Eurogamer Expo Sessions: Peter Molyneux talks Fable III
We talk to him beforehand.
We love Peter Molyneux - so much so that sometimes it must seem like we interview him every week. In actual fact the last time we spoke to him was gamescom in August. Today he's speaking to YOU at our beloved Eurogamer Expo in London, revealing new details about Fable III and, knowing him, putting on an interesting show in the process.
Knowing that not everyone can make it to the Expo and our auditorium will be rammed anyway, we caught up with Molyneux on the phone yesterday to find out what he's going to talk about. Sadly Microsoft insisted we don't talk about Project Milo on this occasion (it was that or no interview), but if you're interested in the Fable series, or just want to know why Molyneux's posting videos of his son on the internet these days, read on.
I know! Sam Van Tilburgh [from Lionhead] was at my house because I was really busy but I had to babysit Lucas. He was recording a video of me giving hints and tips, and Lucas has this obsession with making his video - he wants to make his own video, and it's going to involve planes crashing, people dying and the world turning sideways. Quite why the world's turning sideways I don't know. So he said, "Oh can I record something? Can I be filmed?" And Sam so kindly said okay, so I clipped the mic on, and everything you saw from that point onwards was him.
He turned around to me and said, "What should I talk about?" and I said he should talk about Half-Life 3 because he's always talking about Half-Life 3. In fact, I was on the phone to Phil Spencer, my boss, once and he grabbed the phone and said, "When's Half-Life 3 coming out? You're American, you must know." Phil tried to convince him that he didn't want to play Half-Life 3, he wanted to play Halo: Reach, but it didn't quite work.
Anyway, then the problem was that the camera Sam had couldn't play back the video, so he said, "No problem, I'll put it on YouTube for you." He put it on YouTube and then I made the mistake of tweeting about it and it just went completely insane. It wasn't meant as a Fable PR trick, I promise you.
Yes, well, actually it's a good point, because the first computer game we ever played together was ICO. Because I thought it was absolutely essential if I was going to recognise this child as my own that he loves computer games. Otherwise I'd have to get him gene-tested. So the first game I ever played when he could barely talk was ICO, and he loved ICO for a long time, so he probably would do that. But you're right, the Last Guardian, god, I can hardly wait to see that. I looked at ICO only a few weeks ago and it still looks amazing.
Are they doing an HD version of ICO?
Reeeally...
The Fable world is rather like the world of England, really, the legends of England. It's kind of followed what the English fairytale and legend was and has become. In the first Fable there was this place called the Guild and the Guild had all these heroes - they were kind of like Knights of the Round Table - and they went on adventures and quests. They saved the world.
In Fable 1 it was all about introducing this family called the Bloodline, and it was the most heroic Bloodline the world had ever known. At the time we were thinking of King Arthur and it was very much grounded in halfway between legend and fairytale. That story introduced one of our main characters, Theresa the Seer, and we picked up 500 years later in Fable II, where the Guild had gone into ruin, there weren't any real heroes any more, and you can think of that in the time of around about Robin Hood in England, where there weren't any magical Excalibur swords around any more but you still had massive heroes like Robin Hood.