After his first game venture failed, Peter Molyneux started a baked bean export business. Commodore International mistakenly offered him ten free Amiga systems because they confused the baked bean company’s name “Taurus” with a software company “Torus”, and he used the hardware to create a database system for the Amiga, which was successful.
Which is just such a weird story.
Full text of the paragraph:
Due to the game’s failure, Molyneux retreated from game design, and started Taurus Impex Limited—a company that exported baked beans to the Middle East—with his business partner Les Edgar.[5][6] Commodore International mistook it for Torus, a more established company that produced networking software, and offered to provide Molyneux with ten[5] free Amiga systems to help in porting “his” networking software.[2][7] Molyneux later said “it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn’t know who we were. I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, ‘If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.’ So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office.”[2] Taurus designed a database system for the Amiga called Acquisition – The Ultimate Database for The Amiga[5] and, after clearing up the misunderstanding with Commodore, released the program to moderate success.
yeah I didn’t know who he was so I looked it up. that paragraph just struck me as the weirdest origin story so I shared it.
trying to keep Lemmy interesting for the people
You should’ve seen the articles in gaming magazines about him and his games. B&W and Fable mostly. Always these grandiose claims of whatever new tech was being built in then they’d release and be, well, none of that. Innovative sometimes, sure, but nowhere near what was promised. He was treated like a god and always got massive articles to build up hype. I wish I still had my old Maximum PC collection.