The Fable Story So Far: 22 Years, a Closed Studio and One Last Chance

Fable went from Xbox's great fantasy hope to a closed studio and a ten-year gap. Here's how it got here, before the new game lands in February.

Jarlarex
6 min read
A hero looking out from under a huge mossy tree at a distant castle in the official art for Fable
A hero looking out from under a huge mossy tree at a distant castle in the official art for Fable. Image: Microsoft and Playground Games, via Xbox, Official image.

The next Fable comes out on the 23rd of February 2027, and by then it will have been more than sixteen years since the last main game in the series. In that time its studio has been shut down, its most famous face has left, a whole online Fable has been cancelled, and the job of bringing it back has gone to the people who make Forza.

That’s a strange road for a series that was once meant to be Xbox’s answer to everything. Here’s how it got here.

It started as Project Ego

Fable began at Big Blue Box Studios, founded in 1998 by Ian Lovett, Simon Carter and Dene Carter. It worked as a satellite of Lionhead Studios, the company Peter Molyneux co-founded in 1997, and Lionhead later bought it outright.

The game went through other names, and for a long time it was known as Project Ego. Molyneux started teasing it in 2001, and that’s where the Fable story really starts, because the hype around it got out of hand long before it shipped.

Fable, 2004

Fable came out on the original Xbox on the 14th of September 2004 in North America and on the 8th of October in Europe. It was the best-selling game of that September, shifting 375,000 copies in its first week and getting to around three million worldwide over time.

The idea was simple and it was a good one. You play one hero from childhood onwards, and the world reacts to how you behave. Do good and people cheer. Be a terror and they run away. The game also had a very British sense of humour, which is a big part of why people still love it.

A bigger version, Fable: The Lost Chapters, followed in September 2005, and it brought the game to PC too.

The Xbox 360 years

Fable II landed on the 24th of October 2008, and Fable III on the 29th of October 2010, with a PC version in March 2011. Fable II is the one a lot of people will name as the high point, and it’s the game most people remember for the dog.

Fable III turned out to be the last main game in the series for a very long time. What came next was a run of spin-offs that didn’t really feel like the same series. Fable Heroes, a co-op Xbox Live Arcade game, arrived in May 2012. Fable: The Journey, a Kinect game, followed that October. Then came a remaster of the first game, Fable Anniversary, in February 2014.

Molyneux left Lionhead in 2012 to start a new studio, 22cans. So by the time the Kinect game came out, the person most closely tied to the series had already gone.

Legends, and the end of Lionhead

Fable Legends was teased in August 2013 and it was supposed to be the series’ big step onto Xbox One. It was an online game built around a team of heroes, and it went a long way into development.

Then, on the 7th of March 2016, Microsoft cancelled it and proposed closing Lionhead altogether. The studio shut on the 29th of April 2016, after nearly nineteen years.

That’s the point where Fable basically stopped. Microsoft said later that it had mismanaged the studio, and years afterwards Phil Spencer, then running Xbox, reflected on buying studios by saying “You acquire a studio for what they’re great at now”. That’s a fairly gentle way of describing what happened at Lionhead, but it’s about as close to an admission as you’ll get.

Why Playground?

Here’s the part that surprised people. In 2017, the year after Lionhead closed, Playground Games set up a second team to work on Fable. Playground had made its name on Forza Horizon, and it had never made an RPG.

Word got out through Eurogamer in early 2018. Microsoft bought Playground that June. The game was finally announced in July 2020 at the Xbox Games Showcase, with a teaser that was mostly a fairy getting eaten by a frog. As announcements go, I thought that was exactly right for Fable.

It then took nearly three years to see anything else. The first in-game trailer arrived on the 11th of June 2023, with Richard Ayoade in it, and the tone looked spot on.

The delays

The dates have moved twice, and in both cases Xbox said it out loud:

  • 2024: At the June showcase, Xbox put a 2025 date on it.
  • 25th of February 2025: Craig Duncan, the head of Xbox Game Studios, said on the Xbox Podcast it had moved to 2026.
  • 29th of May 2026: Matt Booty, Xbox’s chief content officer, moved it into 2027 so it could have “the dedicated moment it deserves”.
  • 7th of June 2026: The showcase confirmed the 23rd of February 2027.

Reports at the time linked the move to GTA 6, which is out in November. Nobody has confirmed that, but I can’t say I blame anyone for not wanting to launch next to it.

What we know about the new game

It’s a reboot, not Fable 4, and it’s set in a new take on Albion. You play the Hero of Briar Hill, whose home is turned to stone by a mysterious stranger. That includes your grandmother, so this one’s personal.

Your reputation is the main idea, which is right back to what made the first game work. Playground says there are over 1,000 handcrafted characters with their own routines and relationships, and over 150,000 lines of dialogue between them. Combat mixes melee, ranged and magic, which the studio calls style-weaving. Ralph Fulton, a Horizon veteran, is directing it, and the game runs on ForzaTech, the same engine as the racing games. Hayley Atwell plays Isabel, and Jack of Blades is back from the first game, though we don’t know how yet.

It’s also the first Fable on a PlayStation. It’ll be on PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC, and on Game Pass from day one, with Premium owners getting in from the 18th of February.

Not everything’s been rosy. Some early reaction called the combat simple, and Playground responded that the demo was on Story difficulty. A report in July said the game had gone uncomfortably over budget. That one isn’t confirmed, so take it as a rumour.

Where it leaves Playground

The last piece of this story only happened last month. On the 22nd of September, Xbox said Playground and Turn 10 “will come together as one studio focused on the Forza and Fable franchises”, as part of a reorganisation that cut 268 roles. So the studio making Fable is now also the entire home of Forza.

Will it work?

Playground is now carrying two of Xbox’s biggest names, and it has never shipped a game like this. Its record is very strong, but that record is in a different genre.

Fable has had more false starts than most series ever get. It needs two things to land: the humour has to survive, and the world really has to remember what you did. That was the promise in 2004, and it’s still the reason anyone cares.

Sources

More stories