Peter Molyneux On Why He Quit Lionhead Studios

Here I was at Microsoft and Lionhead, and it was very secure and comfortable... Then, about 18 months ago, this sequence of strange things started happening. I started getting all these lifetime achievement awards and BAFTA fellowships, and gosh, who knows what else? I almost lined them up on the shelf, looked at them, and thought to myself, well, are these awards really for things I've done in the past?

...I just couldn't accept the best I am ever going to do in my life has already been done... [T]he best a creative person can ever do is when there is a lot of risk and when there is a lot at stake. That's hard to do within a big corporation like Microsoft... I didn't want to constrain any creative endeavours this new company would do with setting an early deal. That's what I did at Lionhead, and it really did end up constraining what you ended up doing.

...The indie community I found incredibly enticing. I remember going on to the GDC Awards last year and the year before. They always start off with this video that says, f**k you triple-A developer. In a way, although that's obviously a bit of satire and comedy, they're right.

Well, we are funded at the moment - not funded through a publisher. The thing is we're not going to make an app for iOS and want it to be in the top 1000 apps. That's not what we're doing here. What we're trying to do is make something that's truly a moment, truly a step change. That's our obsession.

...My plan is to find a fantastic team, work on something that is more than just a few pieces of paper or what the triple-A industry calls pillars, which I think are ridiculous, so when I say, look, this is going to change the world and I say this is why, I can point to something and you can see it tangibly there. That's my idea.