What happened the day you decided to leave Microsoft?

About 18 months ago, this series of strange things started to happen. I started to get all these accolades. I got a BAFTA Fellowship. I got a Lifetime Achievement Award in Spain, another in Italy, over in the states I picked up a few more. They were all coming in. Of course, I was unbelievably proud of it. But eventually I took a long hard look at all these awards lined up on the mantelpiece and asked myself, do I really deserve these? Are these a representation of everything I’ve done before? I couldn’t believe it. Is this it? People were saying “you’ve done it all, Peter”. Have I? All those awards, they should have gone to the people I worked with at Lionhead too. I don’t think I deserved them. I couldn’t accept that I’ve already done my best work. I’ve waved my arms around on stage and talked to the press for years and got people excited about games, but my passion is making games and I think I’ve still got something to offer.

I don’t think I’ve made my best game. And I haven’t made one of the greatest games ever, have I? To achieve that is my absolute, absolute passion. All the steps that I’ve taken in my life have led me to this point. I want nothing more than to create something truly worthy of all these trophies I’ve got.

So, yes; back to leaving Microsoft. I had this unbelievable desire to make something special. Of course I didn’t have the idea for the game itself, partly because when you’re at Microsoft any idea you have is property of Microsoft. But then, this terrible thing happened to me. One day I was at the studio sitting on my chair, in the zone, my eyes closed, my headphones on, blaring music in, trying to think of ideas for Fable The Journey. Suddenly I felt my chair move. I looked around. Standing there was the Microsoft chair adjustment personnel, this nice woman who comes over once a month, fiddling with my seat settings to make sure it was posturepedically correct. I thought; this is insane. I was in a creative padded cell. Microsoft was so safe. Microsoft was so nice. You’re so supported. Everything I did couldn’t hurt me, both creatively and physically. The danger was long gone. I had this huge desire to make something truly special, and I felt like I was being suffocated creatively a little bit. That was the moment I realised I had to go.

The last game I really truly actually worked on was Black & White. I suppose I did some things on Fable one and two, but even then I was starting to get pulled away in different directions. At Microsoft I was presiding over these Fable games, I was flying to Redmond [Washington] every three weeks, I was visiting other European studios and seeing what they got on with. There was a hell of a lot going on and I wasn’t able to focus on anything. I was essentially an editor. The points at which I touched things like Fable The Journey and Fable 3 were so brief, that the way I interacted with those teams became very fractured.

Let’s discuss the founding design principals of the new studio.

There’s three central philosophies that will drive my next game. The first; I love and adore connecting people in multiplayer. The best way to play Populous was connecting two computers together. You had to get an RS232 lead and unwire it, and switch over pins two and three, but when you did that it was an amazing game. It’s only now that we are able to truly build games which can connect all kinds of people. So building something that’s truly multiplayer is one of the things I want to achieve.

Secondly, so many of our connected experiences are bound up in these little boxes. I’d love to play Call of Duty more online; I just can’t. There’s this huge skill barrier. At the other end of the scale you have Zynga games where everything is so… it’s crafted in such a compulsive, hungry way that it puts me off. I think there’s got to be a kind of game that’s accessible and amazing for everyone. People of all different skills and tastes playing together. That’s what I really want. I want to be able to play games with my son, and my wife, and someone I’ve just met down the pub and people who love games.

The third philosophy, and I’ll have to be a bit more general about this otherwise it’ll give away too much, is to build something that doesn’t have a full stop. I mean, Draw Something, I’m almost at the end of my time on it. I’ve done it, it’s been a laugh, it’s wearing a bit thin now. Even games like Portal 2. I loved it. I got to the end of it, I was done. But what if a game wasn’t like this – what if a game was like a hobby? I’m a bad example, because my hobby happens to be playing games. My point is that there’s no game that encapsulates a hobby. The closest we’ve got is World of Warcraft. The thing about hobbies, when you think about them, be it gardening or fishing or whatever, is that people do these things for years. Why can’t we have a game that feels more like that, in which you can dip into and dip out of over the course of a very long time?

With regards to games, it appears that your new inspiration is Minecraft, specifically when you discuss how players can shape game worlds and gameplay isn’t fixed.

Oh it is a huge inspiration. The thing about Minecraft is that Markus Persson did something on his own and wasn’t constrained by the foundations of games design. These foundations – things like progression, and scores, and teaching the player – have become features that people assume are essential in all games. They are weighing us down more than anything. A lot of the time in this industry we forget that we’re supposed to be making great games and just get caught up in this treadmill. Markus just threw people into his world and left them to it. No beginning. No end. The gift was giving people a world to play with. The genius was not adhering to those old stale rules of game play. There is an approach to making this new game that’s crucial to us. We have to design it in layers. What I want to do is have something playable in a matter of weeks. From that point onwards we are going to play it and refine and refine it until it’s ready.​

So you're more interested in someone to help with, rather than dictate the creation of this game?

