Lionhead Studios - Peter Molyneux Interview @ Develop

Peter Molyneux speaks to Develop magazine about turning Lionhead around through improvements to their processes:

The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ – usually after severe alcohol abuse – and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere.

Quite a while ago now, we sat down and thought, well, this is ridiculous – we can’t keep this notion that game development is a purely creative process, and that you have to build it to be able to see it. There’s got to be another way.

The first thing that we did is say, right, we need to do more work upfront it design and concepting, and that means less iteration further on. Because when you’ve got a team like Fable, which was around 100 people, you can’t experiment with that many; you’d be spending mad amounts of money. You just can’t do it.