No Boredom for Me!!

When you consider that perhaps the driving force behind all computer games companies is their budget, it's almost amusing to think that probably the most famous game of all time, Pong, was created with a budget of $500 and a few white lies (Nolan Bushnell convinced one of his head programmers to join the Atari company saying it was subsidised by the government!). From the Pong arcade machines successful cleanup in a local pub to 100 machines p/day on the construction line, the computer games industry's foundations were built on very little - but the real worth is obviously in ideas. Ideas for games flooded the arcades with titles like Asteroids (Atari's take on Space Invaders, mentioned later) and even Donkey Kong the massively popular adversary of Mario, then called 'jumpman'.
Unfortunately, ideas are only as valuable as their creator makes them, and a copyright theft lawsuit chased Bushnell in the form of Ralph Baer - he had patented a strikingly similar version of the tennis version years beforehand.
The amount of money that was to be made in computer games had become apparant in the years preceding this trial, and set a trend for aggressive battle to cling on the these basic ideas. Atari released the first (successful) computer games console, the VCS, in 1977. Prior to this date, DAvid Crane a former Atari programemr and designer, had left Atari to start his own company - Activision. Activision fought in court with Atari for around 2 years to earn the right to make games for the VCS alone.
So ideas in the computer games industry by this bought were being snapped up, the majority of early video games such as Pacman and Space Invaders were made from very basic ideas - the novelty of playing an electronically sophisticated game was enough to sell the idea. Scores of games manufacturers and developers sprouted up from everywhere.
However in 1983, from a combination of bad press realting to truancy and a flood of poor-quality games. Personal Computers such as the Commodore 64 harnessed this bad press to sell more of their 'educational' machines and further pushed computer games into disrepute.
On the otehr hand, out of this PC age, the Oliver Twins and the DArling brothers, two sets of teenagers, used the Commodore machines and their like to create more and more games. These young boys would go on the make millions of dollars for their ideas and skills, and the youth of the eighties formed companies like Codemasters and Ocean.
Tthe console market was still in its feldgling years by the time the Video Game Crash of 1983 happened, because a mere 3 yrs after the toy companies cast off games as being a 'passing fad', the Nintendo Entertainment System was released, a machine we all remember from childhood (or early adulthood!) no doubt.
This machine brought with it the likes of Mario, Link and Kirby to the awed eyes of the worlds youth, and resurrected consoles and home computer games into peoples lives.

Peter Molyneux was born in 1960 in Guildford, Surrey and has been the mbrains behind many of the best selling PC and console games for over 15 years. His forte seems to be the popular 'top-down, control the little people' point of view, categorised as 'god games'. The core mechanic of these type of game was touched upon at the very start of our course, and that would be a basic queu system, certain things need to be done in the proper order and you have to manage the ay these things happen to optimise the results.

Populous was the first game to be developed by Molyneux, though he played the slightly lesser role of designer and programmer (at least lesser when compared to more recent titles like Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park where he was project leader). Populous was developed by Bullfrog, a company which is also (perhaps through Molyneux) renowned for its creation of many god games and with Molyneux being behind most of them!
Populous won several accolades since its 1989 release, such as Best Military or Strategy Computer Game of 1990 and 1990 Computer Game of the Year. In short, the character controls people in the form of a deity who can perform miracles, shape the landscape and generally influence them to do their bidding. It was released across a variety of then-popular platforms such as the Amiga, PC Engine and even the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
More recently, the popular Lionhead Studios game, Black and White has been cited by Molyneux as 'the spiritual descendant of Populous'.

Slightly less divine, but still similar games at least in orientation, have been released under Bullfrog and Molyneux's partnership, Syndicate being an example. This enjoyed most of its popularity on the PC, but i can fondly remember this game from the early days of the Super Nintendo. The Syndicate engine was used for some time, with later games like Hooligans by Hip Games, though enjoyed more notoriety than popularity (because it was rubbish).

(ABOVE LEFT) Theme Park (ABOVERIGHT) Syndicate

The next brainchild was, in my opinion, the biggest or at least the most well-remembered game of the 1990's - Theme Park. Here we give every kid (and some adults) there ultimate dream on a plate - create and manage your very own Theme Park. The usual, top-down isometric view was used, and had various levels of difficulty (mainly increasingly difficult customers!) and additional technology to keep up with the demands of the punters. options rangin from how much effort your mechanics make to keep the rides in good order, right through to how much fat you put in your burgers gave the player the feeling of truly controlling the park and giving an unrivalled satisfaction to player who succeeds.
Theme Park spawned a couple of sequels, Theme Hospitalbeing one, which followed the same megalo-maniacal streak with similar dark humour at every turn, thought this time with 2 1/2D graphics to boot.

After 1997's Dungeon Keeper (in my view, another Theme Park spin-off involving the management of a disconcertingly cute rendition of Hell) Molyneux left Bullfrog to form his own company, Lionhead Studios. Whilst having few titles under their belt, 2001's Black and White really made an impact on a fickle games market, just when the First Person Shooter was starting to take over.

(ABOVE LEFT) Dungeon Keeper (ABOVE RIGHT) Black and White

Basically stemmed from Populous as aforementioned, Black and White involves polaying a 'hand' and creating a world for the people who worship you. You have a physical presence on the world as well, in the form of a creature such as a tiger or an orang-utan. The player will control

when the people pray, perform miracls (like rains for the crops) and turn nasty when people lose belief (sending a pig soaring across the sky into the sea always gets those atheists back in line!). Depending on the course of your actions, you will either by a fear-inspiring, hell, fire and brimstone type of god, or a benevolent healer and creator. Black and White spawned a sequel in 2005 based on the aftermath, your created religion has been left without a guide and have started to differ in their opinions. As a result, wars ensue (hmmm there's a moral here too!)and only your creature is left as a relic of your creative/destrcutive hand.

I suppose the only real comparison that can be made to Molyneux would be Maxis, and namely its creator Will Wright. The god game idea was inspired ( but yet to be defined), by SimCity the Commodore 64 creation in 1987.

Maxis, in brief, enjoyed little comparable long term succes in the 1990's. However, Maxis really pulled it out of the bag with The Sims, a virtual family that has been acknowledged as the most successful game of all time!

(ABOVE LEFT) Sim City (ABOVE RIGHT) The Sims
With the amount of expansion packs and extra discs available for it, there is no surprise there then!

In 2004 the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame accepted Molyneux, placing him in the annals of history alongside Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo,Trip Hawkins, creator of Electronic Arts and the aforementioned Will Wright.
Later that year he was given an OBE in the New Years Honours list.
More recently, Microsoft purchased Lionhead Studios as art of its Microsoft Game Studios section in April 2006 and productions by Molyneux seem to be being kept top secret, though we can be sure to the funding now available to him and his team, there is much more to come.

// posted by PashionConscious @ 11:56 PM 0 comments