I didn’t follow everything he’s been doing but I don’t understand the negative sentiment. Populous and Black & White were fantastic games IMO. But these games are old so maybe this view of him as a liar is more recent development.
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the other game that ruined his reputation for me is Godus. He funded it with a kickstarter with the promise it would be a successor to the God-Sim genre like Populous. It turned out to have all of the dark patterns of mobile games (time-gating with micro-transactions), but in a PC game.
Also many decades ago now. He went on to make massive promises for the Fable series - and while I enjoyed them, they absolutely did not meet what he had described. Hence his reputation these days of over promising and under delivering
He definitely got worse over time. It’s sad, really. Despite always exaggerating and overpromising he still used to reliably put out good, fun games. I remember Bullfrog used to be a venerable company, the first Fable was a solid game (despite not being what he promised it would be) and Dungeon Keeper was a classic. And yeah, Black & White were great.
One of his first gigs was when a software company mistakenly contacted his business to make a program of sorts, and rather than explaining the situation, he was like “Who? Oh yeah, sure, we are definitely that company you were looking for, we totally know the thing you’re talking about, we’ll do it!”.
He was a liar from the very start, it just took some time, and a handful of overhyped (by him) games for people to catch on. If I had to point to an specific event for the decline in his public image, it’d be the Project Milo presentation for the Kinect (just revealed as Project Natal).
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I didn’t follow everything he’s been doing but I don’t understand the negative sentiment. Populous and Black & White were fantastic games IMO. But these games are old so maybe this view of him as a liar is more recent development.
Besides the other games mentioned here, there’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What’s_Inside_the_Cube%3F . Read the completion section to see just how bad it was.
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the other game that ruined his reputation for me is Godus. He funded it with a kickstarter with the promise it would be a successor to the God-Sim genre like Populous. It turned out to have all of the dark patterns of mobile games (time-gating with micro-transactions), but in a PC game.
He created a literal scam game; Legacy. They had an NFT land ruse where you could buy high value land for your in-game business.
When the game released no one played it and the “NFT land” turned out to be worthless (Molyneux did get to keep the money though).
Black and White were fantastic.
Also many decades ago now. He went on to make massive promises for the Fable series - and while I enjoyed them, they absolutely did not meet what he had described. Hence his reputation these days of over promising and under delivering
Stumbled upon this: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/black-white-2001-open-source-game-engine-sees-a-first-release/
Good timing for revisiting this classic.
He definitely got worse over time. It’s sad, really. Despite always exaggerating and overpromising he still used to reliably put out good, fun games. I remember Bullfrog used to be a venerable company, the first Fable was a solid game (despite not being what he promised it would be) and Dungeon Keeper was a classic. And yeah, Black & White were great.
One of his first gigs was when a software company mistakenly contacted his business to make a program of sorts, and rather than explaining the situation, he was like “Who? Oh yeah, sure, we are definitely that company you were looking for, we totally know the thing you’re talking about, we’ll do it!”. He was a liar from the very start, it just took some time, and a handful of overhyped (by him) games for people to catch on. If I had to point to an specific event for the decline in his public image, it’d be the Project Milo presentation for the Kinect (just revealed as Project Natal).