Fable at 20: a uniquely British video game with a complex legacy

In 1985, brothers Dene and Simon Carter vowed to each other that they would one day start their own development studio together. The game they imagined was ambitious, as Simon outlined in a developer diary : a fantasy role-playing game, “populated with compelling and convincing 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 creators (and players) at the time, largely because it had never yet been done. In the 1980s, a virtual fantasy world like this was far beyond the realms of technological possibility.

Thirteen years later, they got the opportunity to make the game of their dreams, at their own studio Big Blue Box. Working with British studio Lionhead and its well-known co-founder Peter Molyneux, they put together the fantasy game they had imagined – or a version of it, anyway. Fable was finally released in September 2004, published by Microsoft on the original Xbox.

At the time, thanks to some overenthusiastic press interviews with the Carters’ old friend Molyneux, Fable was notable as much for what it didn’t do as for what it did; hyped-up features such as meaningful choice and consequence, acorns that grew into mighty trees over the course of a playthrough and a game world with no boundaries, did not come to pass. But in retrospect, even though Fable was not “the best game ever”, as Molyneux rather thoughtlessly billed it, it still had a lot of ambitious ideas that other games would take up in the years to come. And it had tremendous personality that, even now, makes it unique in one of gaming’s most crowded genres.

Fable was set in Albion, an idealised version of England’s green and pleasant land, all villages and castles and forests packed with baddies and bandits, a place where people gossiped relentlessly and the pub was sacrosanct. Characters all had unashamedly over-the-top British regional accents, and there was a lot of belching, getting pissed, playful townspeople banter and creative insults. There was a grand quest to embark on, naturally, but the player could get involved in petty nonsense, too; one of the first things you can do in the game is dob in a cheating husband (or promise to keep his dirty secret for a coin, then dob him in anyway). It was a bit like if Monty Python were to reimagine the world of Robin Hood.

You played through your hero’s entire life in Fable: that part, at least, lived up to the billing. Over time his hair would whiten and his face would become lined, 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 immense fantasy worlds that have since become almost standard. Your choices had no consequences when it came to the story path your hero walked – but they did affect his appearance, and how characters spoke about him as he walked past. This was novel, even if the black-and-white nature of Fable’s morality system meant that most players ended up squarely in the middle. You’d have to slap a lot of townspeople to get enough evil points to cancel out all the virtue points you’d get from slaying bandits and monsters in the normal course of the game.

Fable’s association with Peter Molyneux has harmed its reputation over the years, I think. The developer became well known as a peddler of broken promises. He has tried to write off his repeated bloviation as overenthusiasm about his projects, but Molyneux’s post-Fable projects have almost all been terminally grandiose, from the Curiosity cube smartphone experiment that never delivered the prize it promised to the Kickstarter-funded Godus, which was just … very bad, and nothing like what was advertised . More recently he jumped on the NFT train and raised a reported $54m in virtual land sales (a number that he claims is exaggerated) for a “blockchain game” called Legacy: while technically extant, the game looks to be completely dead. Molyneux’s most recently announced project goes back to the world of Albion, incidentally, a mixture of god game and action game. He’s funding it with all that NFT money.

But despite the fact that Fable did not remotely deliver on most of the features that Molyneux imagined out loud throughout its development, it did try. Dene and Simon Carter’s ideas are in there, even if they don’t always work very well. It is like an interesting sketch of what RPGs would later become, when other games did fully realise those dreams of a world that meaningfully reacted to the player – games such as Skyrim and Mass Effect. Its sequels, Fable II and III, really delivered, and fulfilled an old promise that your hero could populate Albion with their own children.

Fable’s legacy is complicated: it was successful enough 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 asymmetric multiplayer game called Fable Legends, and that game basically took down the whole studio ; Microsoft shuttered Lionhead in 2016. It is very sad that such mismanagement caused the downfall of such a unique British developer, and such a unique series.

But there is hope for Fable’s future now, as a genuinely promising Fable 4 is in development at Leamington Spa’s Playground Games – another ambitious, single-player fantasy role-playing game that, hopefully, will preserve Fable’s brilliant personality. Because despite everything else, that playfully British personality is Fable’s true legacy.