Peter Molyneux’s role in the gaming industry has been one of the longest in the industry’s history, with his first game, The Entrepreneur , being released in 1984. The Entrepreneur , despite Molyneux’s enthusiasm toward it, was a mass commercial failure, said to have sold only two copies (one of which rumored to be from his own mother). After the game’s brutal release, Molyneux left the industry for the next three years, until he teamed up with Les Edgar to begin the game development company Bullfrog Productions. Though the company released a scrolling shooter named Fusion a year before, 1989 marked the release of Populous , Molyneux’s claim to fame and what is arguably the very first "god game." Populous was a commercial success, becoming the best-selling game from the company and becoming the progenitor for future strategy games of its kind. Further Bullfrog games like Dungeon Keeper followed in Populous’ wake until Molyneux created Lionhead Studios to produce other god games like Black and White . Molyneux steadily continued experimenting with new ways to play with Fable on Xbox and use of Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral (with the tech demo Milo ). Currently with 22 Cans Studios, Molyneux is developing a "spiritual successor" to his game Populous called Godus , which met funding goals on Kickstarter in 2012.

While creating a sprawling Adventure game crafting guide controlled only by body movements may seem impossible, the world has been carefully sculpted around the concept. Nearly the entire game is on-rails, with player-controlled progress limited to traveling via horse and carriage. Movement of Seren is controlled by grabbing onto the reins. Once holding on, jerking both hands up in a cracking motion makes the horse go faster, while pulling your hands up towards your body stops her. To move left or right, you pull the hand of the intended direction towards you while extending the opposite arm. Intensity is based on how fast and dramatic the gestures are. Instead of simply darting to the next area, however, players must pay attention to not run into obstacles while scoping out any side-areas, where treasure chests or revealing NPCs can be found.

This idea continues with microtransactions, something that Molyneux has been dead-set on improving. Trust me, I don’t like how microtransactions are being used today , but Molyneux has been working on ways to use them without letting them lean toward the realm of exploitation. He’s condemned the use of microtransactions in the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper , claiming they are not consumer-friendly, but he wants to find a way to make them palatable to an audience. That’s become something of another recurring trait of Molyneux: taking something universally disliked and trying to refine it so that it isn’t hated nearly as much.

While Molyneux has certainly made this attitude a recurring (and expected) one, many of the creative ideas from him are the ones that never saw the light of day. Personally, I’m of the small camp who believe the Kinect/Natal demo Milo was an interesting idea that deserved to be investigated upon further ; maybe not with Kinect, but with the idea of simply talking to a person and developing a social relationship with them over time, similar to how you build the foundation of a city into a giant metropolis. Molyneux’s Milo project became one of the most iconic figures of the early years of Kinect, but the project was never realized, Kinect functionality or not. And quite frankly, Milo remained one of the more interesting Kinect projects. Considering the widespread disapproval of Kinect, one of the few good things to come out of it was the potential of a game like Milo . Molyneux was trying to make something cool out of something massively disliked: Milo out of Kinect.

Fable III was another big moment for Molyneux. The game introduced more management features in ruling the kingdom, but was panned for many of the same simplification qualms that plagued the first Fable . It certainly wasn’t poorly received, but it showed that many of these ideas that Molyneux pitches are ones that are much less practical and efficient within the current state of the medium. If the first part of the Molyneux Paradigm is hyping up a game to ridiculous levels, then the second part is to show unequivocal disdain for the game a ways after release. Fable III has been labeled by Molyneux as a "train wreck," when, all things considered, it really wasn’t. It had flaws, but the things that worked actually worked rather well. This same attitude was also delivered from Molyneux with Fable II . During the lead-up to Fable III , Fable II was considered "rubbish." Everything in the game, from the story to the controls to the aesthetic design, was bashed to no end by Molyneux himself. To make this concept even more surreal, Molyneux has even been severely self-critical to his game Populous , one of the keystones of the god game genre.

The sense of freedom became apparent in the early stages of the game during the tutorial. There was no fighter, mage or rogue class; the player simply trained in archery, melee combat and spellcraft. How these skills developed was based on what approach was used in battle and doing successful combos with any of them would multiply the gained experience. The experience was divided into the three combat categories along with general experience that could be distributed as desired. Personal experience seemed that mastering consistently high combat multipliers with the bow was tricky, but by halfway through the game the character would easily be a formidable magic using tank. Bandits, balverines and trolls quickly changed from dangerous enemies to cannon fodder.