What’s better than going back and playing your favourite retro games? Arguably, the answer to that is nothing, but I think discovering demakes of classic titles is up there and is something I’ve really got into over the years. The Halo: Combat Devolved demake is brilliant and I can’t wait for more levels to arrive, but until they do, I’ve now got a GBC demake of one of my other favourite Xbox games to tackle.
James Grice, aka James222, has created a Fable Game Boy Color demake to celebrate 20 years of Big Blue Box & Lionhead’s seminal Xbox title. What’s more impressive is that this is Grice’s first GB Studio project, a game that he made in just four days. Obviously, he hasn’t managed to do the whole game in four days – that would have been a superhuman feat! Instead, players can experience the tasks set around Oakvale at the beginning of the game in 8-bit brilliance, seeing all of the action from a top-down viewpoint and taking us straight back to the 90s.
I’ve played the port this morning for a little bit before writing this article and it’s fascinating. It’s odd to have Albion’s hero walking around as though he’s in a Pokémon game rather than running around in search of gold coins, but it definitely works. I love the cutscenes too, complete with lines delivered by actual voice actors and the chiptune versions of the soundtrack. It’s a definite nostalgic kickback to the days of walking around with a GBC in my pocket as a kid but on a game that I wouldn’t discover till I was 14. Wow… that’s made me feel old again – you’d think I’d get used to this feeling, but the fact that Fable is 20 years old now still gets me!
As documented over on Games Radar, Grice played a lot of Fable when he was younger and would often dream about what it would be like if it came out on earlier hardware. “I had some free time so I spent the last 4 days making my first Gameboy game,” Grice wrote on Reddit,“what better game to make than to try to reimagine on the hardware than Fable for its 20th anniversary!”
While there’s currently only one level, Grice is open to making more if there’s enough interest, covering more key areas of the game rather than just doing a complete 8-bit scene-for-scene copy. He’s open to constructive feedback and opinions about where the game should go next, so if you want to see more, head to his Itch page and download what he’s made so far for yourself and give some feedback!
