You could point to any number of occasions in which Peter Molyneux, the man behind classics like Populous and Fable, jumped the proverbial shark. But when does Peter Molyneux think Peter Molyneux jumped the shark?
"I've got a Fonz 'shark moment' - you know, where he's jumped over a shark on his motorbike... and after that Happy Days was s***", he tells GI.biz. "My inverse one of those was when I thought of the idea in Black & White of introducing weather patterns in the game that were the same outside your window, that was my 'shark moment'."
"Fortunately I woke up and thought: 'Why the f*** did I do that?' If you lived anywhere in the world, you don't want the weather in the game to be outside your window... you want the opposite. It was a dumb, stupid idea."
I'd have thought Black & White itself - an idea simply too far ahead of the available technology - was Molyneux jumping the shark, but I'm just a tired old cynic!
Microsoft's Peter Molyneux [GI.biz]