A shocking thing happened to me last year when I bumped into Mark Fletcher, one of the artists who worked on Fable One, and he said, next year is the 20th anniversary of the release of Fable.

Firstly, it came as an enormous shock that 20 years ago, Fable One came out. 

Secondly, it pulled back a lot of memories I had and feelings I had about the entire Fable series. 

And lastly, and most importantly, it sent me into this reminiscing state about the world of Albion and just how much I loved that world. I should say that the world of Albion was created by a group of us. Dean Carter was a genius who worked on the mythology and the feel of the world, and Paul McLaughlin helped with the art style – the list of names goes on, and on – but that reminiscing caused me to explore this idea:

Could we set a game in the world of Albion and make that game something fresh and new and different?

I know that Fable 4 is coming out and that further prodded me into obsessing about setting a game in the world of Albion, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised what a fantastic world it is. Firstly, I think of Albion as Old Britain.

And secondly, I think it still remains as one of the most funny worlds where all the people and all the events had a tinge of dark humour to them. 

And thirdly, and this is most important because Fable itself didn’t really have jokes as such, what made it funny for me, and I think made it funny for a lot of people, is just the ridiculous things that you could do and the ridiculous choices that you had, and the consequences of those choices. 

So this reminiscing really meant that I started to think if I was going to set something in the world of Albion, but maybe not specifically about heroes, what would that be? What fascinates me about Albion? And that kicked off these trains of thought in my mind and allowed me to really start exploring the idea in my mind of a familiar Albion, a familiar place with a lot of humour.

I had a free weekend in which my son Lucas and I went round some of the local environments that inspire me and remind me about what Albion’s all about. These are all places in and around Guildford, places I’ve visited many times before, and I think these will give you a good idea of where my head has been at recently, and what has been influencing my thoughts around a new game. Fortunately, we had access to a drone (Lucas is doing a degree in film in Bristol right now), so some of this footage is drone footage and some of it is captured just on a plain old digital camera. 

This is Saint Catherine’s Chapel, an old ruin. We had a few team shots in there in the early, early days of Bullfrog, but this location’s always stuck with me. And the reason it stuck with me is the contrast you can see between the old and the new.

The view from St. Catherine’s, when it was built 800 years ago, must have been this serene, beautiful, pristine landscape. In fact, in the video, is a 300 year old painting of the chapel, and you can see it was a ruin back then. But it’s that contrast between ancient and modern that highlights the way human beings have spread out over the countryside and consumed the old beauty. That’s the first thing that really resonated with me. And after thinking about this, I really started to obsess about nature.

And man.

Mankind has spread out and kind of almost corrupted the nature around him. And I think as a mechanic, that is something that has stuck with me. This idea that whatever we do, we’re gonna fuck it up somehow.

The second thing is this view.

The height of St. Catherine’s Hill and its closeness to Guildford, just down below the hill, makes it look like we’re almost at an isometric angle. And I’ve always loved that isometric angle. The first real game that I did, Populous, was in a perfect isometric angle. Syndicate was also isometric. And we made this huge mistake in Theme Park by only having isometric in one direction. The great thing about the isometric angle is that this projection doesn’t portray any perspective distortion, meaning you can see anything in the foreground and background clearly at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, let me say now, this is not going to be an isometric game, but it’s still an inspiration.

Anyway, there’s two things that I get from this location. The view and how exciting it is to see this little world with all the people living and working below you, and the coexistence of the old world and the new world. The thought I had was that the new world is created out of man’s necessity. The world has been shaped because of man’s need to thrive and survive.

So maybe you can see where I’m going with that. Let me just remind you that this blog is exploring. You’re not going to get specific ideas for a little while, so just stay with me.

Just down the road from St. Catherine’s Chapel is Watts Chapel. It’s the most incredible place. Aldous Huxley, incidentally, is buried in the graveyard. Watts Chapel was built by a group of people from the local village in honour of George Watts, who was this famous Victorian sculptor.

