Peter Molyneux O.B.E., video game designer (Populous, Theme Park, Fable).

My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

My guest today is an English video game designer and programmer. In 1984 he designed The Entrepreneur, a simulation game about running a start-up company. When it sold just two copies, however, my guest left the world of video games and began exporting cans of baked beans to the Middle East.

When the computer manufacturer Commodore mistook this venture for a software company with a similar name, my guest signed a deal to design a database system for the Amiga. This benign deception eventually led to the founding of Bullfrog Productions, where my guest designed Populous, the first so-called god game, which went on to sell more than four million copies. Many more successes followed: 1994’s Theme Park, 1997’s Dungeon Keeper then, after he founded Lionhead Studios, the multi-million selling Fable series.

My guest is no stranger to controversy either; his more recent, experimental work at 22Cans, the company he founded in 2012, has sometimes been accused of overpromising and underdelivering. He remains, nonetheless, a legendary – if elusive – figure in the UK games industry.

Play the console:

• Wizardry
• Ico
• Half-Life 2
• Minecraft
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

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