Peter Molyneux, the video game designer and programmer famous for Dungeon Keeper, Black & White and Fable, has expressed regret for his lofty claims about his previous games.
Speaking in the latest episode of the podcast My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin, the British designer said that he was often spurred on by the questions interviewers posed to him.
“I used to specialise, if that’s the right word, in talking about the games that I made before they were finished,” Molyneux said. “You know, as any unfinished project goes, quite often things change and that development process I think, people mistook that as being promises of features in the game.”
Though he justified these claims through being “lost in the passion” of game development of that era, he added that this was an “atrocious” thing to do to his team.
‘Fable’ Credit: Microsoft Game Studios
“I have an enormous amount of regret for it. I feel remorse for what I did,” Molyneux clarified. “What I should have said in every interview is ‘everything I say, take with a pinch of salt’. I may not even tell the rest of the team about it.”
“And when I used to go back after interviews, a lot of the team members would say ‘Peter, we didn’t know that we’re going to have this feature in the game until they read it in the press,’” he added.
Earlier this year, Molyneux said that his present project features a “mechanic that has never been seen in a game before” but shares a lot of similarities with Black & White and Fable. In the interview, he revealed that there are 25 developers attached to the game.
In other gaming news, Super Mario Bros. Wonder will reveal the new voice of Mario at the end of the game. Meanwhile, actor Charles Martinet shared that he isn’t sure what a Mario Ambassador does.