How the E3 Demo for B.C. 'Destroyed' the Project

"It was just a great demo."

By Alex Osborn

Fable creator Peter Molyneux has shed light on why his prehistoric Xbox game B.C. was canceled, citing the need for an ambitious E3 demo as a primary cause of the project's ultimate downfall.

"What was happening was that E3 was becoming so incredibly dominant that teams would not spend a couple of weeks doing a demo, they would spend a couple of months doing a demo," Molyneux explained on the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered.

He noted how, at the time, "it was kind of a nuclear arms race" for studios to make their demos more and more impressive, and how even if the demo was great, that didn't necessarily mean the game would be amazing as well. "The actual reality is... it becomes a living thing in itself, and this living thing at best can be sliced off from the main development of the game. At worst [the demo] infects—disastrously infects the game."

Molyneux went on to explain how, when a development team is trying to finish their demo as time is running out, that's when "your coding and your structure of your project gets very, very messy, and that's what happened with B.C." As a result, "what B.C. was, was a great demo," Molyneux added. "A truly great demo. But what had happened, and I think mainly because the team needed a bit little more guidance, that demo had actually destroyed any game that was there. It was just a great demo."

He said the same thing happened with Fable; however, the studio could only fix one project at that time with the amount of funding they were provided. "We could fix both with the right amount of funding, but Microsoft was already humming and hawing about it and when they said, 'I think you should focus on one,' it effectively killed off B.C," he explained.

That said, canceling B.C. was a "very tough" decision for Molyneux to make. "The idea was really cool. I bet you that if Fable had faded away and we had continued with B.C., we'd be sitting here talking about B.C. 3," he said.

Stay tuned to IGN for the third part of our in-depth interview with Molyneux. In the meantime, find out why the action-adventure Xbox game, developed by Lionhead satellite Intrepid, remains to this day one of the most promising games that never came out.

Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his YouTube channel.

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