It's always difficult following "celebrity developers" in the video game industry. They become better known because of their openness, their willingness to talk about their projects but, in reality, they never really say anything that hasn't been carefully examined by a PR company. When they leave, it's often shrouded in mystery and the conversation between that developer, that figurehead and their fans dries up rather quickly.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Peter Molyneux seems to want anything but falling of the front page and he details exactly what made him leave Microsoft. Now whether this is the entire truth will probably never be known, but it's a fair explanation.
"Well, it's not an easy answer. It's a slightly complicated answer. Here I was at Microsoft and Lionhead, and it was very secure and comfortable. There was the Fable franchise, which is a great franchise. There were some wonderful people to work with. And Microsoft's a wonderful company. I was very 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? Do they represent the best I'm ever going to do? Or do they represent a challenge to what I am going to do?
"I got myself into this slightly obsessive state where I said to myself that I just couldn't accept the best I am ever going to do in my life has already been done. I've got to take the bit between the teeth and go out there and try and do something truly, truly great.
"All this stuff came together, and I went to speak to Microsoft a few months ago. They were very understanding about it. And we agreed two things. The case I put was, the 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. Secondly, the type of people I would need to exploit all this new stuff would be slightly different from the type of people who were at Lionhead.
"So, after a lot of talking, we agreed I would leave Microsoft and set up a new company. Of course, Microsoft was very keen to talk about a deal, but 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. I spoke to a couple of colleagues who weren't at Lionhead anymore. One was Peter Murphy, another was Tim Rance. We decided to found 22Cans."
