The game was born within the walls of Big Blue Box, a tiny British satellite studio spun-off from Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead by siblings Dene and Simon Carter. In fact, Fable’s origins predate the Xbox by quite some time. While it wasn’t available at launch, Lionhead’s Fable would prove to be one of the most important Xbox exclusives – but its path to market was anything but straightforward. It was going up against Sony and Nintendo – two companies with enviable reserves of internal development talent – and a strong slate of must-have Xbox games was a must if players were going to be convinced to jump ship to this new system.
When Microsoft launched the original Xbox back in 2001, it was keenly aware that the console would live or die by the quality of its exclusive games.