Gears isn’t a visionary game, but saying it’s middle-of-the-road is very harsh. It’s a hugely polished, visually impressive Hollywood blockbuster.

And even more ofcourse it’s Fumito Ueda, Kenji Kaido and Hajime Sugiyama.

I am looking forward to Gears 2, I really am. But, tbh, Cliffy is just looking for anyway to get attention.

And besides, he says that “They dont respect game visionaries enough”

What was it he said about Metal Gear Solid? It was passive entertainment or something.

Thats sort of a contradiction.

His game looks great, but he’s no visionary. He creates middle of the road games.

And Peter Molyneux seems like a good guy to me, I think he is a PR disaster though. His games seem to strive after an ideology that has been experienced somewhat and dismissed for good reason.

Which he ain’t.

I’ve not seen a game made by one ‘visionary’ for decades now. Hundreds of talented people are usually involved in every production and it’s impossible to credit the fun-factor of a game to one person.

Sorry Cliffy, you make nice PR glamourshots but this particular attempt is just vacuous headline bait.

Kudos to Esha for the Minter mention. Truly a game visionary (and one of the few remaining soloists) and master of his art.

Anyway, he’s wrong about visionaries, I’d say. After all, despite Tabula Rasa and all the things he’s done wrong, Richard Garriott is still one of my gaming heroes. He helped bring Ultima VII into the World, and for that I can forgive many sins.

Of course, it might be that there are people in the videogames industry who want to be visionaries but simply don’t deserve the title, and then there are those who speak for their development groups almost as if they’d made the game theirself, without actually needing the development group that did most of the work.

Pete, for example, claims that he’s not a PR man, but to be honest I think he’s a PR man more than he is a visionary. He talks about his game’s flaws and on some levels that can be admirable, but the man doesn’t seem to have any real passion. He doesn’t talk about the things that mean something to him, and the reason I dislike him so much these days is that he seems to be a cold husk and a pale immitation of the Molyneux that I remember back in the Bullfrog days. Back then, he was part of Bullfrog and stood with them, and spoke of things in an impassioned way that I couldn’t help but admire.

If he was still that Molyneux, he’d still be one of my gaming industry heroes too.

Edit: Oh, and Jeff Minter. He deserves a mention, because I still like him, and that’s mostly because he’s a man who really cares about his games. His most recent game was a bit of a flop but when reading his thoughts about it, I could really tell the game meant something to him. That was one of those rare few times I’d wished I’d had a 360 so I could’ve picked up his latest on XBLA.

Edit II: Wait… what about Ragnar Tornquist? Dreamfall was uninspiring but I still love the guy, he’s still a visionary and an important element of the games industry - well, to me at least. He’s one of the few people who could actually write a hand written letter to someone apologising for the lack of full frontal male nudity in his latest game. I keep hoping his next effort will be a real hit, because he deserves to be in the limelight again.

(I could probably keep doing this…)

And he’s right about Molyneux, because he’s finally made the game Fable was always supposed to be.