Fable just celebrated its 16th anniversary with a very bizarre exchange from Xbox Game Studios Publishing. Fable's birthday was yesterday, and to celebrate, Xbox teased us with "something special" that should have kicked off today.
"We're excited to kick off something special tomorrow," wrote Xbox in a now-deleted tweet, adding, "Just give us one more day to prepare the chickens."
In case that wasn't a clear enough giveaway, Xbox then tweeted a follow-up that said: "We'd call it our Fable Anniversary, but that name was already taken."
You'd expect to be waking up to some nice Fable news this morning. Sadly, Xbox later clarified last night that someone over at the publisher didn't get the memo and they actually have absolutely nothing to celebrate Fable's 16th birthday.
"Sorry for any confusion! We don't have any big game news tomorrow, or any info about @WeArePlayground's upcoming Fable game," wrote some poor Xbox staffer.
So what gives? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe there really were some crossed lines of communications that didn’t get uncrossed until Xbox’s media people had already published those tweets. Maybe they had something to show that got pulled at the last second. Maybe, as one Xbox insider said earlier, Fable is still years away, and revving the hype engine this early would be seen as poor form.
The Fable reboot was first announced back in 2020 by Forza Horizon developers Playground Games. Since then, we've learned very little about what to expect in the reboot other than it'll have its own custom graphics engine and we'll probably get it before The Elder Scrolls 6, although at this point, we'll probably see the second coming before Elder Scrolls 6.
The recent GeForce Now leak generated a brief buzz after listing Fable as one of the upcoming titles to the platform, but Nvidia has since quashed that buzz saying it was all mere speculation.
And since Xbox isn’t saying anything, we’re back to waiting in the dark for Fable. Happy birthday, Fable.