You’ve probably heard a thing or two about the disaster that is Godus this week. To those just getting here, Godus represents chronic dreamer Peter Molyneux’s first foray into the exciting world of crowd-funding and if you have any familiarity with the man you probably already know how this story ends.
But maybe you don’t know. Maybe you stopped paying attention to Molyneux’s zany antics years ago, maybe you’re too young to have been burned by his crazy promises. If you’re out of touch and want to understand what’s going on with Godus we’ve put together this nice timeline to give you an idea of just what the hell is going on.
May 5th, 1959 – Peter Molyneux is born! Shortly after birth he is diagnosed with George Lucas Syndrome, a disease which causes patients to produce great works when kept in check by producers and contemporaries, but to go completely off the rails the more power they have.
June 5th, 1989 – Molyneux releases his first big hit, Populous for the Amiga. The game casts the player in the role of a powerful god, which becomes a common theme in Molyneux projects.
June 26th, 1997 – Molyneux releases Dungeon Keeper. It’s really good, even by today’s standards. Everything is going great!
March 25th, 2001 – Molyneux returns to the god fantasy table with Black & White, a game that earned quite a bit of praise upon release but over time has become a title many consider overrated.
September 14th, 2004 – Lionhead Studios releases the first Fable. Molyneux talks about the game a great deal during development, but many notice that a lot of what he promised or implied would be in the game didn’t actually make it into the final product. Perhaps most legendary and symbolic is his promise that the world would be so dynamic that if you were to plant an acorn as a child you would watch it grow into a full-sized tree as the game progressed. Other features like multiplayer and the ability to get married/have children are missing as well.
October 21, 2008 – Fable 2 is released and brings with it many of the features promised in Fable 1, but alas now it’s missing a bunch of the new features that Peter has hyped up during its own development cycle. For many this marks the point where they no longer trust Molyneux’s hype machine.
June 2009 – At E3 Molyneux demonstrates his latest work with Microsoft’s Kinect sensor: Project Milo. Milo is a simulated boy that’s half creepy, and half completely staged. The project eventually disappears which is a surprise to no one.
This also marks the beginning of @PeterMolydeaux, a satirical Twitter account that posts game ideas that could easily have come from the real Peter.
October 26th, 2010 – Fable 3 is released and as one might expect it features a slew of missing or badly designed features. Molyneux would later go on to call the game a “trainwreck” and also acknoweldges his hard earned reputation as a chronic dreamer whose wild statements effectively do more damage than good:
“Sorry – I’ve slightly over-promised on things on occasion. I could name at least 10 features in games that I’ve made up to stop journalists going to sleep and I really apologise to the team for that.” – Peter Molyneux at a BAFTA ceremony in 2011.
If you were still a believer now is probably the time you stopped.
February 20th, 2012 – Molyneux leaves Lionhead and Microsoft to found his new studio: 22 Cans, the goal being to “hand-craft a team of the 22 most talented, passionate and creative individuals with which to make the defining games of his career”. Of course Molyneux can’t even keep that promise and the team now consists of 30 employees.
November 6th, 2012 – 22Cans releases their first title: Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? The game is billed as a “social experiment” and has players working in real time to chip away at an enormous cube with a promise that the person who clears away the last piece will receive a “life changing prize”. The game is free but players are able to pay to remove or (if you’re a real asshole) add pieces to the cube.
December 2012 – 22Cans launches a Kickstarter for their next game, Godus, a game that will largely serve as a spiritual successor to Populous. The Kickstarter is funded with just two days left in its campaign pulling in around $800,000. Crowd funding is a big change for Molyneux who now has the daunting task of not letting down investors who are also his customers.
May 26th, 2013 – Bryan Henderson of Edinburgh downloads Curiosity on a whim and wins the game after spending only an hour with it. His prize? Molyneux details it in this incredible video where he pretends to be inside a giant cube and seriously hypes up just how epic everything that’s about to go down will be:
If you don’t feel like watching, I’ll just tell you. Bryan gets to be the first god over all gods in 22Cans’ upcoming game Godus AND he’s going to be given 1% of all profits earned from the game while he is in that role. WOWIE!
September 13th, 2013 – Godus is released on Steam’s Early Access program. The game is of course in beta, and is missing a lot of features including the all important multiplayer mode which would allow Bryan to become god and start making his fat stacks of cash. But hey, it’s early access, this is to be expected right?
August 7th, 2014 – Godus is released on iOS. Note we’ve jumped in time almost a full year. The game’s feature set is very similar to the PC version except a lot of the mechanics have been retooled into a F2P model. This of course isn’t a Godus review but it’s fun to point out that many of the game’s time based limitations are similar in tone to those of the Dungeon Keeper reboot that came out earlier that year which Molyneux (correctly) called “ridiculous”.
