It’s also a world that looks and feels very British, something not common in today’s big videogame productions. John McCormack, Fable II’s art director, recalls that “at Big Blue Box [the company that began Fable before being assimilated into Lionhead] we had a place next to a canal and bridge, forests and fields. You couldn’t help but be influenced: you just look out and there’s a guy going under a bridge in his barge with a forest behind him and a castle away in the back. When you’re doing the art, that comes to seem natural and deliberate – because nobody else was touching it.” Copley adds: “There’s this sense of humour – I was going to say Pythonesque but it’s not, it’s different – we’ve always made this series not to be serious about. It’s something you have fun with.”

McCormack also points out that the look of the game is as much European as British, particularly with regard to its architecture and creatures. It’s a fair point. More importantly, despite the fantasy genre being vastly oversubscribed, you can easily identify a piece of artwork as belonging to the Fable series. And ‘belonging’ is a crucial part of identity. “No orcs, no goblins, none of that,” begins McCormack. “We try to think more supernatural: let’s take the basic idea of being a small nasty creature; why not write a story, like they’re really little children that have been possessed and live in caves? Everything has a reason for being the way it is.”

McCormack’s time showing us the game is vastly different from that with the other members of Fable II’s team – panning into a foggy graveyard, his glee at the chunky headstones, crumbling brick and specific details that characterise it is obvious. “It’s one of those places that, even though it’s not central in the story or anything, you know that graveyards are inherently spooky… It’s a labour of love for us because we were all so into it.” He admits that the art team is ‘eccentric’ and that’s perhaps why the visual style of Fable has an edge to it: “We are geeks, and we play the fantasy games and really love them, but we wanted to do something maybe more European: the Brothers Grimm fairytales, the dark stories.” In the planning stages Carter benevolently forced on the team works like The Company Of Wolves and Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. “We were sitting there with our mouths open, thinking: ‘Nobody’s touched this’. I mean, films have, but no one in games,” recalls McCormack.



That hints at what really sets Fable apart from superficially similar titles: it’s much more fairytale than fantasy. “There’s something fundamentally different between them,” says Carter. “Fairytales are about vagary, they’re about very clear moral themes, they’re about very specific and understandable bits of imagery, and then letting your own mind fill in the rest.” The distinction is so much more than semantic: it goes to the root of why people unquestioningly accept ‘standards’ when it comes to the genre that should be the least standard of all. “When Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, for example, all of their background is fairytale and that meant that – I’m sorry for using a pretentious phrase – it had a kind of truer heart,” says Carter. “Everybody seems to have gone: ‘Years and years of folk tales and mystery and magical mirrors and iconic things are completely lost. Look, orcs!’ Everyone works with orcs. They’re Tolkien’s invention, why are they in your world? Why do they belong there? I’d rather use those totemic images – things that you almost kind of half remember from childhood. It all comes from childhood images, really. That’s why you so often get this childish layer over the top of it: people use these things without understanding where they came from.”