Molyneux praises Lionhead’s secret heroes

Games industry luminary Peter Molyneux wants to put the spotlight on close colleagues at Lionhead as deserving recipients of his most recent award.

The Microsoft Games Studios European creative director last week was handed a Lifetime Achievement honour at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

“There’s three sides to the way I feel about this award, and what it means about my success. The first one is guilt,” the design veteran told Develop.

“Because there is a long list of people that this award is really for, and I’m just the front man.”

The collaborative process of game design is traditionally ignored at awards ceremonies, with studio heads, or even product managers, picking up the gold for their hard-working staff.

Molyneux wants to put an end to this, and has listed key staff who have proved invaluable to his projects over the years.

“People like Russell Shaw who has done all the music on all the games I have ever been involved with,” he said.

“There’s Paul McLaughlin who’s done a huge amount creatively and been involved in almost every piece of art on every game I’ve done.

“There’s Gary Carr who’s been of every game, and there’s Mark Webley who’s been working with me since 1992.

“There’s this huge list of people, so there’s this huge part of me that feels those people need to be named and appraised more than me,” he said.

More on these four can be found below.

Russell Shaw

Russell Shaw heads up the music team at Lionhead Studios – and had joined Molynuex at his old studio Bullfrog in the early ‘90s.

Paul McLaughlin

Paul McLaughlin has been Head of Art at Bullfrog and Lionhead since 1990, contributing to the design and style of games such as Syndicate, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper and numerous other titles.

He is on the advisory board for 3D design school Escape Studios.

Gary Carr

Gary Carr left Bullfrog in the late nineties to help spin-off group Mucky Foot – a studio which closed in 2003 after releasing three games for PC, Xbox and PS2.

He returned to Lionhead and, most recently, worked on the Milo project. With the commercial plans for the game dashed, Carr remained with the group and could perhaps still be working on the innovative controllerless and AI technology.

Mark Webley

Mark Webley joined Bullfrog during its founding years and acted as lead artist on projects such as Populous 2 and Theme Park.

He went on to join Britsoft studio The Bitmap Brothers where he was lead artist on the Chaos Engine franchise. Yet he returned to Bullfrog in 1995, before joining Mucky Foot shortly afterwards.

Webley’s appointment at Lionhead has stabilised his career, where today he stands as studio director.

Legend has it (Wikipedia claims) that Lionhead was named after Webley’s hamster.