A Conversation with Peter Molyneux
Designing a dog that doesn’t annoy.
The long story of the dog started way back. As a designer, you always look to yourself and your experiences for inspiration. I used to play a game in the ‘80s called NetHack. It was drawn with ASCII on mainframe computers. In NetHack, your hero was the letter "H" and you got a dog which was a lower case “d.” I was emotionally connected and I found it interesting to ask what was I was connected with. There’s something magical there. Your imagination will fill in the gaps.
We were thinking about what the sequel to Fable should be, and we did a long list such as bigger weapons and more levels, and we got to the end of that list and there’s nothing unique there. There’s nothing that surprises people, and one of the things we were talking about was how action games are all about killing and shooting. But is there something else? Why does it have to be about that stuff?
We remembered our Black and White days, when we made this game with a thing called a "creature." We asked [what would happen] if we had something like that which was less abstract, so we thought about doing a human, and then we settled on a dog. People have emotional connections with dogs.
