London Games Festival has been running this week, bringing the industry to the UK capital and Peter Molyneux to Knowledge. Yesterday, host and director Jörg Tittel interviewed the Lionhead legend for the first Edge In Person session at London Games Festival's New Game Plus event. See below for the key takeaways.

In this edition we also talk to Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel about launching indie hit Mewgenics, what it's like to achieve 1m sales in a week, and what happens next.

To finish, we cast an eye across social media, offer some recommendations for further reading and playing, and summarise the freshly published Edge 423.

Host Jörg Tittel launched Edge In Person at London Games Festival's New Game Plus event yesterday with his first guest, 22cans' Peter Molyneux. The legendary designer spoke candidly about AI and also the neurodiversity that drives his development – of which, he claimed repeatedly, the soon-to-be-released Masters Of Albion will be the final product. 

"I'm six days away from launching my very, very last game, Masters Of Albion, and I've never been more nervous," he said. "It means so much to me. I've invested so much in the game." 

Molyneux, as anyone who's followed his career since he started creating games in 1984 will be aware, has made statements in the past that have not come to fruition. Is this really his final game? 

Recounting the long path through the studios where he made his name, the most famous being Bullfrog and Lionhead, Molyneux said he's reaching the age where he finally wants to move on, despite the "utter terror" of facing an existence without game development. 

"For me, there's been no other life, really, than making games. I think, when you reach 67, which I am now, I'm gonna say, well, is there anything else in life? 

"What does a normal person do that doesn't have these obsessive thoughts about games?" 

Tittel asked the audience if anyone believed that Masters Of Albion would be Molyneux's final game. Just one person raised their hand.

Obsession session 

Molyneux never stops thinking about the games he's making, and has barely ever done anything else. The British developer is well known for his obsessive nature. Tittel told the audience that he's recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Molyneux, too, is neurodiverse. 

"Anyone who knows me knows that I get these unbelievably focused times when I become almost unresponsive to any outside influences," Molyneux said. "I don't know whether you call that ADHD. I don't know whether I'm autistic. I don't know what it is. I barely understand myself." 

Molyneux has figureheaded some of the industry's most recognisable games, including Populous, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White and the Fable series. He's credited with inventing the god game. Success, however, was not immediate thanks to his neuro make-up. 

"Every moment in my life, up to the point I touched a computer, was a failure. Every school report, every school team activity, every social activity, I was completely useless. I mean, I was famous in school for being the bottom of everything. And the moment I touched the computer, that changed. It was almost visible. 

"And what I'd say to people is, if you've been to school and everyone says you're an idiot, don't think that's true. You're a unique individual and there's probably within you the capacity to be creative and amazing. You don't have to be exactly like that person over there."

AI and the genre revolution 

AI dominated a large portion of the conversation, with Molyneux likening its impact, alongside other current technological advancements, to the Industrial Revolution. Whereas the arrival of the machine in society largely affected blue-collar workers, he said, this time the white-collar demographic is being hit hardest by technological upheavals in the professional space. All, however, is not lost. 

"We adapt. That's the amazing thing about human beings. And those people that can adapt or be nimble and flexible to this are the people that do best." 

Contrary to general discourse on the matter in game development, Molyneux is open about his enthusiasm for the potential of AI in games. He's no stranger to the concept. In fact, Demis Hassabis, head of Google's DeepMind and the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his AI research contributions for protein structure prediction, worked as a programmer on Theme Park at Bullfrog as a teenager. Molyneux's endless curiosity for technological advancement, coupled with his own contributions to the evolution of contemporary gaming, means he's well aware of the benefits the technology could bring – and the detriments it's already brought. 

"It shouldn't be used to reduce costs, and it shouldn't be used to collapse our creativity," he said. "What it can be used for is to create potentially new genres. That would be truly exciting." 

Despite being heavily critical of the manner in which Big Tech introduced AI to the world with "shit" early products, Molyneux said that we're entering a new age of problem-solving, citing social issues as well as media creation. He said AI could allow humanity a new "hope". 

While he was clear that AI has not been used in the creation of Masters Of Albion, Molyneux went on to give a theoretical example of how the technology could have been implemented for the development of Fable, Lionhead's seminal 2004 RPG. 

He noted that games involving many NPCs require that every interaction with every character has to be written and mapped. Fable, he said, required "a quarter of a million lines just for the people in the towns," dialogue which charts all of the player's potential actions with other in-game humans. 

