In December 2001 Official Xbox Magazine described a game called Project Ego in which “trees actually grow, seasons pass, and people’s reactions to your behavior and appearance will change over time”, and in which, Peter Molyneux promised, the player would even be able to have children. When it came out in 2004 as Fable, the trees did not grow and the children were gone. What remained was a short, funny, unmistakably British action role-playing game in which everything the hero did, from escorting traders to kicking chickens, showed on his face and in how the villagers treated him. “It’s not a different game every time you play,” Edge wrote. “In fact, it’s exactly the same adventure every time you play. It’s you that changes.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Big Blue Box, one of Lionhead’s satellite studios, with Peter Molyneux.
- Publisher: Microsoft.
- Released: September 2004 in North America and 8 October 2004 in Britain, for the Xbox, at £40. An expanded edition, The Lost Chapters, followed for Windows and the Xbox in 2005.
- Earlier titles: Heroes, then Project Ego.
From Wishworld to Albion
Fable began, Wireframe recounted in 2019, not at Lionhead but at Big Blue Box, a small studio started by the brothers Dene and Simon Carter and Ian Lovett after they left Electronic Arts. They had been pitching a multiplayer game called Wishworld without success when Molyneux, Lionhead’s co-founder, suggested they make a role-playing game instead. Tired of “clichéd” and “pompous” fantasy, they built Albion, a land of ghosts, balverines and chicken-chasing villagers who spoke in regional accents. “We wanted the populace to be ignorant, and the world’s past to be mysterious and magical,” Dene Carter said. “We wanted rumour and reckoning to win out over exhaustive histories.”
The ambitions kept growing, and so did the problems. Big Blue Box was merged into Lionhead; the team worked long hours through repeated redesigns; and when the art outgrew the Xbox’s memory, the open world had to be chopped into regions joined by loading screens. Near the end, Carter said, he was convinced the game “was going to be a failure at every level”. Then Russell Shaw’s music went in, with the recorded dialogue and the particle effects: “Over the course of about six weeks, the lurching, ungainly, vacuous ‘thing’ we’d been making started to transform into a charming fairytale world.” The film composer Danny Elfman wrote its opening theme.
The acorn
The best-remembered promise was the acorn: plant one, and watch it grow into a tree over the course of the hero’s life. Carter later called the affair “Acorngate”. Molyneux, he said, knew only that the team’s engine could morph plants in real time, and “saw no reason why we couldn’t extend this morphing to every single piece of plant-life in the game”. To the programmers, tree growth “would require a real-time update of navigation data, would break our foliage technology, and – as far as we could see – would have no actual gameplay value whatsoever.” Carter called Molyneux’s habit of announcing unplanned features “testing ideas on the press”, and Wireframe reported that each new announcement set off panic back at the studio as the team tried to make it work.
After release, players complained on Lionhead’s forums that promised features were missing, and Molyneux apologised there. “We never had any intention to mislead,” he told Edge. He did not expect to change: “I’m always going to talk about my dreams, but I’ll be clearer that these are dreams that may or may not make it into a finished game.”
Growing up a hero
The player’s hero begins as a boy in the village of Oakvale, which is attacked by raiders and a masked figure called Jack of Blades. Taken in by the Heroes’ Guild, he grows into a young man learning to fight, and then into an adult taking quests for money and renown. Quests earn money and experience, which buy new fighting skills and magic. Everything he does shows on his body: Edge noted that even choosing a meat-rich diet changes how the hero looks as he ages.
So does morality. Australian PC User’s reviewer found that “good characters eventually get a permanent halo, while evil characters sprout horns and develop a stoop”. A famous hero is cheered: “women will swoon and men will clap and cheer”. For a villain, “chickens will run in terror and people will shun you”. A haircut, a beard, tattoos, armour and gifts change how attractive he is to the villagers, some of whom he can court, marry and move into a house he has bought. Expressions, from a laugh or a fist pump to rude noises, change how people react to him. Edge thought the morality system was less a test than a “virtual make-up bag with which you design your in-game self”, of little consequence to the story.
Reviews
Reviewers liked the combat and the humour and found the story short. Edge reported that the main quest could be finished in under ten hours, that quests could not be failed, only retried, and that its combat was “one of its strengths”. It found the game “fittingly grounded” after its “thermal of continuous hype”: “Fable doesn’t sprawl, it doesn’t overreach and it’s not a non-event.” Australian PC User finished the main quests in just over ten hours and thought the game fell “a long way short of its original design concept”, but was “very slick” and “good fun nevertheless”. The Australian Official Xbox Magazine gave it 9.7 out of 10, and it was voted Xbox game of the year at Britain’s Golden Joystick Awards in 2004.
The Lost Chapters and the series
Lionhead followed with Fable: The Lost Chapters in 2005, an expanded edition for Windows and the Xbox with new areas and quests, which helped answer complaints about the game’s length. Microsoft bought Lionhead in 2006, and the series continued with Fable II (2008), which Edge scored nine out of ten, and Fable III (2010). A remake, Fable Anniversary, came out in 2014. Microsoft cancelled the multiplayer Fable Legends in March 2016 and closed Lionhead at the end of April. It kept the Fable name and gave it to Playground Games, whose new Fable is due in February 2027. Former members of the team carried the spirit on in their own games: Wireframe noted that Kynseed, by the ex-Fable developers at PixelCount Studios, revolves around a mystical acorn, “a humorous nod to the first Fable game”.
Sources
- Frank O’Connor, Project Ego preview, Official Xbox Magazine (US) issue 1, December 2001, p. 56: growing trees, seasons, children; the earlier names Heroes and Fable.
- Official Xbox Magazine (Australia) issue 27, May 2004, p. 18: Danny Elfman to score Fable, “from Big Blue Box”.
- Edge issue 142, November 2004, pp. 76–78: Fable review (Xbox; Microsoft; Lionhead/Big Blue Box; £40; release dates; “It’s you that changes”; under ten hours; quests cannot be failed; morality, diet and appearance; combat).
- Australian PC User (Australia), December 2004, p. 121: Xbox review (halo, horns, renown, expressions, a little over ten hours).
- Official Xbox Magazine (Australia) issue 36, December 2004, p. 32: Fable reviewed in issue 32 at 9.7, and voted Xbox Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards 2004.
- “Molyneux acknowledges critics”, Edge issue 143, December 2004: the forum apology and Molyneux’s quotations.
- “Leaving Albion: The epic making of Fable”, Wireframe issue 27, November 2019, pp. 20–25: Big Blue Box, Wishworld, Dene Carter’s quotations, the merger into Lionhead, crunch, the Xbox’s memory, “Acorngate”, Oakvale and Jack of Blades, The Lost Chapters, Fable II’s Edge score, Kynseed.
- Wireframe issue 58, December 2021, p. 86: “that acorn might not have grown into a tree as promised”.
- “Fable (2004 video game)”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): release dates; Danny Elfman’s opening theme; The Lost Chapters (2005); Fable Anniversary (2014). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable_(2004_video_game)
- For Lionhead’s purchase by Microsoft, Fable III, Fable Legends, the closure and Playground Games, see the Lionhead entry and its sources.