How much of that 'destruction' was down to pressure that you put on the team?



P.M.:What I used to say is, "Look, I'm working 120 hours a week - I'm only asking you to do half of what I do!" But you can't do that anymore, because you're asking people to make a choice not between whether they go to the pub tonight or not but whether they go home and see their children.

And so because of me, and the way I used to sort of lead from the front and work harder than anybody else, it used to semi-destroy people's lives. So I've tried to structure Lionhead so that creativity is really important, but it isn't obsessively important any more. That the voice of production and the reason of finance can be heard at an equal level as an idiot like me shouting from the rooftops, which is very much what I used to do.

So looking back at Fable 2, yeah, we crunched at the end, but it was only at the very, very end that we used up people's whole weekends. There's a few exceptions, but a lot of Sundays this studio was empty, which I thought was great.

Everything's important when you're making something big like this - the team, the morale, the quality of their life, how much money you’re spending, the game features you're working on - all of that comes together to make a successful product. It's this holistic thing. I used to think that, if it's not good enough and you're working 60 hours a week, you should be working 70 to make it good. But that's just such a wrong way of working, because you're going to end up making huge mistakes.