Fable · Xbox · 2004 · Preceded by: Black & White (spiritually)
Peter Molyneux promised an acorn you could knock from a tree and watch grow. There was no acorn. There was no tree. He apologised within weeks of release, and never escaped it.
Fable arrived in 2004 as a genuinely good action role-playing game — a compact, charming, well-made Xbox RPG that reviewed decently and sold well. It is remembered as one of the great disappointments in the medium anyway, and the reason has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with what its designer said about it beforehand. In the years of interviews leading up to release, Peter Molyneux described a game of extraordinary ambition. You would have children. The game would span your hero's entire lifetime. Other heroes would take quests from citizens independently, and if you were too slow to complete a job, a rival AI hero might finish it first and take the credit and reward. And — the promise that outlived all the others — you would be able to knock an acorn from a tree and, over the course of the game, watch a sapling grow in its place. None of it was in the game. In October 2004, days after release, Molyneux posted an apology on Lionhead's message boards: "If I have mentioned any feature in the past which, for whatever reason, didn't make it as I described into Fable, I apologise." He maintained that every feature he had described had genuinely been in development, but that not all of them made it. He later reflected that the acorn line alone "changed people's perceptions of me" — and it did. He became, permanently, the man who promised acorns that did not grow into trees.
Fable is the cleanest case study in the medium of a game destroyed by its own marketing, and the mechanism is worth being precise about. Molyneux was not lying, in the ordinary sense. He was describing features that his studio was genuinely attempting, in the enthusiastic present tense, to journalists who reported them as facts about a forthcoming product. The features then failed, as most ambitious features do — and by then they had been printed in magazines for years as things the game would contain.
The result is that Fable shipped into an audience holding a mental model of a game nobody had built. Every player who loaded it up was, in effect, comparing it to a superior imaginary version assembled from press coverage. A perfectly good RPG cannot survive that comparison, because the imaginary game has no bugs, no scope constraints and no shipping date.
Of all the promises, the acorn is the one that stuck, and its persistence is instructive. It is not the most significant feature Molyneux described — rival heroes stealing your quests would have been a far more radical addition — but it is the most vivid. It is concrete, tiny, easy to picture, and entirely checkable: either you can knock the acorn off the tree or you cannot.
That is what made it lethal. Grand claims about emergent systems are hard to falsify; a claim about an acorn is falsified the first time a player walks up to a tree. Molyneux later said the single line changed how people saw him forever, and he was right — the acorn became shorthand for an entire mode of games marketing, and for the rest of his career every promise he made was measured against it.