Peter Molyneux knows he's spent over 40 years in the video game industry – but he isn't sure how much longer he'll stay there.
The Fable designer was emotional during his interview with Edge for its new magazine issue 416, out now, as he described plans to stop making games after his upcoming strategy game Masters of Albion launches.
"I know people are going to say, 'Come on, it won't be your last game," says Molyneux, "but, you know, I'm 66 years old." The developer – who once implored people in a 2023 blog to "be patient. Please be understanding" – tells Edge, "I'm working as hard as I've ever worked in my life. And I just haven't got the life energy left to do this again."
"Everything that I've done... it just feels like this is the bet, you know?" Molyneux says about Masters of Albion, the supernatural countryside god game kind of set in the same green hills as his 2001 RPG Fable. "I've put all my chips on the table."
Molyneux took a sizable break from game-making after reaching nearly $900,000 in Kickstarter funding in 2012 for the god game Godus, which released in Early Access a year later but never left it. So some people still dismiss anything he says by reflex.
"Why should anyone give this guy money again?" says a popular comment in a 2024 Reddit thread about Molyneux.
But 62-year-old Hideo Kojima also often publicly grapples with the increasing amount of energy he needs to sacrifice just to make something interesting. The reality is, no matter what you still think about your video game heroes, they are getting older.
