The Art of Fable III

Yeah. They believe in science, in industry, but they don't believe in any of the old stories. We quite like the the juxtaposition of having a hero - your character - walking into a bar, wearing a giant glowing sword, a blue beard, a tattoo-laden glowing wedding dress, and announcing, "I'm the hero of Albion!"... And everybody laughs at you.

Then as soon as you cast a spell and set something on fire, they run screaming. It's crazy, it's something they don't believe in. The stories of creatures, of hobbes and balverines and all that - that's something they tell their kids, it doesn't actually exist.

In Bowerstone, they've got bigger problems anyway - like the fact that the king keeps killing anybody who doesn't do what he says. That's going to be your major consideration, rather than whether there are trolls in the forest - the fact that people are kidnapping your kids and making them work in factories.

Yeah... That's gone through all kinds of experimental iterations. It was made of ice at one point! As soon as any creative group sees a gap, we all just scream and run towards it - all shouting, "Right, okay, the whole place is made of SHOES!" No, no, calm down everybody, just calm... [laughs] We got stuck right into that. It was really exciting. It still is.

I think that's one of the pleasures. We've got really strong art and design teams, and it's brilliant when you all get to talk about a completely new land - and just go mad, go completely mental and come up with all this stuff. Then you can haul it back. Making things slightly more subdued is always much easier than to take a really boring idea and try to make it exciting.

Well, at the moment it goes into the artbook! It's all related to Fable, so it'll always be in the background and useful, even if we ever decided to set a game...

In a land made of shoes.

Before Fable 1, I meant, doing a prequel. We've got this plethora of unused artwork, with so many ideas in there.

It's really lovely actually, yeah. So much - literally 99 per cent - of the stuff you do as a concept artist goes no further than that. It gets given to a 3D artist who makes a model, and that's it. It's fulfilled its purpose. So it's great that now it gets used, it's a really big kick to see it in a book form. There's something about it which makes you feel... It makes you feel like a real artist! [laughs]

That's exactly it, though! We did the Art of Fable II book, and as soon as I handed it to my mum, she said, "Oh my god! Look at that! Did you do that?" Well, yeah, I've been doing it for 10 years. But she doesn't play games. She'd never seen it.

It's just to convince other people that we have actually got useful jobs!

We've got a library upstairs - I've been collecting the concept art of games and films for years. I've got thousands of books of it, and I'd always wanted to have one that we'd done. Well, we got one last time, and we're doing one again this time, as far as I know - it's going to be great.