"It's limiting," he said. "It's limiting because we have to pre-think all the things the player could do. What we could be doing is spending our time training an AI model to impart a behaviour and a personality [on an NPC] – what the responses should be from a character like this."

Adapting to player actions 

AI-driven NPCs, he said, could be given a background and could adapt in a way games haven't seen before. Whereas NPCs are currently locked into the lines written for them by development teams, they could adapt to events in the world and the player's actions based on their character. 

"For you guys," he said to the audience, "this is an amazing opportunity, because it could create a new genre."

"I've been saying this for years. Your world is different to my world. I said it about Black & White and I said it about Fable. In reality, that had its limits, but you could stretch the boundaries of that because it can be adaptive to what the player is doing. And that is truly exciting and an incredible opportunity."  

Tittel asked Molyneux if he could potentially make a game by himself using AI, as a retirement project. 

"We need demand to make that happen, because it's not quite possible yet," he said. 

"You know what I would love, what would be fantastic? If I could, when I first go into Unity or Unreal, the first thing I do is turn on my microphone, and I say, 'Right, Caribbean landscape, tropical beaches, crabs, shells' – you know, create a whole interactive world through just using my voice. And think of that like a canvas. Don't think of it as, 'Oh my God, that's the game to publish,' because if it were that easy, everyone could do it. Once you've done that, that's where [human designers] come in. That's where we still hold all the aces."

Edmund McMillen has a few million-sellers under his belt. 2010's Super Meat Boy and 2011's The Binding Of Isaac both hit 1m sales around the one-year mark. But his latest game, conceived back in 2012 and developed over the past six years with longtime collaborator Tyler Glaiel, has outstripped all of those previous successes. Released on February 10, Mewgenics hit the 1m milestone within just seven days.

"I've been asked in the past: what do these numbers feel like? And I'm always like, 'I don't know!'" McMillen tells Knowledge, a few weeks on from launch. "It's so hard to put in words."

But here's his current best attempt: "Your happiness only goes up to ten, right?" McMillen lives a pretty nice life, he says, so he spends a lot of time at the upper end of that scale. "And through the two weeks of launch, I was feeling at a ten, but I can't go higher than that – even though you're getting all this stuff that you'd assume would force you to break the cap and launch into space."

Coming back down to earth

Having gone through this process a few times now, though, McMillen reckons that "behind the scenes" there is some emotional recalibration going on, which can make it difficult to return to normal. "Once the dust settles – I've seen people beat the game, hit all the beats and whatever else – I'm alone with my thoughts," he says. "And the drop, for me, was considerable. I felt like how people describe going to raves for 48 hours, where they don't sleep and just do molly, you know what I mean? Food didn't taste good. Videogames weren't fun. I didn't want to hang out with my friends. I didn't want to do anything. And it felt like that for a week and a half. But it could have been worse. I've felt worse in the past with this sort of stuff."

Throughout all of this, there was at least one positive thing that McMillen could cling onto: what this success meant for his development partner. Glaiel himself acknowledges, "I've not made anything remotely close to as big as this." (McMillen and Glaiel's previous collaboration, 2017's The End Is Nigh, sold 100,000 copies in its first year.)

"I've actually gotten more joy from seeing Tyler's life change because of this than I have from anything else – the reviews or the numbers or the money," McMillen says. "Because that's this thing I can see. It makes sense to me." As we speak, Glaiel is in the process of buying his first home, something only possible because of Mewgenics' success.

Holding up to stress-testing

But when a game's core dev team consists of just two people, who are also self-publishing, hitting these numbers does come with its challenges. Relative to the team size, Mewgenics went through a lot of testing – "a year and a half of private beta with 30 or 40 people playing regularly, plus a bunch of automatic testing that would play the game rapidly overnight," Glaiel explains – but all that time paled in comparison to the reality. "It was something like 30 million hours of people playing the game in that launch week. And so everything that could possibly happen happens."

On top of that, Glaiel was nervous to make changes while the game had so many active players: "If I push a patch that crashes during the tutorial or whatever, it collapses. Everything falls apart." But, looking back, he's proud of how well the game has held up to millions of hours' worth of stress-testing: "I've had to fix maybe ten large bugs – like, crash bugs – out of that many hours of people playing. There's a bunch of other little bugs that show up. But I feel like we did a pretty good job, considering how complex and large the game is."

