Recently, I travelled to Guildford, England, to interview developer Peter Molyneux, the legendary game developer behind Populous, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White and Fable, among others.
And, as part of that interview, which covered everything from Molyneux’s brand-new god game, Masters of Albion, which has just got a huge game-changing update, through the moment he conceptualized Black & White’s famous titan creatures, and onto the bombshell news that a Black & White remaster could be incoming, I also asked the father of the god game genre about AI use in the video game industry.
Molyneux is a gaming industry veteran, having been active in the gaming industry for over 40 years, so naturally his take on the rise of AI in game development was of interest. This is what he said when I asked if the gaming industry should embrace AI.
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“Right. So, it’s such a hot topic. Yes. It’s such a hot potato. You’ve got to be very, very careful what you say, because, you know, I think the latest survey said that 12% of people would never buy any game under any circumstances if it had any AI at all.
“The first question we’ve got to ask is actually why does 12% of the people have this incredibly polarized view of AI? And the answer, I’m going to blame ChatGPT, I’m going to blame Gemini. They did this criminally ridiculous thing. They released those models that produced those repulsive images of 10-fingered hands and incredibly inappropriate materials which anybody could generate, and that locked into people’s minds AI equals AI slop.
“So we’ve got consumers [who] are annoyed. We’ve got this technology which ain’t going to stop. You know, if you think it’s going to stop, it isn’t. And then we’ve got Steam, which is almost everything in the industry at the moment. Steam, as a developer, you have to tick the box. Does this game contain AI? And if you tick it, you know instantly 12% [of gamers are] gone, and probably a further 18% would probably look at it and go, ‘Oh, not for me.’ So we are pretending. This is the truth, Rob. We as the industry are pretending we’re not using AI, but the reality is, it’s almost impossible to code now without using AI. Almost impossible. I mean, the efforts you have to go to extract AI from line completion stuff and from generative stuff is very challenging. So everyone, every title that’s come out in the last year has been using that, but we’re still able to not tick the AI box. AI is going to be, when it’s sorted out and not producing AI slop, it is the most… This is very controversial. It is the most, the biggest advance in creativity for smaller studios, for medium studios and bigger studios. The biggest step forward in creativity.”
Then naturally, I asked, how so?
At this point, I asked Molyneux how AI was such a big step forward for studios, as, at least from my point of view, that has often been something not clarified well over the past few years of AI discourse. What are the everyday game development examples of how AI is being such a transformative tool for game studios of all sizes? This is what Molyneux said.
“I’ll talk in general terms. I won’t talk about ourselves. Let’s say you and I thought about a game, you know, let’s set it in an old Carpathian mountain village. And it starts in a graveyard, and there’s this young girl wandering around the graveyard looking lost. Now, traditionally, what you would do is you’d have someone… like there was a genius concept artist at Lionhead called Mike McArthur, and I’d sit down with Mike McArthur [and] I’d say, yeah, there’s this girl, and she’s wandering. How old is the girl? Mike might say. I don’t know, maybe she’s about 12. Okay, and is it an old church, a new church? You know, we’d have this conversation.
“[So] he would go away. Two weeks later, he would come back. Then, do you mean this girl? This child? Oh no, I don’t really like the girl. She looks too pretty. She should be, you know, starving, and he goes away for another week, comes back. Yeah. [Now] you can do all that concepting work in five minutes [with AI].
“If you take that same premise. Imagine that you were a zombie; you were just emerging from there. That’s the character you play. Okay, yes. You play an undead. And you move in an undead form. To do that prototype, you know, to get you to come out of the ground, to get you to locomote, to get you to navigate around the world effectively would take months and months and months of work. But now you can go to AI and say, right, I want to have a character. I want him to be buried. I want him to be a fully rigged character. Produce the code. To bring him out to the ground and move him, the code will be produced. This is all done in a day, not months.
“You can tweak the code. You can change the code with this conversation. Now, all of that is the preparation work that you’re doing for the [development] team to engage with [on] the actual title. I don’t think AI is powerful enough yet to trust it to produce the assets for the final quality of the game. But Rob, it will be. Yeah, it will be in less time than we can possibly imagine. Within a year, I predict that there will be AI so intimately bound to middleware like Unity and Unreal that it will be very hard for us to extract it. So at the moment we’ve got this ridiculous state where other industries, like the advertising industry, are embracing AI; it’s the savior. Whereas the games industry is trying to push it away.”
It feels inevitable, for better and worse
What struck a chord with me during this interview was Molyneux’s belief that, within a year, AI will be so fundamentally built into key game development middleware like Unreal Engine and Unity that it will be almost impossible to not use AI in the creation of a new game. That just rang so true to me as soon as he had said it. It felt inevitable. Very few studios have their own proprietary tools/engines, and even if they did, if AI can indeed make game development easier, why wouldn’t they adopt it into their own tech? I’m neither massively pro AI nor anti-AI in game development; it’s clearly how the tech is used, and to what extent, that is key, but I’m not sure ignoring it entirely solves anything.
However, I think there is a clear difference between using AI-powered development tools and middleware to help create quality games powered by real human passion and performance, and churning out a non-stop slurry of AI slop loaded with AI assets and poorly implemented AI-coded systems in order to make a quick buck. We’re clearly living through very turbulent times in the gaming industry right now, and the rise of AI in game development is just one facet of that, but it feels like there’s plenty of change yet to come, and that will likely be both for the better and worse.
