<
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/we-would-look-at-all-the-american-rpgs-and-the-jrpgs-at-the-time-and-just-go-right-if-theyre-doing-it-were-not-peter-molyneux-and-john-mccormack-talk-the-development-of-fable-20-years-on/>
'There are few releases which can be said to have had as much of an impact on
the games industry as
Fable, a title that upended the RPG rulebook by
focussing on emergent gameplay rather than grand quests, all with a healthy
dose of British humour. Its influence is plain to see in later games like
Mass
Effect, with its choice between good and evil paths, but its creation was far
from smooth.
Peter Molyneux traces the origin of
Fable back to the time when Bullfrog, the
company he founded, was developing the 1997 PC game
Dungeon Keeper. He
recalls discussions with designers Mark Healey and Simon and Dene Carter in
which they were "moaning about role-playing games and how serious they were",
as well as how they were mired in statistics, which "took away from the delight
of feeling that you were the hero and feeling that you were going on an
adventure". Peter says it was these discussions that Simon and Dene would call
back on when they developed the concept for
Fable years later.
Bullfrog had been bought by Electronic Arts in 1995, and Peter decided to leave
the company following the completion of
Dungeon Keeper, after becoming
increasingly dissatisfied with the corporate role he now found himself in,
detached from game development. Other Bullfrog employees soon followed his
lead, and by 2001 the studio had vanished, fully absorbed into EA. On his
departure, Peter set up Lionhead Studios, which was initially run from his
house, but soon established offices in Guildford, at the University Of Surrey
Research Park. At around this time, Ian Lovett and Simon and Dene Carter also
departed EA to set up Big Blue Box Studios, one of a number of 'satellite
studios' that all reported to Lionhead. The idea was that each of these studios
could work semi-independently, incubating their own game ideas.
Artist John McCormack, left behind at EA, recalls that Simon, Dene and Ian
asked him to come over to Peter's house to view a tech demo built by coder
Martin Bell. "I was sold on that immediately because it was an incredibly
powerful terraforming engine," he recalls, saying that the plan was to use this
engine for a fantasy RPG concept called
Wishworld that would see epic battles
between wizards. It was an easy decision for John to abandon the sinking
Bullfrog ship and join the Big Blue Box crew.'
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
