Once upon a time, Peter Molyneux was one of the most famous – or, perhaps, infamous – game developers in the industry. Many of the games he designed, including the likes of Populous, Black & White, and Fable, were beloved, but at the same time Molyneux developed a controversial reputation for making impossible promises about the experiences his games would deliver. It seems his self-confidence goes back to well before he had established his name.
"I always dreamt of being an entrepreneur," as Molyneux tells Edge magazine in issue #416. With that in mind, at the age of 24 he set up a business called Vulcan Computing, with the "disastrous" idea of selling floppy disks to schools with "some free educational software" he'd created. "We couldn't get the floppy disks cheap enough," Molyneux recalls, so that idea ended in failure.
"But that started me on the route of programming," Molyneux continues, "and as that business was decaying, I thought, you know, 'I'm going to write a game.' At that time, you could write a shoot-'em-up where you were shooting space invaders in toilets and it would sell tons of copies. Instead, the game I decided to write was a text-based business simulation. I thought it was quite fun, although visually it was nothing to look at."
That game, developed for the BBC Micro Model B, was called The Entrepreneur. Molyneux's print ad for the game – reprinted in Edge – advertised it at a modest £7.95, and promised a £100 prize with "rules & regulations sent with order." Ponying up £7.95 for a chance to win £100 might be more of an appeal to gamblers than strategy game fans, but Molyneux was confident it would work. Quite a bit too confident, in fact.
"The day the advert for The Entrepreneur came out, I got so excited, I actually phoned up the Post Office and said, 'You may want to put a few extra postmen on.' The office – this tiny little office in this business park – I'd cut a bigger hole in the bottom of the postbox, because I thought, 'No way they're going to fit all the orders in there.' And then the day of release came, and two orders fluttered in. And one was almost certainly from my mum."
Molyneux has told this story with some variations for years – this 2009 Gamespot interview is as good an example as any – but there's one sad truth that's lingered through every telling: nobody seems to know if any copy of The Entrepreneur still exists anywhere. If Molyneux still has the code somewhere, it seems nobody's prodded him to release it, and selling only two copies doesn't exactly make a game easy to preserve.
"For every game, I've got this belief that it's going to sell unbelievable millions and be this wonderful experience," Molyneux says. "That's always stuck with me, and ended up getting me in a lot of trouble."
