Peter Molyneux's mouth has probably sold more Microsoft consoles than we'd care to admit. The man's a showman. Rich with enthusiasm and promise, he's constantly promised to change the world and the way we interact with media through his games like Black & White, The Movies, Populous, and his most notable franchise - the console RPG series; Fable. Fable is strange because even though the games are teeming with tender love and care, they're continuously over-hyped and feel a little disappointing in retrospect, oftentimes turning the games from a day one purchase to something picked up at Gamestop for £/$14.99 during a sale. This trend started way back in 2004 with the promise of Fable - an open-world life simulator that promised to bend the entire world to your whim. If you were evil, your face would grow grim and wrinkled and town citizens would run away in fear. If you were good, your face would be bright and school children would gather around you just for a glimpse of the hero they heard of only in legend. You were promised your own house, your own wife, kids, a dog, and an experience unlike any other. Yeah, it's a little hard to deliver on all that, and Fable didn't. Ultimately its own hype and imagination derailed the wonderful - if short and narrower in scope than expected - action-RPG from 'instant classic' to 'pretty good' game. Much like gamers across the world, or really people across the world, Peter Molyneux's ambition and excitement for the medium exceeded the realities of what was possible. But in a world where new ideas cost money and ambition has to come with a bottom line, it's good to know there are men like Monlyneux and franchises like Fable that aren't afraid to promise the moon with genuine enthusiasm, to the point where even though the hype may 'ruin' a game like Fable, the resulting product is obviously the best it could very possibly can be - and in a creative medium, it's not a bad trade off. Which titles do you were think represented wrongly before release, or did you let yourself get carried away thinking they'd be something they could never be? Let us know in the comments!
