I have a long-standing fascination with Peter Molyneux and the works associated with him. To some extent, leading others in making a new thing is about selling the dream, making it a mythology as you go. Molyneux was famous for talking big. His studios and the teams he led made some extraordinary works. The ideas were always a little bigger than the products. In my mind, this benefitted them before, during, and after.

Eventually, most people didn't see it that way. When the games he and his teams made stopped seeming extraordinary in any quality, and when the public lost all patience with him and his visionary style - these seemed to happen at the same time - the backlash was severe, downright mean-spirited, and frankly vicious and hateful. It was so brutal, and the difficulties of half-failed projects on top of that, that he declared he was going to stop talking up his games. Generally, that's what he's done for the last 5-7 years.

Curiously, his company has released one minor game in that time. It's so uninteresting - I played it for a couple hours - that Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on it after 4 years.

The message implied - almost expressed directly - is that in some sense this is his unique way of working (that's basically what he says) and a gift (it is, though I haven't heard him say it) and somehow related to the creativity of the games (it is, and that should be obvious). People focus on the pragmatic question of whether the released product delivers on the promises in some bullet-by-bullet feature sense. They get disappointed. They believed the talk. They wanted to believe it. The dream was a beautiful one. Then their disappointment affects their impression of what did release.

I've noticed the gaming public - the vocal complainers about things not working - going beyond mere complaint and into insult and derogation and contempt - can be quite spoiled. Nobody who knows how a game is made, who has any idea how much work that takes and from how many people - and this is true about software in general, or anything very involved, with long development cycles - should feel justified in being so bratty and mean about the failures. Fortunately, most who know aren't bratty and mean about it. Knowing is enough.

Games are always about more than meets the eye. A board game involves - what, little plastic tokens? Slips of cardboard? A video game involves - what, changing the colors of dots on a screen? A few buttons to press? These things are incredibly insubstantial. The substance almost all happens up here, in the mind.

Games associated with Peter Molyneux are hit and miss. This is true of any creative person or group. The most pedigreed ones learn how to hide away their least interesting work. They go on and focus on the next great big idea, and realizing it through a thousand and one great little ideas. The first Fable was groundbreaking. It was a watershed in the development of RPGs as a form. The sequels? Well, I didn't play them. But they weren't quite so groundbreaking, and in the span of a decade or more working on all this, the team, and its outspoken lead, certainly had time to make a bunch of promises that never materialized. But that's what you do - you give it everything you've got, and the spaghetti that doesn't stick on the wall, you don't cry about it.

What the naysayers and wisecrackers and haters of Peter Molyneux fail to recognize is that games from his studios have often enough been cutting-edge. They've introduced new ideas and forms. Some of the fallout of that is that they may not be as fully realized as the products of teams who rely more heavily on existing tropes, grinding on the next shipping. All game development is hard, in fact it's very hard, but when you take bigger risks, you face bigger unknowns. A lower proportion of what you propose will pan out.

If you look at Elon Musk, you see a similar pattern. How many of us drive a Tesla? Are we using his batteries daily? Has anyone gone to Mars, or even the Moon, lately? Yet we realize - many of us - that the hype and the machine are not entirely separable. No one is accusing Elon Musk of not working hard. No one is accusing him of lacking vision, or not bothering to communicate it. A few people think he's a dumb figurehead, but they're either ignorant or high on themselves.

Success is the result of a dream that carries on, outlasting countless failures.

(These were my thoughts while reading the beginning of a newer interview with the dude in question, here.)