Curiosity: Peter Molyneux Explains Why He Left Microsoft

Peter Molyneux may have left the comfort of Lionhead and Microsoft, but he’s still a big player in the game industry and his latest endeavor, titled simply “Curiosity”, is a game worth keeping tabs on.

Molyneux describes Curiosity as an indie game “experiment” while the rest of his new studio, 22 Cans, works on a much bigger title which has yet to be named, or even formally announced.

“It is a brave concept. What they intimate on Twitter is that it’s crazy,” he said in his keynote speech at Unite 2012. 

“And it is crazy. But we’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to be crazy. We’ve got to experiment with these new things. We can’t just lock ourselves away in ivory towers, coming up with a concept and just releasing it. Those days are gone. Forever.”

The concept of Curiosity is to remove squares from an ever-shrinking block of 64 billion parts. Each layer within the block reveals new parts, which each player (it’s a multiplayer game) can chain together for score multipliers. 

“One of the reasons I really wanted to leave my beautiful, wonderful, safe place at Microsoft was to have a single idea. For me, having one idea that I and my team utterly, completely, obsessively, focus on is the reason that I left,” he said.

“The scariest thing for a designer isn’t complex stuff. It isn’t a quest with a story and an interesting outcome. The scary thing is simplicity. That is terror. That is our abyss. That is the place we don’t want to go, when we have to design the most simple and purest thing and make it delightful.”

via Gamasutra.