Peter Molyneux: Yeah. It's this simple. [...] Although I'm not going to talk about the idea, I will say there are so many ingredients that go to make up an amazing game now, and those ingredients just didn't exist even a few months ago. Whether you talk about new ways of input, or smartglass or motion control or the evolution of whatever consoles are going to be. There's the cloud, where can save your game to it and off it goes and you can go to your friend's house. But it's so much more than that! It can be so much more! What I love about cloud computing - and this hasn't been explored yet - is that it allows for something that we as gamers haven't had since the start of gaming, and that is persistence. We don't have worlds or experiences that can continue and last for extended periods of time. We need to get rid of saved games.

So many times we in this industry make experiences for these small tiny little boxes of people. Now, you may say Call of Duty, the 15 or 20 million people who play, that's not a particularly small box. Well I think it is a small box. Call of Duty excludes so many people who just simply cannot play it because they're not good enough. The trouble is, I love the idea of connecting to people. I love the idea of connecting to my friends. The fact I have to filter those friends by their skill and by what they're able to do... There's an incredible opportunity there.

Imagine a game experience that was more like a hobby, a game experience you continued to play for weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years. I find that fascinating.

The more you talk about it, the more I wonder if it's even a video game in the traditional sense at all. Can it be described in terms of traditional game genres, such as shooter or role-playing game?

Peter Molyneux: I've always been a little bit rebellious against those pigeonholes. Populous was the first example of that rebellion. And Theme Park - there was SimCity before it - but there was nothing that said, why don't we take something and make a simulation based around fun? So I've always experimented and played around with that. But the genres we define at the moment are in crisis anyway. How can you even compare in the same breath Draw Something with Call of Duty? Where are your genres there? I can guarantee it will be a game. It will be an experience. It will be something you may point at and say, I can understand why they're doing this and that.

You mentioned the idea that a game can change the world. Is that your ambition with this?

Peter Molyneux: Well, let's just think about this for one second. If I said to you, five years ago how many people are playing a game at this precise moment, you would have probably added up whatever the most successful thing at that time was. You would have probably added Halo numbers to DS numbers. You would have come up with a figure of two million or three million people playing. Now, five years further on, how many people are playing a game at this precise period of time? It must be tens of millions, if you add in iOS, Facebook, XBLA, Android. Is it tens of millions? Is it hundreds of millions? Why should we stop that growth curve? Why couldn't we say computer games are played by everyone, like everyone watches TVs?

I believe at this point in this industry we're just coming in to the equivalent of the television age. When televisions first went out to consumers there were a few million, and those millions rapidly turned into hundreds of millions. It wasn't only the wealthy enough people to afford a television. Over a period of a few decades that experience touched everybody in the world. And now it's almost unthinkable that people don't have a television. Why can't everyone in the world be a gamer? When you've got devices, mobile phones and tablets that are powerful enough to challenge console gaming, it doesn't seem ridiculous. It doesn't seem bizarre.

It took television quite a long time to get its head around providing entertainment for the world. [...] But you see what I mean. That's why I got so excited when I was at Lionhead. If you could think you could be there at the start of that revolution, where now entertainment is truly global, now it's not just the wealthy people who have slates and smartphones, they're filtering down to everybody. That's going to continue to happen. When you've got all this technology and all these ways of touching and using these devices, and bringing that together in one experience - that's really the reason we set up 22Cans. And then we change the world and everyone will be happy.

That sounds pretty ambitious for your first game there.

Peter Molyneux: It is. But you have to think like this. We're not setting up 22Cans just to make an iOS game. That's not the sole reason we're doing it. We're doing it because there's an enormous opportunity for change. And that change for someone like me and all the people who work here is incredibly exciting.

It doesn't sound like an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or console game. It sounds perhaps like a PC game. Have you even thought about platforms yet?

Peter Molyneux: I've got some thoughts about platforms. Platforms are popping up all the time. The last 10, 15 years have been unbelievably easy for triple-A developers knowing your platform and knowing it's not going to change. Talking about platform transitions happen every seven years - those days are gone forever. God knows what the world will come up with in terms of platforms in the next few years. Platforms are to do with peoples' ability to touch entertainment. Interactive TV - we haven't even started on that. We haven't even started on the true ability of what tablets and slates are. You have access to everything at the quality you feel most comfortable with all the time. I'm not excluding consoles. If consoles are like the cinema, and if everything else, if Facebook and smartphones are like television, they can co-exist. I definitely wouldn't exclude the consoles. But I wouldn't just say it's a console game.

What about games? Is there a game you created while at Lionhead you're most proud of, or is that too abstract a question to answer?

Peter Molyneux: It's not an abstract question but it is a difficult one to answer. I find making a game is like being a parent. You feel very protective about the games you do, you feel very proud about them, and you love them. Just like a parent, it's very hard to pick a favourite child.

I think I love features more. I loved the dog in Fable 2. That was a moment where we realised gaming experiences aren't just about the weapon you've got, that you can give something else to players. I loved the creature in Black & White. I loved the world in Black & White. I loved the theme of The Movies, but I think we made a terrible mistake with The Movies.

But the dog from Fable 2 stands out for you?

Peter Molyneux: Yeah. It was a great journey to implement that feature. The emotional link people had with their dog - I've still got letters from people who said, I love my dog and when it dies these terrible things happen. That's how you measure success.​