In the mid-1980s, Peter Molyneux was so sure his text-based business simulation would be a hit that he cut a bigger mail slot in his front door to handle the orders. He received two, one of them probably from his mother. This episode follows the strange path from that failure to a baked-bean export business called Taurus Impex, the Commodore mix-up that delivered ten free Amiga computers to the wrong company, and the bluff that got him a porting contract and the footing to found Bullfrog Productions in 1987.

We cover how Populous inverted the avatar-based game and created the god game genre in 1989, selling over four million copies, the drunken resignation email that ended his time as an Electronic Arts vice president, finishing Dungeon Keeper largely from home, and putting roughly six million dollars of his own money into Black and White a ...