YoIn 1985, brothers Dene and Simon Carter promised each other that they would one day create their own development studio together. The game they envisioned was ambitious, as Simon described in a developer diary: a fantasy role-playing game, “populated with engaging, compelling characters with real personality, people who actually reacted to what you did… We wanted each and every person who played our game to have a unique experience, to have their own stories to tell.” The idea of a living, reactive game world was an obsession for many game makers (and players) at the time, largely because it had never been done. In the 1980s, a virtual fantasy world like this was far outside the realm of technological possibility.
Thirteen years later, they got the chance to create their dream game at their own studio, Big Blue Box. Working with British studio Lionhead and their well-known co-founder Peter Molyneux, they created the fantasy game they had envisioned (or, at any rate, a version of it). Fable was finally released in September 2004, published by Microsoft for the original Xbox.
At the time, thanks to some overenthusiastic press interviews with the Carters’ old friend Molyneux, Fable was notable for both what it No However, the hyped-up expectations for Fable weren’t met: much-touted features like meaningful choice and consequence, acorns that grew into towering trees over the course of a playthrough, and a limitless game world. But in retrospect, while Fable wasn’t “the best game ever,” as Molyneux somewhat thoughtlessly described it, it still had plenty of ambitious ideas that other games would pick up on in the years to come. And it had a tremendous personality that, even now, makes it unique in one of the most crowded gaming genres.
Fable was set in Albion, an idealised version of the green and pleasant land of England, full of villages and castles and forests filled with bad guys and bandits – a place where people gossiped endlessly and the pub was sacrosanct. The characters all had shamelessly exaggerated regional British accents, and there was plenty of belching, drunkenness, funny banter from the townspeople and creative insults. Naturally, there was a grand quest to embark on, but the player could also engage in petty nonsense – one of the first things you could do in the game was to rat out a cheating husband (or promise to keep his dirty secret for a coin, then rat him out anyway). It was a bit like Monty Python reimagining the world of Robin Hood.
In Fable, you played out your hero’s entire life: that part, at least, lived up to expectations. Eventually, his hair would turn white and his face would get wrinkled, and then suddenly, it was over. Fable turned out to be a very linear adventure, and not that long either, a far cry from the vast fantasy worlds that have since become almost standard. Your decisions had no consequences when it came to the story path your hero followed, but they did affect his appearance and how characters talked about him when he passed by. This was novel, even if the black-and-white nature of Fable’s morality system meant that most players ended up somewhere in the middle. You’d have to slap a batch from the townspeople to get enough evil points to cancel out all the virtue points you would get from killing bandits and monsters in the normal course of the game.
I think Fable’s association with Peter Molyneux has damaged its reputation over the years. The developer became famous as a peddler of broken promises. He has tried to dismiss his repeated boasts as over-enthusiasm for his projects, but Molyneux’s post-Fable projects have almost all been terminally bombastic, from the Curiosity Cube smartphone experiment to the launch of Molyneux’s messaging app. I never gave the award He promised Kickstarter-funded Godus that it was just… really bad, and Nothing like what was advertisedMore recently, he jumped on the NFT bandwagon, raising $54 million in virtual land sales (a figure he says is exaggerated) for a “blockchain game” called Legacy — while it technically exists, the game appears to be completely dead. Most recently announced project returns to the world of Albion, by the way, a mix of god game and action game. Finance it with all that NFT money.
But even though Fable didn’t come close to fulfilling most of the traits Molyneux had envisioned out loud during development, it tried. Dene and Simon Carter’s ideas are there, even if they don’t always work out very well. It’s an interesting blueprint for what role-playing games would become later, when other games did make those dreams of a world that reacted meaningfully to the player a reality: games like Skyrim and Mass Effect. Their sequels, Fable II and III, really delivered on the promise that your hero could populate Albion with his own children.
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Fable’s legacy is complicated: it was so successful that Lionhead was bought by Microsoft in 2006, and its two sequels also sold well. But then Lionhead was told to turn Fable into an asymmetrical multiplayer game called Fable Legends, and that game basically He knocked down the whole studioMicrosoft closed Lionhead in 2016. It’s very sad that mismanagement like this led to the downfall of such a unique British developer and such a unique series.
But now there is hope for the future of Fable, as a genuinely… promising Fable 4 is in development at Leamington Spa-based Playground Games – another ambitious single-player fantasy RPG that will hopefully retain Fable’s bright personality. Because, despite everything else, that playful, British personality is Fable’s true legacy.