Of course, for a game like this, bugs aren't the only concern – there's also the matter of players who want to unpick every design decision the team has made over the past six years.

"This is the first game I've made where people have opinions on it," Glaiel laughs. "I mean, like, The End Is Nigh, people have opinions on that, [but] there's no expectation that we would update the game with rebalanced levels or enemies or something. People might hate the birds, but they just learn to deal with them. With Mewgenics, people have really strong opinions on what we should or shouldn't change."

Processing a deluge of player feedback

Glaiel acknowledges that the sheer amount of feedback they've received from players "can get overwhelming at times" – especially once you start to factor in the game's most ardent fans. "It's so bizarre," McMillen says, "when people reach out and say, 'Listen, I love this game. It's my game of the year, best game ever… except, it really falls off after the 500-hour mark.'"

These players are "a tiny fraction" of the game's audience, Glaiel says, but also the most invested. "Whenever you read feedback from people on Discord and Reddit, it's those people who've got super into the game." The developers don't want to ignore that part of their audience, then, but it's hard to design for players who've min-maxed the game's breeding system to produce an army of perfect clones. "There's not a lot we can do to support that, because at that point you can basically do infinite damage," Glaiel says. "And we can't just make a boss that has infinite health… Or can we?"

McMillen and Glaiel say they try to examine any issues that have been flagged, but without simply taking the offered diagnosis of what's wrong – or how to fix it. "This is game design 101 stuff," Glaiel says. "This is what they teach people in school." But there's another reason to do things this way, McMillen adds: "Publicly, it is very bad to appear to bend to the will of someone online. Which sucks in a lot of ways, because sometimes they might be right!"

What happens next?

If The Binding Of Isaac is any indication, Mewgenics has a long life ahead of it, and we'll have to wait and see whether the developers ever put a paw wrong. One thing McMillen says he's learned from supporting the former game for so long: "For every nerf, have two small buffs. As long as there's some counterbalance there to appease the fans, I think that's a pretty good solution."

For now, McMillen is confident. "I'm going to go on record saying that I think we did a fantastic job balancing this game before release," he says. "I don't think the changes that we're going to make for balance are going to be Slay The Spire-style changes that will polarise..." Glaiel cuts in: "It's still gonna piss off the whole Internet!" The pair argue the point back and forth in a way that speaks to all their years as friends and collaborators.

There's one thing they can agree on, however: the best part of game development is the actual development part. "I think both of us enjoy making games," McMillen says. "Releasing games kind of sucks." The money is handy, of course, but McMillen's already had enough success to live a comfortable life, and he's clear about his priorities: "Let's make another game!"

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

Sweden's Frictional Games has a stream of critically acclaimed releases on its CV, not least Soma and the Amnesia series, but it has never made anything on the scale of the forthcoming Ontos. "It's the biggest game we’ve done and likely the biggest that we can do as a studio," creative director Thomas Grip tells us.

The reach of the project is no surprise given that it's been in development for a decade. In fact, the ambition for Ontos is such that it's needed reining in. "It ended up being overwhelming, almost, with every room filling up with all these little props," art director David Satzinger explains. "So part of our process was cutting fat off the project."

In Edge 423, on sale now, we embark on a deeply mysterious sci-fi adventure set within a base on the Moon, and find out how Frictional is infusing Ontos with the spirit of Soma while creating something that stands on its own. The scale may have ramped up, but the project retains the core attributes that have made Frictional one of Scandinavia's modern success stories. 

Elsewhere, we talk to studios including Remedy and IO about why they're forging ahead with their own engine technology in an era of freely available off-the-shelf solutions, and dig into the pros and cons of early-access development. We also talk to Kenny Sun to discover the story behind the creation of Ball X Pit, meet with Swiss developer Okomotive for our Studio Profile slot, and take a trip back to Metroid Prime's heyday in Time Extend. 

Our preview lineup features forthcoming releases such as Masters Of Albion, Huntdown: Overtime and Silver Pines, and games including Marathon, Crimson Desert and Darwin’s Paradox arrive for review. In Knowledge, we weigh up game censorship in 2026, and also talk to Exit 8 director Genki Kawamura, while in Trigger Happy Steven Poole goes in search of the metaverse. 

Edge 423 is available from UK newsagents now, and online here. For a limited time, you can subscribe and get your first three issues for just £5/$5.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.