I think the good games he put out were strokes of luck honestly. I do feel a bit bad for him, because RPS absolutely destroyed him with those questions, but at the same time, it is kind of his fault. He's over-promised for years now, and it's come back to bite him.
 
After reading this article, I think RPS roasted Peter Molyneux a bit too much.

"There’s this overwhelming urge to over-promise because it’s such a harsh rule: if you’re one penny short of your target then you don’t get it. And of course in this instance, the behavior is incredibly destructive, which is 'Christ, we’ve only got 10 days to go and we’ve got to make £100,000, for fuck’s sake, let's just say anything.' So I’m not sure I would do that again."

Even projects crowdfunded to excess enter tense, never-ending development hell.
Whatever you think of Molyneux and his history of lofty game design ideas, it's hard to argue that Kickstarter doesn't encourage this kind of thing. In the nearly three years since Double Fine made Kickstarter a serious place to seek game funding, the site has gained a reputation for lofty promises that often don't pan out the way the backers or the developers expected.
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I think RPS should've rather started with, "Do you think Kickstarter compels people to lie?." Reading the article again, it does feel more like a personal attack on a gaming personality instead of a gaming entity or culture.
 
Eugene said:
The thing is, Molyneux started doing this WAY before Kickstarter was even a thing, that's probably why they targeted him.
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That's true, the article does spend a lot of focusing on Godus though. I think Kickstarter plus Molyneux was always going to be a bad match. His over-promising plus having to work on a tight budget could only equal one result.

Will be interesting to see if/what he does next.
 
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