Reality Bytes

Plenty of video game designers cite sci-fi author Isaac Asimov as a childhood hero. But Peter Molyneux, who devoured I, Robot while a wee geek in Guildford, England, took the dream of artificial intelligence literally. "Asimov thought that if you can simulate a mind it would be alive," he says. "I thought we'd have robot slaves and lovers by now."

Today, Peter Molyneux has devoted his career to making virtual entertainment more human, and his new game Fable II is poised to become one of fall's biggest hits. With his Count Dracula hairline and caterpillar eyebrows, the 49-year-old Englishman has become the face of "god games" — titles that put the player in charge as a ruling deity of a civilization. He launched the genre with the 1989 computer game Populous, paving the way for popular series from Will Wright's The Sims to Sid Meier's Civilization. Role-playing games like Dungeon Keeper and Black & White came later for Molyneux, but it wasn't until 2004's Fable that he officially took his empire worldwide. A Medieval coming-of-age fantasy developed for Xbox and PC, it was one of the first games to allow players to make both "good" choices (say, helping a guardsman) and "bad" choices (ransacking a village) outside of pre-scripted sequences. Decisions even affected the character's physical appearance: turn evil, and you may grow horns. Those slippery virtues, which now epitomize the gameplay of everything from Grand Theft Auto to Spore, helped Fable sell a whopping 3.5 million copies worldwide.

Fable II, which takes places 500 years later, no longer measures good versus evil — it changes the whole spectrum. Defend an innocent child in a fight, and you might get horribly scarred, making the townspeople wary of interacting with you. Steal some liquor for the evil town drunk, and you can earn enough gold to buy a tavern and give the locals cheap drinks. "It's not like a novel or a film or anything else that exists in culture," Molyneux says. "Whomever you are, Fable II sculpts itself around you."

Depending on your behavior, the trusty mutt that follows you through the game can evolve from a retriever to a Rottweiler — though if the townspeople don't like you, they will kick your dog. Your character has a wide variety of romantic choices: male or female lovers, monogamy or polyamory, protected or unprotected sex —which, of course, leads to kids or no kids. (There's no hot pixel-on-pixel action — the game just fades to black.) But your decisions have an impact: when you choose not to wear a condom, you can spread STDs to your lovers, and your wife might not be there when you get back.