13 Flat Out Lies We Were Told Just To Sell A Video Game

7. Anything That Comes Out Of Peter Molyneux's Mouth

The Lie: Fable designer Peter Molyneux claimed ahead of the game's release that, "if you choose to carve your initials in a tree, the initials will still be there if you come back to the tree 10 years later." It might not sound like something substantial to lie about, but it's just indicative of Molyneux's approach to selling a game, to pull an idea out of thin air, promise it to players, and then realise that he can't actually do it. The Truth: Molyneux himself has even said, €œSorry €“ I€™ve slightly over-promised on things on occasion. I could name at least 10 features in games that I€™ve made up to stop journalists going to sleep and I really apologise to the team for that.€ It's a whole lot more than 10, though, because Fable alone promised the above tree-carving mechanic, the ability to poison a town's water supply, to be able to lock people in houses and burn them down, planting a tree and coming back to it years later, battle cuts which turn into scars, and countless other features that never made the cut. Molyneux is a great talker, but he essentially writes cheques that his dev team can't cash, and the result is that the legendary designer is one of the least-trustworthy people in the video game industry. Despite his earlier success with Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper, the vast majority of Molyneux's more recent titles (the Black and White series, The Movies, the Fable series) have simply fallen far short of the hype he built around them.