Lionhead Studios

History

For a period of three years, Lionhead established satellite companies, including Big Blue Box Studios (developers of Fable), Intrepid Games (developers of B.C., long since suspended due to a massive overrun) and Black & White Studios (who have taken responsibility for the continuation of the Black & White series). Lionhead proper was working on three games: Fable, B&W2 and The Movies.

The "satellite" system has ceased to exist in any meaningful form since mid-2004, however, with Big Blue Box having been more or less integrated into the main company, and Intrepid essentially having been disbanded.

Lionhead was a privately held company until October 2004 (shortly before the suspension of B.C.) when a consortium of investors, including Ingenious Ventures, IDG Ventures Europe, and technology firm Add Partners, made a significant investment into the game developer. This came at a time when the company was in severe financial straits, as they had overrun development on two projects, Black & White 2 and Fable, and also cancelled B.C. and a project with Jeff Minter named Unity.

Between September 2005 and April 2006, Lionhead successfully released two titles, Black & White 2 and The Movies, as well as an updated version of Fable (entitled Fable: The Lost Chapters). These titles did not achieve a massive impact in sales, and this left the company vulnerable to a takeover bid.

In April 2006 Lionhead Studios was acquired by Microsoft, signalling the end of independent development, and a focus on Microsoft's proprietary gaming platforms. Lionhead remained a fairly independent part of Microsoft Studios, which has also acquired Rare Ltd. and Bungie Studios (Bungie Studios became an independent studio in late 2007, shortly after the release of Halo 3).

On 7 March 2016, Microsoft announced the cancellation of Fable Legends and a proposed closure of Lionhead Studios.

On 29 April 2016, Lionhead officially closed down.

Criticism of pre-release changes

Leading up to several Lionhead Studio game releases, Peter Molyneux's enthusiasm for talking openly about the development and design process of his games caused outcry online when certain features did not make it or were changed during development. He made a rule that he would not talk about game mechanics unless he could show them in game or present certain ideas as prototypes and/or experiments.

Several products such as Black and White 2 and Fable had features changed or lacking in the final product.

Peter Molyneux said the following on the issue:

After Fable, there was a pretty dark time where people looked at the game and compared it with what I said in the press, and they felt cheated. I realised that we just couldn't keep on doing that. But that was very much a reflection of how we worked, because what I was talking about in the press was what we were experimenting with at that moment, and a lot of those experiments would sort of come out as you were making the game. So I'd be talking about trees growing, and then we'd cut trees growing, and people would, of course, feel cheated. So I made a rule: I will not talk about any concrete mechanics unless I can actually show you them in game. I'll talk about our ambitions to make the best role-playing game of all time, but if you see Fable 2 press you'll see that I talked about stuff as I demoed it. People understandably get enormously upset about it—it's like seeing a trailer for a film and seeing Batman die, but then he doesn't die in the film; it would just be wrong. So I think a lot of what we do is realise what we’ve done wrong and work to try and make that right. It's far better than thinking that we get things right all the time.

Cancelled

Peter Molyneux also discussed Justice and Survivor during an IGN interview. These projects never made it out of the concept stage.

Awards