Peter Molyneux's tearful retirement cut short by it being a complete hoax

Peter Molyneux, the creator of Fable, Populous, and Black & White, is not retiring from video games. The 56-year-old designer apparently sent out a series of tweets on Thursday declaring his exit and acknowledging some of the troubles he encountered on the way, though he posted minutes later that his account had been hacked and none of it was true.

Here are the appropriately reflective tweets announcing his retirement:

Godus is the most recent project from Molyneux's current studio 22cans, if you're not familiar. It's attracted a lot of controversy for not delivering on the concept laid out by its Kickstarter, and for never giving that guy who "won" Curiosity the money or in-game power he was promised. Those are just the most recent missteps for Molyneux, who has made overpromising into something of a running gag through decades of delivering "cool but not quite what you were talking about before" games.

And here's where he spoiled all the retrospective pieces being hastily typed on a thousand game journalist's keyboards:

Or this could all be part of one big publicity stunt. You never really know with Molyneux. Either way, the apparent hacker's charade lasted just under 15 minutes, making it quite possibly the first social media hoax / alternate reality game ever to not outstay its welcome. Hopefully whoever's in control of the Twitter account has turned on two-factor authentication by now.

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Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.