“I felt myself turning round saying, ‘What? This is ridiculous. I just want to make a dungeon. I don’t want to schedule it on my alarm clock for six days to come back for a block to be chipped,'” – Peter Molyneux decrying mechanics he would later use in Godus
Bryan is still not god.
November 27th, 2014 – Godus is released on Android. Bryan is still not god. This is becoming sort of like the ending to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory except Willy Wonka forgot he invited kids to his factory.
A photo of Bryan’s “not-god” form.
December 2nd, 2014 – Molyneux announces his new game, The Trail (some outlets have incorrectly been calling the game The Trial), a curious move seeing as how he hasn’t yet finished his last game, Godus. He also accuses Kickstarter of being a destructive force that ultimately damaged Godus:
“There’s this overwhelming urge to over-promise because it’s such a harsh rule: if you’re one penny short of your target then you don’t get it. And of course in this instance, the behaviour is incredibly destructive, which is ‘Christ, we’ve only got 10 days to go and we’ve got to make £100,000, for fuck’s sake, lets just say anything’. So I’m not sure I would do that again.” – Peter Molyneux
Isn’t it weird how similar that confession is to what he said back in 2010 at the BAFTAs? I’m sure he’s learned his lesson this time.
So what unlucky soul is tasked with bringing Godus to completion while daddy moves on to bigger and better things? Well let us introduce you to Konrad Naszynski or FuriousMoo as he is known on the 22Cans forums. Konrad is an original Kickstarter backer for Godus and has been hanging around as an intern at 22Cans for some time before finally being given a paid position as a designer for the game. Naszynski comes across as almost like a bizarro version of Peter Molyneux, one who wants to under promise and set extremely realistic expectations. He’s also exceedingly open with his customers which should certainly be a good thing, but is also why you’re reading this article.
Maybe Bryan can be god in The Trail.
January 10th, 2015 – In the spirit of transparency Naszynski outlines just what kind of trouble Godus is in, and emphasizes that perhaps players should re-adjust their expectations in relation to what will come of the Kickstarter promises.
This will also buy me a lot of thinking time for what to actually do with Godus as a whole. You all want to know what this game is actually supposed to be, well so I. Like I said, I was never given any indication of what Peter’s vision was of Godus as an end product beyond the kickstarter pitch. There’s not much point me making grand plans now because I simply don’t know what will be achievable. To be brutally candid and realistic I simply can’t see us delivering all the features promised on the kickstarter page, a lot of the multiplayer stuff is looking seriously shaky right now especially the persistent stuff like hubworld.
Godus is rather confused right now, it plays like an ongoing persistent game without real end point and yet it’s divided up into discrete levels. This is one of the big decisions we will need to make in the next couple of weeks. And again realistically I’m having to ask myself, “how can we turn what Godus is right now into a good complete experience” rather than “how can we deliver on the kickstarter pitch goals”. We are in the process of re-evaluating the ‘big picture’ direction of and end goal of Godus. It’s not an easy or straightforward task, but I will let you know when I can.
What kind of things promised in the Kickstarter are we missing?
For starters the game wasn’t delivered on time, missing its projected release dates by well over a year.
We’re missing the promised multiplayer mode that lets Bryan be a god.
The Linux version that was unlocked in a stretch goal is nowhere to be seen.
It seems as though numerous bonus rewards in the Kickstarter likely haven’t been delivered either. There is a running thread on the 22Cans forums that tries to sort out who received what, it hasn’t updated since May, but you’ll see a lot of stuff is still unaccounted for.
February 9th, 2015 – Rock Paper Shotgun publishes a piece on the status of Godus, including Naszynski’s comments which make for some pretty great headlines and stir the media into a frenzy.
In an attempt to at least partially get out of the PR tailspin 22Cans has found themselves in, the team publishes a really awkward video where they address how bad they fucked up. Seriously, this thing is a mess, with Naszynski holding steady to his stance that things are probably not going to work out well while Molyneux doles out as much hope as he can muster while also being the only one at the table to enjoy a refreshing beverage.
February 11th, 2015 – Eurogamer does a great piece on Bryan, who is still not god. They also get Peter to acknowledge his failings in relation to Bryan and promise to do a better job of letting him know when he gets to be god.
May 14th, 2020 – Molyneux reveals that he has unlocked the secret to immortality in his new “game” Resurrecto. Players are instructed to kill themselves after starting the game at which point they will be resurrected into their own body as it was at the age of 21 while retaining all their conscious memories. Unfortunately there is no time in the development schedule to add in the resurrection feature. Thousands are killed.
November 14th, 2021 – Ressurecto is released for iOS. Resurrections are now available for 700 gems or $55.99.
