Thread by @retrohistories

Did you know that there's a commercially released Peter Molyneux game you definitely haven't played? And that there's a good chance it's permanently lost?

👇👇👇

Molyneux has mentioned in interviews promoting his upcoming title Legacy that it's a return to the premise of the first game he ever wrote.

He's mentioned this game, The Entrepreneur, often in interviews, usually telling the same story: he anticipated huge success, but only ever received two orders.

This story is such a practiced Molydote, light on details, that I assumed he was just doing a bit; maybe The Entrepreneur didn't even exist. Certainly nobody seems to have a copy.

But before he told the story (beat-for-beat) to Ryan McCaffrey, he gave up a few more details:

So now we've got a company name and a platform to go on.

And it turns out that The Entrepreneur most definitely existed! Here's the ad from May 1984's Acorn User.

I'm skeptical that it sold only two copies, especially with that competition prize — Acorn User had a circulation in the tens of thousands — but I can certainly believe it was a commercial failure.

As for playing it today, it's not in the usual places: bbcmicro.co.uk, Stairway to Hell, TOSEC. It's never even been mentioned on the Stardot forums.

It seems that not only is it a lost game... it's so lost that almost nobody in the community realises it ever existed.

We know almost nothing about The Entrepreneur. What it looked like, how it was packaged, how it played. How it guided Peter's later games.

My hope is that, someday, a copy turns up on a cassette, and this game — of clear historical significance — can finally be played by anyone.

But the chances seem remote. Molyneux doesn't seem to have kept any physical artefacts from his early career. And other surviving copies, if they exist, have obviously been forgotten.

Preservation isn't impossible, but 35 years after release, it would take a very lucky break.

(Of course, there's another Peter Molyneux game you'll never be able to play again, but that one was destroyed by design, and there's zero chance of it ever showing up in someone's garage.)