Molyjam and The Future of Video Games

What would MolyDeux? If you’ve followed games at all in the past 15 years, you’ve probably heard of Peter Molyneux. He’s been around for awhile; his most recent works include the Fable series but stretch back to god games like Dungeon Keeper and Populus. Whenever you see an interview with the man, you can tell he has this grand vision in which he sees the world and it’s fascinating, both hilarious and amazing at the same time.

The idea for MolyJam came up after years of the fake Peter Molyneux (@petermoludeux) twitter account being around. The account takes Molyneux’s thinking and applies it to some pretty crazy ideas that, most of the time are pretty stupid and hysterical because that’s the way he thinks, especially if anybody turned it into a game. MolyJam takes those tweets, provides them to aspiring game developers, and inpires them to make a game with one of those ideas in a 48 hour session. The event is taking place all over the world  in places like San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, Boston, Austin, London, Tel Aviv, Brighton, Ottawa, and more. Molyneux made an appearance at the London event to give words of wisdom to the aspiring developers in the room.

Watch Peter Molyneux’s introduction video:

The attention that this event has gotten is simply amazing. Big names in the game industry are involved as well as game engines being provided like Unity, Game Maker, and Game Salad. There’s even a livestream of the event in San Francisco if you care to watch games being made, because it’s pretty damn cool. The official website, WhatWouldMolyDeux, has all the information on the event as well as the submissions so far of the game jam.

I hope we start seeing more of these type of events. Maybe not based off a parody twitter account, but giving gamers a deadline to make a game in 2 days could create some pretty awesome/dumb stuff.

UPDATED: All the entries are now available on www.whatwouldmolydeux.com, Entries are avilable from all the participating locations around the world. Check the games out and give them a download to try them out. I watched a good bit of the live streams yesterday from Dieburg, Germany and California’s San Francisci/LA molyjam.