Same-sex marriage in the Fable games was no big deal for Peter Molyneux

We've been covering the Television Critics Association lately, but there's another big entertainment conference going on -- E3, where video game publishers hype their upcoming products to the press. There's not a lot of gay visibility to be found in video games, but that's been changing quite a bit recently. One notable game is Fable, a role playing game that aimed to allow the player's actions have an effect on the game's setting and on your character. If your character spent a lot of time in the sun, you'd develop a tan. If your character performs good deeds, townspeople are more likely to be friendly. Fable also had an open-ended romance system where you could potentially court any NPC, including ones the same gender as your avatar.

A sequel, Fable 2, is currently in development and the Gay Gamer boys were able to score an interview with the legendary Peter Molyneux who heads the studio that developed both Fable games. While Molyneux downplays the edginess of Fable same-sex romances, he does acknowledge how the game's publisher was resistant to the idea:

We said this is about having choice and consequence, and allowing people to choose which person they chat up is part of it. When you came to think about it, there’s a man, there’s a woman, there’s a boy, there’s a girl – same-sex marriage just came up naturally.

There was one interesting moment after I said you can get married to the same sex at a previous E3: There was a poll that year in Germany that asked what was everyone’s favorite feature in Fable 1, even though they hadn’t seen it yet and we hadn’t done an awful lot of work on the same-sex marriage. And the poll came out as same-sex stuff. It was absolutely amazing; it was fantastic!

And (Fable publisher) EA were hemming and hawing about same-sex stuff, because it is different and they’ve got to sail quite a safe line. Then they saw this poll, and that was really useful.

Considering Molyneux' history as an innovator, it's not surprising that he'd realize that an open-ended role playing game couldn't limit a player's character to the heterosexual default. (The Movies, another game from Molyneux' studio which puts you in charge of a movie studio, also avoids forcing heterosexual pairings.) Fable isn't the only game where players could control a gay character (Bully is a recent example, with The Sims and Fallout also coming to mind) but these moments of inclusion are still rare, making games like Fable 2 notable exceptions.