"We would look at all the American RPGs and the JRPGs at the time and just go, 'Right, if they're doing it, we're not": Peter Molyneux and John McCormack talk the development of Fable 20 years on

Women with lovehearts above their heads yearn for the player hero in Fable.

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.