Lionhead Studios boss Peter Molyneux thinks that one day, videogames will tell the greatest story in the world.
Lionhead’s Molyneux – perhaps best known for games like Fable and Black and White – has a bit of an odd relationship with stories in videogames. Oh, there’s no doubt that he’s for them, and the man clearly thinks there’s potential there … it’s just that he keeps revising what he believes that potential is.
First, he said he thought that games would have Godfather-level storytelling by 2016. Then, Molyneux revised his statement to say that not only would games reach the level of The Godfather‘s plot, they would surpass it. But even that wasn’t grandiose enough for Molyneux: The man has flatly stated that the greatest story ever told will some day come from a computer game. That’s right, the greatest ever. Of all time. Period.
“And I think that if I play the greatest story ever told in the same game as you play it, your greatest story is going to be different to my greatest story … and that is power,” Molyneux told VG247.
Molyneux is a man who has a reputation for thinking big – perhaps thinking too big, if you ask some people. In Peter Molyneux’s perfect world, the game with the greatest story ever told would be one of Lionhead’s: “That ambition to do that, to write that story, or to write that game that allows you to experience that story, is definitely something Lionhead Studios wants to do.”
Big words, Peter. Big words. But I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see – I wonder what Shakespeare would have come up with had he been playing as a Bard in EverQuest back in the day?
