We’re just a few hours out from the early access release of Masters of Albion, which creator and legendary hyperbolist Peter Molyneux is pitching as both his swansong and “redemption title.” To mark the occasion, Molyneux recently took to YouTube to field questions from fans about his career, Masters of Albion, and where his god-game obsession stems from.
It’s that last one that’s most significant to me right now, because Molyneux—a founding father of the whole god game genre thanks to Populous, which he designed—says his obsession with the godly genre is making him a bit sad these days. Why? Because they’ve sort of all gone away.
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You get the odd modern iteration—Reus 2 hit in 2024, for instance—but it sure doesn’t feel like a genre many people are thinking about these days. Which is sad, because more videogames should let you yeet villagers so hard they dip beneath the curvature of the Earth.
“If you compare it to other genres, like first-person shooters or battle royale, or even RTS games and roleplaying games, they’ve all moved forward. If you just look at the HUD of any game, pretty much, the HUD—the icons on the top of the screen have reduced and reduced and reduced in all those other genres, and it was a real sadness to me that god games have kind of been left behind.” Videogame HUDs feel like an odd thing to zero in on specifically, but I think ol’ Molyneux is treating them as metonymic for ‘how far a genre has come forward’ in general.
The way Molyneux tells it, it sounds like there’s a vicious cycle going on where waning interest from devs leads to less appetite from publishers which, you guessed it, leads to waning interest from devs. “If you go to a publisher and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this great game. We’re working on it. It’s a god game.’ They kind of turn their nose up and say, ‘Well, we’ve run the numbers and god games are such a small slice of the overall games that people play; we’re not interested in signing it’.”
This is why, says Molyneux, 22cans is self-publishing Masters of Albion—though it’s worth noting even Molyneux’s curtain call isn’t just a god game; there’s a lot of Fable and Dungeon Keeper-flavoured stuff in there. I haven’t been too blown away by what I’ve seen of it so far, but if Masters of Albion could help revive the god game genre, at least a little? That’d be fine by me.
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