If you look at these pictures, there is a mysticism about this place And I love it. I still have an incredibly fervent passion for the idea that magic exists today. Looking at these pictures, you could imagine that this was a centre point, a focal point of magic. I love exploring magic. I have some real foundational beliefs about what a magic system should be, and that is that magic has to have a cost. I thought one of the most brilliant examples of that was in a book written by Neil Gaiman called Stardust, where every time they used magic, they just aged terribly.

Remembering back to Fable, we had these amazing swords, weapons you could upgrade, and fantastic armour, but what has always lingered in my mind is the question, who made this stuff? Who made the Sword of Aeons and what’s actually in it? Is it the metal from a meteorite from Alpha Centauri or is it a couple of old tin cans that have been melted down?

I’ve become more and more obsessed about this, about who makes this stuff and how do they make it? And why did they make it? And that got me thinking about things like what did people eat in Britain in the years 700 to 800? Who made all the food? Especially for the armies. Who is producing food for these huge groups of mobile infantry? How do you feed thousands of men who are marching across the country heading to what could be their doom? How does it all work?

And this brings me to the other thing I find absolutely fascinating, and that’s the brutality of life in the past. Anywhere from Victorian times and back, just the pure brutality of life. In this world there was no health service, no social systems at all. No law, no police force, no social care, no pensions, no unemployment benefit. 

And then you mix into that world progress, and this is what we were beginning to explore in Fable 3 except we didn’t really have the time to get deep into it, the industrial revolution happening in a world where magic existed.

If you think of that industrial revolution, we look back and think of it as a wonderful time. Mankind were brilliant. We were lovely. We were weaving materials and we were cutting grain, and we were manufacturing things where before the industrial revolution, everything that was made, everything that was consumed was done in the home.

If you wanted milk, you had to have a fucking cow. If you wanted a table, you had to go and chop down a tree. And then up came this industrial revolution and said, fuck all that, that’s silly. Why don’t we just start manufacturing specific things, rather than everyone making one single thing at a time?

And so these factories were created, and Guildford is a great example of that time. Guildford was a town that was based on the wool trade. And that’s why the whole town is centred around the river. 

These manufacturing places were places of utter brutality. We’re not talking about the occasional accident. Literally, they were built in such a way that children as young as six were the only ones that were small enough to get under the machines to clean them. There were saw blades running over their heads, slicing away while they scrambled beneath the machines, in dire jeopardy. One false move and you lose a limb or worse. We can’t even imagine a world like that now. And furthermore, if one of these kids got their hand sliced off or their legs sliced off then the only thing that happened is they couldn’t go to work the next day. There was no health service to look after them. The 7-year-old’s stump was no concern of the owners. There was no employment law. The owners didn’t care. A kid got his arm chopped off. We’re gonna find another kid to replace him. And that’s the only thing that they really cared about. And I think for a game, that’s a wonderful theme to explore. 

On the one side you’ve got progress. When you think of the word progress, it’s probably a golden word in your mind, an example of why human brings are fan-fucking-tastic, because of progress, because of invention. And on the other side of the coin are the consequences of that progress. That in the Industrial Revolution you are going to have to reorganise society just to cater for this progress. Which ultimately gave birth to the modern world that we live in now, where we do care about each other and we care about social justice and social care. But that’s an interesting thing to explore, progress versus compassion.

There are great examples of that found around Guildford as the Industrial Revolution went on. Incidentally, in this blog, anything you read, I’m not checking. This is just what I believe. And you are probably going come back and say, oh no, the Victorian Times had a police force for whatever, but this is just what I believe. Historical facts can of course be of great use when game designing, but never let it be said that fantasy and imagination are not the most powerful tool in a creatives bag.

I think the people that were pushing for progress, for invention, and ultimately for profit, probably thought they were doing a fantastic job. It must have been an incredible feeling that suddenly you were creating things that had never been created before. And that must have felt amazing. It’s not like starting a business now. They were making things for the very first time.

