Peter Molyneux is returning to his roots

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2023 marks ten years since Peter Molyneux's social experiment with Curiosity: What's Inside The Cube concluded, promising one user a direct role in strategy game Godus as the 'God of Gods.'

In the following years, a Eurogamer interview with that player, Bryan Henderson, and a controversial interview with Rock Paper Shotgun prompted a lot of negativity towards Molyneux, and compelled him to take more of a backseat, handing over the reins of his studio 22cans and resolving not to speak to the press.

2023 also marks Molyneux's tentative return to the spotlight, with a handful of interviews earlier this year, then as a guest on Simon Parkin's My Perfect Console podcast, and appearing at last week's EGX 2023 to reflect on Fable 2's 15th anniversary. In the narrow window between his arrival at London's Excel Centre and walking out on stage, Molyneux spoke to GamesIndustry.biz about what he's been doing in the intervening decade.

"It's interesting because ten years ago the press used to take up an enormous amount of my time," he says. "I would say three days of a five-day week had some sort of press that was going on and then suddenly, just like that, it stopped. I thought, 'What am I going to do?' And what I decided to do was return to being a coder. So I've been working on my code for a long time, and that's a lot more [like] where I started from. I started as a coder rather than a designer. And, I'm absolutely adoring it. I love it, but it does make me a lot more introverted."

As he previously expressed on Parkin's podcast, Molyneux acknowledges some of the issues with how he communicated about his games to the press in the past, from the