After his first game venture failed, Peter Molyneux started a baked bean export business. Commodore International mistakenly offered him ten free Amiga systems because they confused the baked bean company’s name “Taurus” with a software company “Torus”, and he used the hardware to create a database system for the Amiga, which was successful.

Which is just such a weird story.

Full text of the paragraph:

Due to the game’s failure, Molyneux retreated from game design, and started Taurus Impex Limited—a company that exported baked beans to the Middle East—with his business partner Les Edgar.[5][6] Commodore International mistook it for Torus, a more established company that produced networking software, and offered to provide Molyneux with ten[5] free Amiga systems to help in porting “his” networking software.[2][7] Molyneux later said “it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn’t know who we were. I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, ‘If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.’ So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office.”[2] Taurus designed a database system for the Amiga called Acquisition – The Ultimate Database for The Amiga[5] and, after clearing up the misunderstanding with Commodore, released the program to moderate success.

  • Owljfien@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I feel lucky that I played fable games as a kid and never heard of this dude so I just saw the games for what they were, no inkling of any broken promises to taint what were actually good games

    • GONADS125@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The first game was incredible, but I thought the series went the way of the original Jurassic Park trilogy, where each subsequent release in the franchise was worse than the one before.

      That’s just my opinion tho.

      • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Fable suffered from the same issues as The Elder Scrolls, with the methodic removal of RPG elements and a general “dumbing down” of game mechanics with each iteration. The 3rd Fable game doesn’t even have an inventory.

      • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I found Fable 2 to be the best of the three. Gameplay systems were the most fun, character options the best, etc. The first one frankly had the major issue of gender locked character. Female protagonist should absolutely have been an option in that game.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Project Natal/Milo was the grift that impreseed me the most…

      Like the big brass balls needed to lie about having made Sentient AI