According to Wikipedia, it was the biggest selling game of 2004.Īnyway, with 2014 being 10 years since Fable came out, Microsoft have done what it did with Halo and had the game re-made by Lionhead and called it Fable Anniversary. It was a sort of action adventure game with role-playing elements where you could be a goodie two-shoes or a complete shit. He could also chat up women, steal stuff, smash down doors, get back tattoos, get huge sideburns and sleep in beds that he wasn’t supposed to. He could fart! I think that was pretty much unheard of in video games at the time. The townsfolk were voiced by real Britons (not Americans trying to sound like Britons) and our hero could fart at the press of the D-pad.
I trawled through some old newspaper clippings to see if I could find my review of Fable, but I couldn’t (the review came out before the newspaper I worked for archived anything like video game reviews online so I only have a hard copy – and only God know where that is), but one of the things I remember most about Fable was the wicked British sense of humour that oozed from just about every pixel. It proved to be complete rubbish, which we all found out, but it indicated the ambitious things that Fable wanted to achieve. I think at one point Molyneux claimed that if you planted an acorn in the ground in the game eventually you’d see it sprout into a towering oak tree. In fact, the things he said about it caused a bit of a stir, if I remember rightly. I liked it, I think, but it was a game that it’s creator Peter Moyneux talked up big. Fable Anniversary: the new look hero from the remake of the 2004 original.Ĭasting my hazy memory back to the days of the original Xbox is hard but I remember playing Fable on Microsoft’s first console.