Take food. Before factories, how was food made on a large scale? If, for example,  you wanted thousands of people to do something, you have to worry about the food. About feeding them. And how was that food even manufactured? How do you feed an army of thousands marching across the country?

So you’ve got Mr Progress, who’s inventing things and making factories and running factories. And then you’ve got the people who are actually working in these factories. To them it was probably a nightmarish hell, but history only briefly touches on that. They had to leave their homes, they had to leave their families. They had to go and work in these incredibly dangerous places. There was laughably no employment laws at all. An employer could come to them and say, you’ve gotta work for 16 hours a day for seven days a week.

And I believe I’m right in saying that the average working week was 110 hours. 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I do wonder why, why those people who lived in the countryside on small farms,  and I wonder why they left to go and work in these factories and towns. 

I’m quite excited to talk about brutality versus kindness, because I think that the business owners, the entrepreneurs that start off these factories, didn’t give a shit about the workers. But they got a bit rich and then they got a bit guilty. So they started building these places that people could survive in. A great example of that, is the work house.

Work houses were seen as a brilliant thing at a time when there was no social care at all. If someone was completely out of work and they had no food, they either became a criminal and stole things to survive and eat, or they died. So they built these workhouses, and the idea was you went to a workhouse and you could get a free meal and you got a free bed. And if you look at these pictures, it was a ghastly, it was just like going to jail basically. But at the time it must have felt absolutely wonderful. But now we look back at workhouses and think, oh, what a terrible thing. 

This is Waverley Abbey, and it’s really interesting to me because if you look at the estate it’s in, it’s right next door to this enormous stately home. The contrast of the abbey to the stately home, that it is in ruins and a symbol of the old times, next to this at-the-time modern, decadent, expensive private home, and the sort of the coexistence of man and nature, where the old building sits with much of its grounds taken back by Mother Nature, is really fascinating. 

Now the other things that are near here are the Gunpowder Mills. And if you look at this picture, there was this gunpowder factory just down the road from where we are now, where they made gunpowder.

Have you ever wondered how they make gunpowder? In this factory they literally ground up sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, and mixed them together in these huge vats. Well, of course this whole building just exploded. It was completely fatal, but it was in this beautiful, amazingly green and lush landscape when we went there, and there’s this real feeling of foreboding. Here’s a building that was built with complete disregard for any safety and complete disregard for where it was built. I mean, it totally polluted the entire area, including the rivers, because of their manufacturing processes and scant disregard for the area.

Look at the way this factory is constructed. It’s built for purpose and nothing else. When they built this place, we hadn’t invented safety. We had to invent safety. Machines were being invented for the very first time. This was the first time that steam was used and water was used to power things. When Leonardo da Vinci or whoever was drawing plans for machines, he wasn’t thinking, “What are we gonna do about the safety of this?”

No, they were so busy thinking about whether this thing they’re inventing would actually work, there was no interest in whether it was safe. And then it does work, and then things progress and then it took a remarkably long time for anyone to come up and say, let’s just put a guard on that. Let’s just make it so that people don’t die.

Sometimes when you’re thinking through an idea, these weird coincidences happen. And the weird coincidence that happened around this is that, well, I love listening to audiobooks, and I’ll listen to an audiobook if I’m walking the dog or if I’m driving somewhere, wherever I can really. Anyway, I had just started listening to an audio book called A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie. The world that Joe Abercrombie had created felt so much like Fable, especially in this series of books. 

It was the humour that really won me over to the books and reminded me of Fable. So Joe’s books were a fantastic inspiration.

Right, this article has explored Guildford a lot and how fascinating and inspiring that has been, so next time let’s go into a little bit more detail.

Just to remind you that you’re going to have to be patient waiting for specifics and details because this is going to take a while. Sorry! Thanks for sticking with it – making games takes a long, long time.