Shigeru Miyamoto? What about the Minecraft guy, whatever his name is...

Anyhow, I think game designers had more impact in the earlier days of video game history, when development teams were still small. ( With that in mind, I'd say it still applies to most Indie games. ) But even with the huge teams of modern AAA games, you still need a person or two with a creative vision, someone to guide development in a certain direction. Otherwise it all falls apart, no matter how skilled your artists, coders or the rest of the team are. At best you'd probably end up with a technically near flawless game, which is otherwise completely uninspired, like so many big AAA releases.
And ironically, threads like these are part of the "problem". People are interested in what the guy does, whether it's good or bad, and they like to discuss about it. ( Or just call him names, even though they don't know him at all. ) Celebrity, as you said, can be a funny thing.

Lol, this is pretty funny to me. Because I can't handle stress no one else can is all I get from this person. If you need 100,000 dollars no, no you do not just say anything. If I wanted to get paid for my game with promises, I would always be honest with whats going on. Hell, I would youtube my progress even for the backers to see exactly what is happening.(They already own it right?) Anyways just because he can't stop blabbing his mouth falsely for money doesn't mean we or anyone cannot as well.

Also someone said this guy was with Bullfrog i think. Was this guy behind dungeon keeper?

Yes, he was the designer of the first game.

Yeah it's so weird. Wouldn't this article allow investors to try to get their money back since he just admitted that he lied to investors to get their money? What world does he think he lives in where he is beyond litigation? Although the price for the lawsuit would probably be more than most people individually put into the stupid kickstarter, so sigh, he may actually be above the law.

Well, he used to be awesome at least. lol! +1 for helping me. :D
I hope you get 1000 soon!

I don't know if the article would be enough to pull him before law for responsibility of the matter in the US, but it is definitive something worth checking out

If I had a million dollars I make an animated adaption of the Hobbit with traditional 2D Animation and Disney styled Art.

Hmmm seems so very very wrong. Ring Runner and WindForge both made modest estimations of what they needed, got their funding (Ring Runner even exceeded it to make the space cities) and delivered exactly what they promised. To date they pretty much broke even with what they invested, but still good examples.

Then there's hugely odd ones like potato salad which get huge amounts of money, probably because it made someone laugh so they promised their $1.

At least with Noah Antwiler, his hugely unrealistic promises is at a highly-unlikely-to-ever-meet-tier on Pantheon... and with that funding he could actually pull it off...

Richard Garriott is my nerdy deity.

I see what you mean though. Every time Peter makes a promise, the team behind him bolt upright and say ‘What?! No, no, we still haven’t figured out how to implement those real-time trees you wanted yet!’ The man seems very genuine and has very creative ideas, though the industry would perhaps benefit from focusing a little more on the genius programmers who somehow help turn those ideas into a coherent game.

If ever the last line summed up an article, that one did.

I remember hearing an anecdote how the dog in Fable 2 came to be. Supposedly it went like this: the gamedesigners at Lionhead were busy at work, suddenly the door opened, Molyneux said "I want a dog" and he left closing the door behind him.

Peter Molyneux invented Populous!


He INVENTED it!

What have you done, goddamnit?! Nothing, NOTHING!

It seems he doesn't have the self-awareness to know he should be the last person to complain about overpromising and under-delivering. Why else would he make such ironic statements?

that would cost a lot more then 1 million

Hmm. This sounds so familiar. I'm sure there's someone else I've heard about recently with similar issues. Something about a space game which cut a promised feature...

I think David Braben must have graduated from the Peter Molyneux School of Lack Of Self Control.