Molyneux Talks Reviving Classic Games

Gamespot has a few words with Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, who looks back on some of the great games of the past in the days before the Leipzig Conference, where he is slated to give a keynote. Along with some commentary on modern gaming, Molyneux discusses a wish to reimagine titles like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and Syndicate. Great ideas ... if he ever gets the chance to make them come true.

Curse you EA

[hords]

I loved Dungeon Keeper. I always cursed EA for buying up good franchises and then never using them. Especially the ones from Origin and Bullfrog.

Dungeon Keeper!

[avalys]

If he remakes that, I'll be the first one to buy it. That game was awesome!

I remember if you had the screen centered over the sexy torturer woman for too long without moving the mouse, the game's narrator/alert voice would say "You know, that'll make you go blind."

Online Syndicate

[hal2814]

Oh yeah. I would hope they keep it as small squads. It would be sweet to have multiple people playing on a squad. No more of your shotgunner getting nailed by a sniper while you're got your attention on another player.

Re:Online Syndicate

[hal2814]

I think it depends. Squad vs. squad trying to secure the same goal would work out as long as it doesn't get too crowded (50 squads trying to assasinate the same person) but I think a deathmatch-type scenario would get old really quick. Personally, I think a co-op has a lot more potential and I guess in that case you could be using different squads. What I would hate to see is too many agents running around with noone to persuade or assasinate. That would be like taking the worst parts of Diablo and the worst parts of Quake III and putting them together.

Powermonger

[LainTouko]

People tend to forget about the game quite a lot, but I'd be interested to see a modern game along the lines of Powermonger. A real time strategy game set in a medieval world that actually acts like a medieval world; food supply and transportation, and the turn of the seasons are a significant part of the strategy, splitting your army means not being able to communicate instantly, you can disrupt enemy armies by killing messengers (pigeons), you can disrupt enemy armies by killing their commander, people can't be "conjured up" by resources, all you can do is take existing people and give them weapons, (or just conscript unarmed shepherds anyway), everyone has a name, you can kill sheep for emergency food, you can nick fishing boats for your army, but then the towns won't produce as much food for you to appropriate, townsfolk are sycophantic, and then discontent when conquered, large armies travel the waves entirely by coracle, capitals mysteriously lack the production facilities of towns and cities...OK, maybe not a carbon copy. But that would be cool.

Re:Populous remake

[kabocox]

After realising how much I missed it, I bought Populous second hand a few months ago. What makes it so good is that it has everything a good real-time strategy game should, and nothing more. If only someone were to remake it on modern hardware, with photo-realistic castles and fluid water, but no changes whatsoever to the gameplay, I'd buy it in an instant.

I think the only 2 of his games that I've played were Populous on the SNES I think and Dungeon Keeper. Populous on the SNES could have used some work. I could see how it would have been much better on the computer though. I don't mind some minor changes other than updating graphics and the engine. I don't like series that tend to stick too closely to the status quo. My thought on that is the Civ series. Other than updated graphics and engine, there wasn't much new other than culture was added in Civ3. My biggest dislike of the Civ series was always Alpha Centuria was released before Civ 3 and its tech engine and unit builder made anything in Civ feel dated. The Civ series should have had a unit builder. You should have been able to choose which animals to domesitic and breed different riding animals other than just elephants and horses. (You should have been able to ride big cats or train war bears or maybe even ride cows/bulls into battle.) Other thing is mixing and matching weapons. If I want tigers pulling my chariots and shooting fire arrows, I should be able to train and build the units. Well enough of my Civ rants.

I'll need to dig up a copy of populous. It was a cross between an early age of empires and a regional sim earth with a computer god to play against. Now that I think about it, an updated Populous could make an awesome multiplayer game or maybe even an online game. You'd just start everyone off with a single hut and villager and go from there playing against others. You could have a polythesic religion where you let allies villagers into your turf or maybe spread religion around like Civ culture a bit. Or you could be monothesic where if they were of a different religion your followers would automatically kill or injure villagers of another religion.

Robosport!!

[MrTester]

Of all of the old games I played, Robosport is the one I most want to see redone.
It could be fantastic!

Re:If Molyneux remade these games what would we ge

[Jerf]

I think some of his problem is the canvas got too big.

Dungeon Keeper was a great game. Especially the first one, all things considered. A small set of changes and it'd shine as an engine even today. The AI was spectacular in practice. It was actually fairly simple, each creature had certain rules and preferences, but with a good mix of creatures the dungeon really hummed along by itself without a lot of dumb intervention. Combat could use some work (they tried to fix it in the second one, but the ultimate problem is you probably need to be able to play without picking up the creatures at all, at least as an optional mode), and there were a couple of other bugaboos, but it was really solid. Really packed a lot in on those older computers.

Now he wants to really pack a lot in on these newer machines and consoles, and our tools just aren't up to it. Theoretically the games he envisions probably could exist, but they'd take longer to develop than the consoles will actually be economically viable for. People bitch about bloat, but the fact is that in general, even allowing "bloat" our programmer tools have not kept up with hardware, and truly pushing a complicated world to the limit in code (not just graphics) is basically beyond us right now. An XBox 360 may be, say, 100 times more powerful than a Super Nintendo, but we can't really make a game's code and engine 100 times more complex. (In fact, going from a Super Nintendo RPG to a modern RPG can sometimes leave you wondering what we've been doing with our time since then.)

I do not say this to excuse him; ultimately, despite various self-esteem-propoganda to the contrary, you do need to limit you dreams to the possible. But I think it's a good stab at an explanation.

Someone who would probably fall prey to this is Garriot, the guy behind Ultima. Ultima games were always just on this side of dissolving into a quivering mass of bugs because they were always so cutting edge. (Mind you, I'm not saying they were quivering masses of bugs; they are in general quite good, although 7 and on get a little glitchy. I'm saying that it took a lot of work to get them there and sheer willpower. Witness the fun involved with getting Ultima 7 running, with its incredible memory management scheme. (You're better off running Exult, now.)) And you know, while I've heard about some plans of his, I haven't heard about anything he's done and finished since before the first Black and White...

Re:Powermonger

[Red Moose]

Yes I was thinking the same thing. While the other games are good, and Syndicate (oriiginal one ) was uperb, Powermonger has to be one of my all time favourites. The style of play was very atmospheric, and affected your plans, it was simple quick attacks rolling a catapult down a hill, loads of psychophantic troops! Capturing the enemey general and getting his people.

Powermonger was Bullfrog's finest moment. Intro music was excellent too!

Re:Bought my microsoft. *sigh*

[usrusr]

> And hell! Origin could release Ultima 7 for PC's in 1993.

How many people worked on that game?

We still love those old pixel grids more than the shiny new HDR graphics, but only because they are our childhood memories. give any person is used to todays visual quality and instant gratification a game made like those old ones with which he does not connect any memories of "the good old times" and he would never endure the pains of long text passages, crude menus etc.

today we see the old games as warm and strong on story, but try to remember: back then we did care little about story, we mostly exposed us to those things because they had those really marvellous graphics, computers were the future and generally amazing miracles, they could even play games!

you can't bring that back, even linux can't do that