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Molyneux hoping to talk first 22 Cans effort "within a few months"

Peter Molyneux has said he'd like to talk about the first project from the newly-founded 22 Cans "within a few months," adding he'd "hope" to see it in a playable state by the end of the year.

"When you're an indie developer, the weeks you used to take to do something when you're a triple-A developer have to take days. I definitely hope to have something to talk about to the world within a few months," Molyneux told Eurogamer in one of the first interviews he's given since founding the company after leaving Microsoft.

"That will depend on any partners we have of course. I'd be disappointed if you didn't hear from me more in the oncoming months. I'd be very disappointed if we didn't have something pretty realised within a year."

On it being playable this year, he added: "I hope so. One of the things we are definitely going to do is involve a community in this experience before it's completed. I love the idea of what Minecraft and Markus did. I love listening to people's positive and negative points.

"This world today is very different to the world where we used to stick something in a box and put it on a shelf and the world didn't need to see it, touch it or experience it until it was absolutely finished. Those days have gone forever."

On leaving Microsoft last month as creative head of Microsoft Game Studios Europe and Lionhead boss, a series of events started a chain reaction that had Molyneux feel he still hadn't provided his best effort to date, beginning with his GDC lifetime achievement award and BAFTA fellowship.

"18 months ago, this sequence of strange things started happening. I started getting all these lifetime achievement awards and BAFTA fellowships, and gosh, who knows what else? I almost lined them up on the shelf, looked at them, and thought to myself, well, are these awards really for things I've done in the past? Do they represent the best I'm ever going to do? Or do they represent a challenge to what I am going to do?

"I got myself into this slightly obsessive state where I said to myself that I just couldn't accept the best I am ever going to do in my life has already been done. I've got to take the bit between the teeth and go out there and try and do something truly, truly great.
All this stuff came together, and I went to speak to Microsoft a few months ago. They were very understanding about it.

"And we agreed two things. The case I put was, the best a creative person can ever do is when there is a lot of risk and when there is a lot at stake. That's hard to do within a big corporation like Microsoft. Secondly, the type of people I would need to exploit all this new stuff would be slightly different from the type of people who were at Lionhead.

"So, after a lot of talking, we agreed I would leave Microsoft and set up a new company."

Read the full interview through the link. It comes throughly recommended.

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About the Author

Johnny Cullen

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Johnny has experience at a wide range of games media outlets, having written for Eurogamer, Play Magazine, PC Gamer, GameDaily, and more. He worked at VG247 pumping out news at an astonishing rate for several years. More recently, he founded the games website PlayDiaries.

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