I know you're all bored of these Fable posts, but I promise, this is the last one until The 17th or 18th. Gamespot did an interview of Peter Molyneux, the lead dev on the Fable team. This was an absolutely FABULOUS interview. It gives huge insight on all kinds of things - the gaming industry, British culture, the development of Fable, and it's really very cool.

Linkage

This really prompted me to do a little blurb on gaming and the like. Molyneux is really a great guy - you can tell from the interview. Something that he mentions in the interview is that Fable was brought up with very grossly exaggerated expectations. They were expectations that Molyneux said himself that he planted, and later regretted because he knew his team couldn't fulfill. He talked a lot about how the project evolved as time went - they set out to make the greatest RPG of all time. That's what every team making an RPG sets out to do. Because if you shoot for anything less, you're gonna get less. He doesn't believe they made the greatest RPG of all time, and I find that a very brave statement for him to make. This interview alone has restored my faith in Fable.

As for the gaming industry in total, I now feel a lot more enlightened on the whole process. The gaming industry is often interpreted as run by single men, who can afford to stay at work for 12 hours each day - because they want to, because they have no responsibilites. Molyneux touched on the fact that over the course of 3 1/2 years, 20 babies were born to families on his team. The gaming industry has changed. Maybe that's what it used to be, maybe there are still a few companies out there still like that. I don't know. As the makers of games have changed, so have gamers. Gaming once used to be a very limited field of people. Up until about the time of the Nintendo and Sega consoles, not many people were into video games. PC games were non existant until Windows 95 came out. Computers weren't nearly as user-friendly 10, even 5 years ago, and thus that has opened up the PC world to those not as much into gaming.

The whole point of this, really, is that I'm amazed at how the whole industry has advanced. Molyneux said he wanted games to become on the same level as books and movies. I think we're almost there. The only thing left is for the press to embrace what is now equally important to our culture as books and movies.