Recently, I travelled to Guildford to interview Peter Molyneux, the father of the god game genre, about his final game, Masters of Albion, which just got a major, game-changing update.

I've been a long-term fan of Molyneux's games, though, stretching all the way back to Theme Park, so I also took this opportunity to also ask the legendary game dev about, arguably, his most famous god game creation to date, Black & White.

And, specifically, I wanted to know where the origin of Black & White's most famous creations came from: the titanic animal creatures that you, as god, nurture in the game and use as an instrument of your will. And, well, the story of how these creatures came to be is interesting.

"So when I left Bullfrog back in 1997 there was already Mark Webley, Tim Rance, Demis Hassabis, and Paul McLaughlin waiting for me to leave. I left Bullfrog when I finished Dungeon Keeper. The day the gold master came out, I left. I got in the car. I drove home. I got out. The guys were all there, and they said, 'Right, what game are we going to do?' I had not thought of anything, and Demis had come up with one idea. I think Mark Webley had come up with another idea, too. And so I said, you know, I just spoke this thing which formed in my brain the moment I sat down at the table. This is literally 20 minutes after leaving Bullfrog.

"I said, 'Why don't we have this world? And in this world, you know, players care for this world. Let's include little villages and villagers, and they're waiting for a god.' I had the slant of the game with the [god] hand that reached out, [too]. But in this world, why don't we have this monster? It was originally a monster. It wasn't a cute creature. Why don't we have this monster that you're growing and nurturing and teaching? Afterwards, I wrote it all down. It was one sheet of paper, and that was the game that we did.

"And, you know, the same approach is taken with every game I've got. It starts with an idea, and very often a feeling as much as an idea, and then we just explore it. So, in Black & White's case, for example: We want a big creature, a big monster. Why will people really want to look after a monster? What if we make it a big creature? What if we make a big ape or a big cow or a ridiculous turtle? Then people will have that emotional connection to it because, in design terms, the less you have to teach a player, the more comfortable it feels, and so everyone knows if you've got a little cute ape and it's looking up at you, you realize that you can punish it or you care for it. You know that, and really everything else is explored."

"The problem with that approach is [that it is] very, very hard to project when the game is going to be completed, and even harder to project whether or not the game is missing a feature. For a perfect example in Black and White. Originally, the little villagers you had no interaction with at all, and then I was driving to work six weeks before the game was supposed to go to gold master and I thought we should be able to pick up a little villager, and we should be able to put them by context-sensitive things, and we literally implemented that in the last moment."

Is Masters of Albion going to get titanic creatures?

Molyneux's core strength, to me at least, has always been his uncontainable and seemingly endless creativity. The ability to dream up new games and features has led the legendary dev to create some of PC gaming's most iconic titles, including Populous, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable. Yes, sure, implementing all those ideas perfectly has been a recurring challenge, but it's great to see Molyneux returning to the god game genre one more time before he bows out to try and pull many of his greatest hits ideas together in one god game package.

The big question I have, though, as well as many other god game genre fans, is whether or not Molyneux's last god game is going to end up featuring the titanic creatures that Black & White is most known for? Right now, Masters of Albion does not have them. However, as part of the game's New Beginnings update, mysterious colossal structures have appeared on the skyline, and that, along with the fact that the update's official press release has asked if they are 'a link to the past or a foreshadowing of the future?' has got gamers talking. Here's hoping they do make it, as some of my fondest god game memories involve bringing doom upon my foes with a titanic, rotund cow lord.

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Rob is editor of PC Gamer magazine and has been PC gaming since the early 1990s, an experience that has left him with a life-long passion for first person shooters, isometric RPGs and point and click adventures. Professionally Rob has written about games, gaming hardware and consumer technology for almost twenty years, and before joining the PC Gamer team was deputy editor of T3.com, where he oversaw the website's gaming and tech content as well its news and ecommerce teams. You can also find Rob's words in a series of other gaming magazines and books such as Future Publishing's own Retro Gamer magazine and numerous titles from Bitmap Books. In addition, he is the author of Super Red Green Blue, a semi-autobiographical novel about games and gaming culture. Rob loves riding motorbikes, too.