“Bard to the bone” – Fable II

When it comes to pivotal moments in British video game history, Populous is one of the more significant games overlooked by Super Chart Island (Robocop’s half-year run at the top of the chart made sure of that). Coming out in 1989, the same year as SimCity, it cast the player as a god, reshaping the land and gathering believers and power. Equally impressive in scope and in execution, it helped build a genre as well as a platform which developers Bullfrog made the most of.

From there, via Syndicate, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper and then, for some top Bullfrog staff, a bumpier road through break-off company Lionhead, bought by Microsoft, to the very successful Fable series. The first Fable was actually largely devised by satellite studio Big Blue Box, but they were set up by ex-Bullfrog employees too. Like other long-term British success stories, there is a clear thread to be traced over time, centering a certain common density of concepts allowed by the home computer era and encouraged by British games culture. Just as there were traces of Lemmings visible in Grand Theft Auto, Fable II’s combination of myth and management has a lot of Populous in it.

Chiefly, it answers the question of how to fit together some of the freedom and control of the god game genre with an RPG where you only get to play as one person. How it does that is particularly easy to see when compared to the superficially similar fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Fable II is much less interested in giving you a grand scale setting to explore, giving you a series of disparate areas connected with loading screens and big number notes of travel time. It’s also less interested in giving you particularly detailed combat stats or upgrades to work with, although it has some neat concepts there too (my favourite tactic was killing an enemy or two from a group and then magically raising their ghosts to keep the survivors busy while I shot them from a safe distance). Instead, there is a massive and detailed focus on interacting with people and influencing them. 

At some points of the game you need to raise your renown in the world, like the Populous god raising belief. You can do that by going off and doing some big impressive quests. Or you can do that by commissioning statues of you in heroic pose, or getting the local bard to sing tributes to your progress. If that’s still too impersonal, you can go round the world individually showing each person trophies of your success and persuading them to like you. The biggest unique stroke of genius is in how you do this, which is through a series of mimed actions and interactions pretty much imported wholesale from The Sims. 

You can flirt, insult and brag your way around and track each person’s feelings of love/fear/humour towards you. These attitudes are shown by a bunch of sliders which immediately put me in mind of Theme Park’s incredible array of options to increase the salt content in the fries on sale at your park or whatever. Some people will give up rewards if you scare them enough, at the cost of general bad word about you going round. Get the right person to like you enough and with a few chat-up lines, impressive farts, rambunctious dancing and a suitable ring, you can marry them. This is obviously absurdly simplified, but also charming and somehow much more satisfying than selecting superficially sophisticated dialogue options which basically amount to “be good” or “be a dick” anyway.

People aren’t the only ones you can use your reactions with. You can also praise or play with your dog, who follows you round ready to help in fights and identify treasure to dig up. This is a straightforwardly lovely and welcome addition, even if it inevitably leads to eventual cruel separation. There are plenty more concepts where that came from, too. Various jobs have you performing simple timing tasks to earn points, multipliers and promotions. You can get deep into assorted pub forms of gambling if you like. Death causes you not a reset but a loss of experience and some more scars on your character, a rather beautiful visual record of your failures. “Wouldn’t it be more interesting if…” seems to have been the valuable guiding principle. 

In some places the results are more mixed. The game’s straightforward and inclusive attitude to sex and sexuality is a wonderful surprise. Again, being able to call up a status screen which tells you if any passing stranger is gay, straight or bisexual is quite the simplification, but it works better than so many established alternatives. It’s food where things go more awry. The tracked moral superiority of vegetarianism I can kind of dig; the result of frequently eating food to restore health being your character getting fatter and being rated as less attractive I really cannot.

That one feels like a misapplication of one of the game’s other guiding principles with its own through-line from an earlier era of British gaming: the primacy of humour. Lionhead later summarised some of this in explaining one of their points of contention with Microsoft, on the cover art for the game. This was not just through Microsoft’s insistence on appeasing the perceived racism and sexism of their audience, but also that they saw that an RPG meant “dragons and shit” and not Lionhead’s own vision of “a Monty Python-esque comedy”. Just as my story of the British games charts started with Jet Set Willy and its explicit Monty Python references.

There is, to be sure, something of Monty Python and the Holy Grail about Fable II and its mediaeval-ish setting. Its characters live up to age-old tropes or provide self-aware comment on them as best suits plot and humour at any given moment. When you meet a Mad Dog “The Strangler” McGraw there is a drawn out diversion into the redundancy of having two different hard-man nicknames. The game’s intro shows an epic flight through a beautiful landscape which culminates in a bird pooing on the main character’s head. 

At one point you get to the RPG staple of being forced into a combat arena, and your fights get accompanied by sports commentary from a character called Allen Murray who is essentially played as an even more gaffe-prone Murray Walker. When you reach the Guild of Heroes and open a treasure chest to receive a scroll of the message “Go to fable2.com for information on how to access the gold and items your heroic ancestors left behind” it is jarring in a knowing and funny way. Any moment could be one to take the piss out of character or player alike.

Occasionally Fable II takes its whole picaresque array of cockney sparrows and comedy yokels and trips to the pub a bit far (and not just when it features James Corden), and it gets into some dodgy noble traveller tropes. For the most part, though, its humour creates something fun and unique and, yes, very British. With all the subtlety indicated by its setting being called Albion. Amidst the comedy it reaches with varying success for something more serious too. Its mix of tones is less Monty Python and more Terry Pratchett, taking it even further into the particular version of popular British nerd culture I grew up with.

When you kill the bandit who serves as the first boss in the game, Zoë Wannamaker’s mystical narrator invites you to think about all of the memories and moments of a life now gone. “Do you feel the weight of responsibility yet?” she asks. It’s a thoughtful moment immediately completely undermined when she goes on to tell you that you have made the world a better place. Don’t worry; killing is good. In that moment I wished I could believe it was taking the piss and not just giving in to gameplay necessity. 

Far more successful is a sequence where the main character is held captive by the bad guy for ten years. You are subjected to torture and brainwashing, with a loss of your precious experience points if you do the right thing tying in gameplay consequences a lot better than some other points. It’s strikingly dark. And then, as you’re given commands, a message comes up to tell you that you now have the middle finger expression available to you. What a great concept, to look evil in the eyes and swear at it. The last time I can think of the potential for jamming such disparate elements together in games being so well realised is Metal Gear Solid. 

Now, I was a child who loved playing Theme Park and self-aware adventure games including Discworld. It’s not a great surprise that I very much liked Fable II as well, and more impressive that it reached wider audiences and enlarged possibilities in some really positive ways. Still, there is something particularly enjoyable about just seeing familiar RPG approaches being done with a different sensibility, and there would be even if it wasn’t a sensibility I was so inclined to.

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Top of the charts for week ending 25 October 2008: