If I Were Peter Molyneux 1

I’ve at least one friend who’ll hate this.

I’ve said before that the videogame industry does not have any space for idea men, and people like Wil Wright and Peter Molyneux are living fossils, strange creatures that breathe methane, preserved in amber by the sheer scope of their impossible egos. There are roughly a million people in the games industry who have ‘a great idea for a game,’ in the same way every waitress and carwasher in Los Angeles is ‘working on a script.’ I have to reiterate over and over again that this sort of exercise is entirely undertaken to make sure that we realise such things will never get made, and therefore feel sad. It’s the catharsis for which we follow both tragedy and horror narratives, and why anyone with the intellect sufficient to spell their own name watches daytime television.

Despite the fruitlessness of the efforts, I nonetheless want to throw this idea out here in the vague hope that if I keep doing this sort of thing my brain will stop coming up with better games than I’ll ever play and I’ll lower my threshold for disappointment in a billion-dollar industry that would rather sell Call Of Duty: Black Ops, Uncharted 3, and God Of War III than Psychonauts, Okami, Beyond Good & Evil, or Grim Fandango. Good fucking christ, looking up those references was depressing.

Anyway, I’d really like to be involved in the creation of and the writing for a short, action-packed third-person perspective action-adventure co-op game with two protaganists who shift being focus, Lost Vikings style to develop a well-controlled plot thread. The protaganists are manly manly manly men, who are working to rescue a woman with a name like Regina, or possibly Kitten, and at the conclusion as the two of you rescue her, she professes her undying love for you, but the game slows down as if to gear up for a Quick-Time event where you have to choose which of the two men she chooses. You choose, and she professes and then there’s this dreadful pause – no matter who you choose – where the two men have to explain to her, that, ah, no, sorry. They’re, um, gay.

“Oh, so you… and he…?”

“What? No. Him? He’s an ox, not my type at all. I like expressive guys, you know, sensitive sorts?”

“And I prefer bears.”