Lionhead Studios | Code Like It's 198x

Lionhead was meant to stay small. “Bullfrog became too large for me when it grew beyond 30 people,” Peter Molyneux told Computer Gaming World in 1997, a few months after leaving the company he had co-founded. “LionHead will never grow beyond 20 people and all of those people will be friends.” Four years later it had 90 staff and a family of satellite studios around Guildford, and nine years later it belonged to Microsoft. Along the way it made Black & White, in which the player trained a giant creature, and the Fable role-playing games. It also became known for the distance between what Molyneux said a game would do and what it did.

Fast facts

Founded: 1997, in Guildford, Surrey, by Peter Molyneux, Mark Webley, Tim Rance and Steve Jackson, a co-founder of Games Workshop.
Name: from Mark Webley’s hamster.
Games: Black & White (2001), Fable (2004), The Movies (2005), Black & White 2 (2005), Fable II (2008), Fable III (2010), Fable: The Journey (2012).
Owner from 2006: Microsoft.
Closed: 2016, after Microsoft cancelled Fable Legends.

A hamster and a small team

Molyneux left Bullfrog, by then owned by Electronic Arts, in the summer of 1997. Edge reported that he was unhappy as head of a company and wanted to go back to making games himself. His new company was named after a pet. “LionHead was the name of Mark Webley’s (a LionHead co-founder) hamster,” he told Computer Gaming World, “and we liked the name and the hamster so much that it was our first idea, but then, sadly, LionHead died. We felt that perhaps this wasn’t a very good omen.” The next ideas were no better. “Starfish” lost out after the team watched Trainspotting, and “Red Eye” was already in use, in Molyneux’s words, in “the soft porn business”. They went back to Lionhead.

Edge named the founders in 2001 as Molyneux, Steve Jackson, Mark Webley and Tim Rance. Webley had programmed on Bullfrog’s Theme Park. Jackson had co-founded Games Workshop. Demis Hassabis, who had worked on Theme Park at 15, was a founding member too before leaving to set up Elixir Studios. Edge reported in 1997 that Lionhead’s games would be published by Electronic Arts.

Black & White

Molyneux told Computer Gaming World that his first Lionhead game would be “the most important game of my career”, with single-player and “massively multiplayer” modes. It became Black & White, a god game in which villagers’ worship powered the player’s miracles and a giant trainable creature acted for the player in the world. It took more than three years. Edge compared the wait with that for John Romero’s Daikatana, then added: “The key difference between the two products is that Black & White delivers. And it delivers in spades.” PC Gamer gave it 94%. By 2010, Edge reported, it had sold more than two million copies.

Satellite studios

Rather than grow one large team, Lionhead backed small companies around it. By September 2001 Edge counted 90 staff and three satellites: Big Blue Box, Intrepid and Black & White Studios, each with access to Lionhead’s support and technology. The first of them, Big Blue Box, was set up in 1999 by Dene Carter, formerly of Bullfrog, with Simon Carter and Ian Lovett, and spent its first years on a role-playing game for Microsoft’s Xbox called Project Ego. It came out as Fable in 2004, in October in Britain.

Fable followed one hero from childhood, and what the player did along the way, from fighting to marriage and petty crime, changed the hero’s appearance and fame. “It’s exactly the same adventure every time you play,” Edge wrote. “It’s you that changes.” Before release Molyneux had described many features that did not make it into the game. Edge called it “the last of Xbox’s launch promises”, arriving “on a thermal of continuous hype”, and found the finished game “fittingly grounded”. Players complained on Lionhead’s own forums, and Molyneux apologised there. He told Edge: “We never had any intention to mislead.” He did not promise to stop describing his plans: “I’m always going to talk about my dreams, but I’ll be clearer that these are dreams that may or may not make it into a finished game.”

Two more games followed in 2005. The Movies, published by Activision, put the player in charge of a film studio. Black & White 2, published by EA, returned to the god game.

Microsoft

Microsoft bought Lionhead in April 2006, and Edge questioned Microsoft’s Peter Moore about the purchase. From then on Lionhead was a Microsoft studio making Xbox games. Fable II (2008) and Fable III (2010) continued the series. When Microsoft introduced its Kinect motion camera, first shown as Project Natal, Lionhead was charged with showing what it could do: Edge described the result in 2010, Milo and Kate, as a project that “focuses on interaction with artificial life”. Fable: The Journey (2012) was a Kinect game.

In 2010 Lionhead worked from an office building on a research park in Guildford. Edge noted that visitors who knew Syndicate might recognise the buildings, which Bullfrog had used as the model for that game’s futuristic city. Molyneux left in March 2012 to found 22cans, whose offices were less than a minute’s walk from Lionhead.

Lionhead’s last project was Fable Legends, a multiplayer Fable in development since 2012. On 7 March 2016 Microsoft cancelled it. “After much consideration we have decided to cease development on Fable Legends,” said Hanno Lemke, general manager of Microsoft Studios Europe, “and are in discussions with employees about the proposed closure of Lionhead Studios in the UK.” The studio closed at the end of April.

After Lionhead

Lionhead’s people carried on elsewhere. Former staff Mark Healey and Alex Evans were among the founders of Media Molecule. After the closure, Mark Webley and Gary Carr, who had come to Lionhead from Bullfrog, co-founded Two Point Studios, whose Two Point Hospital (2018) was a spiritual successor to Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital. Microsoft kept the Fable name and gave it to another British studio, Playground Games, whose new Fable is due in February 2027.

Sources

Edge, issue 48, August 1997: Molyneux leaves Bullfrog for LionHead; Steve Jackson; titles to be published by EA.
Computer Gaming World, issue 161, December 1997, Chris Lombardi, “In the Company of Lions”: the hamster, “Starfish” and “Red Eye”; “keep it small, keep it simple”; “the most important game of my career”.
Edge, issue 96, April 2001: Black & White review. PC Gamer, issue 96, May 2001: Black & White, 94%.
Edge, issue 101, September 2001: Lionhead’s founders, 90 staff and satellite studios; Big Blue Box and Project Ego; Demis Hassabis.
Edge, issue 142, November 2004: Fable review (Xbox; Microsoft; Lionhead/Big Blue Box; UK release 8 October; “It’s you that changes”).
Edge, issue 143, December 2004, p. 25: “Molyneux acknowledges critics”.
Edge, issue 152, August 2005: previews of The Movies (Activision) and Black & White 2 (EA).
Edge, issue 163, June 2006: Peter Moore on Microsoft’s acquisition of Lionhead.
Edge, issue 174, April 2007: Media Molecule formed by Lionhead employees.
Edge, issue 216, July 2010: feature on Guildford studios (Lionhead’s research-park home and Syndicate; Black & White “sold more than two million copies”; Milo and Kate; purchase by Microsoft in 2006).
Edge, issue 243, August 2012: 22cans and its offices near Lionhead.
“Lionhead Studios”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): founding in July 1997; Microsoft’s purchase on 6 April 2006; Fable II, Fable III, Fable: The Journey; closure on 29 April 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionhead_Studios
“Microsoft shutting down Lionhead Studios, confirms Fable Legends is cancelled”, Game Developer, 7 March 2016 (web, secondary): the cancellation, Hanno Lemke’s statement, development since 2012. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/microsoft-shutting-down-lionhead-studios-confirms-i-fable-legends-i-is-cancelled
“Two Point Studios”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): founded July 2016 by Ben Hymers, Mark Webley and Gary Carr; Two Point Hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Point_Studios
“Fable (2027 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Playground Games; release set for 23 February 2027. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable_(2027_video_game)