When things go wrong for modern game developers they go spectacularly wrong. This is an era of endless rolling news and mass social media judgement. There is no respite. Peter Molyneux knows this now – if he didn’t before. The veteran designer, famed for inventing the “god game” genre with his 1989 title, Populous, has spent the last three days under intense press scrutiny. His latest project, Godus, is in disarray, his reputation in tatters. Everyone wants a piece.

“The only answer is for me to retreat,” he says, speaking via Skype from his office in Guildford. “I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It’s this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn’t worked.”

Awarded an OBE in 2004, Molyneux is one of the most prominent members of the UK games industry. In the 26 years following Populous, he oversaw classic strategy and adventure titles like Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and most recently the Fable series. But ever since leaving his seminal studio Bullfrog in 1997, he has become just as well-known for enthusiastically hyping his projects, only to deliver products that fail to live up to the impossibly grand expectations.

The Godus that failed

Godus is the latest, most ruinous example. The game, a spiritual successor to Populous, challenges players to grow and support a population of followers who can then interact with the worlds developed by other players. In December 2012, Molyneux’s small studio, 22 Cans, received over half a million pounds via the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to develop the game. Rewards were offered to backers and the release date was set within a seven to nine month window.

The problem is, although a smartphone version has been released, the PC iteration of the game hasn’t. 18 months after its proposed release date, it is still in development. Furthermore, in a video recently released to the internet, Molyneux announced that the development team would be shrinking, so that staff could be moved onto a new title, The Trail. He also announced that many backers would not receive the rewards they were promised for financially supporting the game, and that some of the Kickstarter pledges may not be achieved.

So what went wrong? “I suppose the big mistake was estimating how long the game would take to make,” he says. “I very stupidly and naïvely didn’t build in enough contingency time into my predictions and I was 100% wrong. When you’re creating something that hasn’t existed before, it’s very, very hard to be precise about those things.”

“My hope is that in six to nine months time, people start to finally see the game they really did pledge for. That will be two to three years into development but that’s kind of what it takes when you do an original game. I wish it didn’t. Up until mid January, every single moment of this company was dedicated to Godus.”

His assurances have so far been met with fury. Angry backers have taken to the game’s forums, and to Twitter, to voice their frustrations. What’s clear is that Molyneux empathises with his critics, as he often does. “If I was pledging on this campaign I’d probably be saying the same thing as our backers,” he admits. “I’d be saying ‘I wanted a PC game, I wanted combat, I wanted a story. Why haven’t I got it? Why did you do the mobile version first?’ I wish I was more effective and efficient, and the next game we work on we’re going to make sure we keep behind closed doors for much longer. We’re going to make our mistakes and go down those blind alleys privately before presenting the game to the world”.

Curiosity failed the kid

But there is another problem to deal with. In 2012, Molyneux released a smartphone game named Curiosity, a massively multiplayer experiment that asked players to chip away at a vast online cube: the person who clicked on the final piece was set to receive a “life changing” prize. The winner, eighteen-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson, was promised a 1% cut of any profits made from Godus, and the chance to become the game’s God of Gods for six months, to effectively control the virtual universe as he saw fit. On Wednesday, Henderson gave an interview to gaming site Eurogamer. He has not received his prize. What’s more, Molyneux’s team promptly forgot about him.

“We had someone here who was looking after Bryan, he left and nobody took the reigns of keeping Bryan informed and in the loop,” says Molyneux. “That was terrible, it was atrocious and I can understand him feeling offended about that. We should have... I should have made sure that he was still in the loop.”

So can the situation be fixed? Molyneux says yes, but it’s going to take time. “The problem we have is we can’t start his reign as God of Gods until we implement the technology that allows him to have influence over people’s worlds and crucially allows him to be challenged in competitive games of Godus and as people have pointed out we have to add combat to Godus still.”

“It’s not that we backed away from the idea, I still love the idea and I still absolutely love the fact it was someone British that won it, I still love the fact that Bryan is young and it’s going to be a life changing experience for him. That said, it is inexcusable that someone from 22Cans didn’t stay in contact with him. It’s just incompetence to be honest with you.”

Trail of promises

But this is not an isolated incident and Molyneux knows it. He is an enthusiastic and passionate developer, a singularly unguarded voice in an industry where upper level managers are media trained into robotic banality. But gamers are tired of it, and now, by falling short on Kickstarter pledges and stretching the site’s terms and conditions to their limits, he has incensed investors to deal with too.

When asked if it was fair to seek funding based on the promises made in a short pitch video, with no evidence of a product, Molyneux, who has so far given rambling and sometimes evasive responses, pauses for a considerable time. “I say these ideas so passionately, people think that these are hard and fast promises,” he finally responds. “I truly believe them when I say them, but as you know, sometimes they don’t come to pass. They don’t come to pass because they’re too technically difficult, they don’t come to pass because maybe they don’t fit and people see this as being a promise”.

His responses start to come with stutters and pauses. “My answer to this is this simple,” he says. “I love working on games, it is my life. I am so honoured to be a part of the games industry, but I understand that people are sick of hearing my voice and hearing my promises. So I’m going to stop doing press and I’m going to stop talking about games completely. And actually I’m only giving you this interview now in answer to this terrible and awful, emotional time over the last three days. I think honestly the only answer to this is for me to completely stop talking to the press.”

There is also something else going on, a very modern malaise; as a public figure in the games industry, Molyneux is visible and accessible. The social media storm has been furious, and with that, as we have seen over the past six months, comes something darker. “People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they’ve threatened me, they’ve threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can’t,” he says. “I think I’ll get this over and done with, I’ll answer some of the things backers are saying, but after that I feel the best thing I can do is just ….”

He trails away; the line sounds dead again.

Every encounter with Molyneux produces a strange mix of compassion and scepticism. He is disarmingly passionate, child-like in his enthusiasm, and seemingly naive about the effects of his many pronouncements, despite his 35 years in the industry. He willingly concedes that his approach to publicity has eroded faith in his ability to deliver products; he concedes that even his act of post-hype contrition has become staid and tiresome to many. He says, this time, he has learned to step back – even if it means withdrawing from what appears to be the part of game creation most important to him.

Over and out

Godus is a mess. Molyneux has handed control over to a fledgling designer Konrad Naszynski, who joined the team after being a passionate fan on the game’s forums. Some see this as passing the buck, setting someone else up for failure. There are hundreds of disappointed people who invested in this game, who want answers about its development and completion and who have received only promises and excuses for reduced team sizes. Molyneux has assured the Guardian, though, that people will be playing a finished version of Godus within nine months. He also says that nothing else will be revealed about the new project.

Peter Molyneux has admitted regret and culpability; he was clearly in distress throughout the interview – an interview he told us would be his last. An hour before publication, however, we discovered that he had spoken to the gaming news site Rock, Paper, Shotgun the day before, and had given their interviewer the same impression – that he would no longer be speaking to the press (that interview is now online). He has also spoken to at least one other site, seemingly on the same afternoon as our discussion. Another trail of broken assurances.

“I think people are just sick of hearing from me,” he says in one disarmingly dark moment. “They’ve been sick of hearing from me for so many years now. You know, we’re done.”

• This article was amended on 18 February 2015 to correct the date of Curiosity’s release.