Last night's Xbox Developer Direct 2026 Showcase saw Playground Games reveal the latest look at its upcoming reboot of the Fable series, and it's inevitably got me waxing all nostalgic about all of the hijinks I got up to in Lionhead's original trilogy.
From the joyful memories of becoming the biggest love cheat in Albion, marrying and abandoning potentially dozens of wives over the course of all three games, to getting a little too obsessed with the blacksmithing minigame in Fable II, in an effort to afford the finer things in life.
Throughout the years, I've poured a ridiculous amount of hours into all three Fable games and come away with a ton of unforgettable stories from across the series, most of which have emerged from the RPG series's fairly unique take on a morality system and its anecdote-friendly sandbox. As a result, I wanted to take today's Talking Point as an opportunity ask players for their own stories of exploring Albion, ahead of the new game's release, with the aim being to hear some of your funniest, most unusual, and potentially moving accounts of the first three games.
Just to give you some background on my own personal history with the series, my first experience with Fable was on the original Xbox.
While typically a bigger fan of JRPGs like Final Fantasy, my older brother had bought the game, due to Xbox positioning the title as one of its major titles on the console (alongside games like Halo, Blinx: The Time-Sweeper, and Dead or Alive 3), our shared love of Shenmue's open-world sandbox (which we felt was built upon here), and of course, all of the lofty promises that Lionhead founder Peter Molyneux was touting in the game's press.
I can remember vividly, for instance, having multiple conversations with my brother about all the incredible features that Lionhead was teasing in all of the gaming magazines and video game websites at the time, from promising players that dropped Acorns would eventually sprout into trees (apparently an idea Molyneux came up with based on a mechanic from the abandoned Fable-precursor Wishworld) to a proposed revenge system that would see your enemy's children hunting you down as recompense for killing their parents.
It all sounded too good to be true, and, in many ways, it was, with several of Molyneux's "promises" being absent from the finished game. Nevertheless, Fable remained somewhat of a magical game for me, in quite the same way that Shenmue had been before, with part of the joy of playing it being to discover the edges of what was actually possible (in the days before exhaustive promotional materials and Wikis removed all of the mystery from new releases).
As for the later games, I didn't necessarily rush out to buy them both at the time of release, but instead found myself playing them both in the 2010s, upon rediscovering the series and my love of RPGs. Out of the two, the second game (often considered to be the best of the trilogy) appealed to me the most and has pretty much become the de facto game I return to now, whenever I want another taste of Albion.
Who could resist, for example, going around flipping off everyone in Bowerstone Market or chatting up a partner, only to lead them to a quiet place and fart in their general direction?
Immature? Yes. Hilarious? I certainly think so.