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By: Geoff Keighley
Photographs By: Michael Donald
Designed By: James Cheung
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The Guildford Cathedral stands out in this tiny village south of London. |
Thirty minutes south of London, the Guildford Cathedral towers over the rolling countryside and dwarfs the rest of this tiny village. Perched on Stag Hill, a favorite hunting spot for the King of England in the 1300s, the 70-year-old cathedral boasts the highest Sunday morning congregation attendance in all of England. It's a majestic sight, usually crowned by a golden angel weather vane on the roof. The vane serves as a beacon, which can be seen for miles on end.
Today, the angel is missing.
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Peter Molyneux welcomes GameSpot readers to Lionhead Studios in Guildford, England. |
Step inside the cathedral, and you can't help but feel as though you're living in a fairy tale: The church feels out of place, yet perfectly set on the landscape as though someone swooped in from above and plopped it down in the middle of a sea of green grass. Inside, the 15-foot-tall angel is unearthed, stripped of its gold leaf and ready for regilding. But there's more: In addition to being restored, the angel will be retrofitted with a cell phone antenna inside its hollow core. The local cell phone company, One 2 One Digital, has agreed to pay for the restoration so that it can put its 5-meter-high antenna inside.
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The office, one big war room, is filled with interesting toys. |
The regilding of the angel is perhaps a fitting analogy to what is happening only a stone's throw away from the cathedral at Lionhead Studios, the new startup of PC gaming's "It Boy," 41-year-old Peter Molyneux. Just as the angel will have the marvels of technology concealed inside of it, Molyneux and his team have a similar project all their own: hiding three years of cutting-edge technology inside a beautiful and simple game that will let players manipulate an open-ended miniworld however they deem fit. If it all works out, the result will be Black & White, a new-age Rorschach inkblot test of your moral tenor.
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Peter Molyneux takes a break from Black & White to get dinner. |
Today, it's exactly three years and one day since Valentine's Day 1998, the day that Lionhead Studios wrote the first line of code for Black & White. Late in the evening, while the nearby cathedral basks in amber spotlights, the Lionhead office is almost pitch black, save for the glow of computer monitors. For Molyneux and his team of 25, developing Black & White has been a life-changing experience. Now, as the group sits in one large war room at Lionhead's modest first-floor offices on a road named after Nobel laureate Frederick Sanger, three years of sacrifice and hard work might be coming to an end.
All told, the past few weeks have been especially tough for the team, an all-male group of whiz kids whose collective dream was to work with the man behind gaming classics such as Populous, Syndicate, and Theme Park. The hope is to finish the game tomorrow, February 16, 2001, and bring development to a close. Tonight, the office is a mess--chicken pot pies and chocolate mousse cakes sit half-eaten in the conference room, and Molyneux sits at his desk, taking a long draw of a cigarette, only to blow the smoke right back at his monitor as a stress reliever. As the clock ticks into the night, Molyneux stops fixing bugs for a moment and muses, "You know, I can think of something and make it real. How cool is that?" Despite all the hard work, Molyneux looks to be enthused just by the thought of his dream coming alive. "Three years ago, I had this bizarre idea about a 200-foot cow, and tonight, all these people around the world are talking about it. It's amazing," he says, speaking in his trademark way that radiates infectious enthusiasm. When Molyneux speaks about games, every adjective is a superlative and the modulation of his voice makes even the most mundane comment sound like it's the most important thing you've ever heard.
Nonetheless, while people around the world might have been talking about Black & White in February, the more pressing question was when they would get to play it. At the start of January, Black & White had 3,000 known bugs in it. Tonight, it's down to a handful, but as a cool wind blows through the open patio door at Lionhead, the question remains whether the team will be able to blow through the final few issues that are preventing the game from being finished.
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