Fable creator Peter Molyneux has said there was a pitch document for Fable 4 at Lionhead Studios, but that he left the company before he could see what came of it.
“We did have a proposition for Fable 4,” Molyneux told me this week in a video interview. “And again, it was the thought of moving through time a little bit more, a little bit further.” What he means by that is Fable 4 would adhere to an overarching storyline that connected the Fable games together.
“When we were thinking about Fable 1, we were also thinking about Fable 2,” he explained. “We thought in Fable 1, it was the start of the Heroes Guild, and then Fable 2 will move time on. And we always had this notion that industry and technology were stamping out the magic in Fable, and you can see that with the three [games].”
So: “We had a pitch document,” he said, “which I think was proposed at the time. But that was just at the time that I was leaving Lionhead so I wasn’t there for the full exploration of it.” In other words, he didn’t get to pitch it, or see where it went. “No, no, I didn’t.”
Peter Molyneux left Microsoft and Lionhead in 2012, after being shunted up the hierarchy to become a high-ranking member of Microsoft Studios. The last Fable game he was involved in was the on-rails Kinect spin-off Fable: The Journey, in 2012, which wasn’t bad actually, but felt like it had been created out of a necessity to have Microsoft studios make Kinect games. There was also an Xbox Live multiplayer Fable beat-’em-up that year called Fable Heroes. Perhaps, in Microsoft’s eyes, Fable had become oversaturated.
It has of course been many years now since we’ve had a mainline Fable game, hence the excitement around Playground’s Fable series reboot, which is simply called Fable, and which we got a first proper gameplay glimpse at earlier this year. Molyneux told me he watched this so I asked what he thought of it, to which he replied, “Well, I cried, obviously.” We had previously been talking about how emotional he can be.
“I’ll tell you why,” he added. “Because it just made me unbelievably proud that we created something which persists and that people care about. What they’ve done is they’ve taken that world and they made it far more graphically rich than we were ever capable of doing. I would say it looks a little bit antiseptically clean – that’s a little bit of a tiny negative. But I love the idea that they’re revisiting the original story. And I love the idea that it’s somewhat like the original Fable was. It just makes me feel insanely proud that something we worked so hard on is going to continue to exist.”
“It just made me unbelievably proud that we created something which persists and that people care about”
Molyneux went on to say that Playground Games hadn’t contacted him to talk about Fable, which he completely understands. “They wanted it to be their own creation,” he said. “And they come across as such wonderful fans.” All of the quirky parts of the series seem to be present and correct in Playground’s interpretation. It must be flattering to see, I said. “Incredibly flattering,” he responded. “It all looked fantastic to me.”
Playground’s Fable reboot will be released in the autumn on PC and Xbox and PlayStation 5.
Meanwhile, Peter Molyneux is going back to his god game roots with a new game of his own, Masters of Albion, which shares more than a few similarities with the Fable series. That game enters early access on 22nd April. Masters of Albion will also, apparently, be Peter Molyneux’s last video game – a claim I explored with him in a larger interview.
