Fable & Danny Elfman

Highlighting.

Fable, for today, is the series of video games developed by Lionehead Studios until 2016.
One of the major interests of this series is that it advances in time.

For the first opus – Fable – you are in the medieval era – in Albion – and you find yourself, on foot most of the time, going from village to village, from small city-states to small city-states – all the while having for – or against – you all the ancestral magics that were unleashed in the Middle Ages. Your goal is to figure out what happened to your family – like in Sifu, you start as an orphan, your family murdered for no apparent reason.

For Fable II, you literally jump in time to find yourself in the 18th century – centuries of Enlightenment but not only – centuries of great darkness especially which required some phenomenal Enlightenment to get the West out of its doldrums (doldrums due to bigots for 3/4 of the doldrums) – for this opus, you are almost free, there is a main quest but you can abandon it or even never realize it if you wish.
For this game, too, this opus marks a real evolution in what a video game is: the player comes to walk around – comes to realize the quests that amuse him – and starts to be quite free to appropriate your game.
I would date the change in the relationship between viewers and creators to that time – and it’s not going back.

In Fable III, you are, literally, your son – your son of the character you were in Fable II. It’s an interesting idea – not fully exploited – but interesting and quite disturbing actually;
And here we go back to the great ancient themes: the rivalry between brothers. So, well, a man is quite smooth in time – we don’t evolve that much.

Fable III would therefore go perfectly well with Seneca’s tragedy Thyestes – but really perfectly well. I say this randomly, of course.

The interesting thing about this game is the freedom offered to the player: you can be a real hero, splendid and beautiful. You can be a hero most of the time and sometimes let yourself go and smash a guy who has pissed you off. You can be the worst bastard Albion ever wore. Your behavior doesn’t block the game.
But your behavior does change the way other characters react to you: you will be more or less welcomed – more or less believed – more or less helped – and your actions will have irreversible consequences: you will not have the same adventure as a hero or as a villain or as sometimes I’m the one

This is a principle that you will find very developed in Red Dead Redemption, for example – also at random.

So, Fable is a game that makes you work your neurons – your conscience – and that forces you to realize the consequences of your actions – and all this without really moralizing (it’s there, of course, if only because everyone loves you when you’re the hero).

And since Fable is a “big game”, it has been thought through in every detail.
The composer of the music of Fable is Danny Elfman.

If you don’t know his name, you probably know the amazing music of Tim Burton’s movies. Dick Tracy? you liked it? the music is soooo great. The Simpsons ?- the theme…

And you don’t know the best – for me the fan of ….
Mission: Impossible – yes it is him the original music of the first episode
and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure – pays homage to him, with the characters of Oingo Bongo – his music group from the 80s and 90s.

As a result, Fables does not lend itself to a single link – via the theatre – with Altair. But to a link and a complete highway through its fabulous musician.
And there you have it, another wonderful programming element in my suitcase.

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Featured Image : from Fable : Legends – by Lionhead Studios