Loading...
Loading...
Playground Games
February 21, 2026 at 09:32 AM
Initial featured article on Playground Games' history, key staff, studio expansion, and the transition from racing to RPG
Playground Games was founded in November 2009 in Leamington Spa, England. The three co-founders, Gavin Raeburn, Trevor Williams, and Ralph Fulton, all came from Codemasters, where they had worked on racing games. Racing games are what Playground Games was built to make, and it is what they did for their first decade.
Their first game was Forza Horizon, released in 2012. It was a critical and commercial success. They followed it with Forza Horizon 2 (2014), Forza Horizon 3 (2016), Forza Horizon 4 (2018), and Forza Horizon 5 (2021). Every entry in the series reviewed well. Forza Horizon 5 sold over 35 million copies.
Microsoft acquired Playground Games at E3 in June 2018, bringing the studio into Xbox Game Studios. The acquisition came alongside several other studio purchases Microsoft made that year (Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games). By that point, Playground Games was already building a second team for the Fable project.
All of Playground Games' offices are in Leamington Spa. The original studio handles Forza Horizon. Studio 2 opened in 2017 specifically for Fable development. Studio 3 opened in July 2024. The studio had 455 employees by the end of 2024.
Leamington Spa is a mid-sized town in Warwickshire, in the English Midlands. It has an unusually high concentration of game studios for its size, including Codemasters (before their acquisition by EA) and several other developers. Playground Games' roots at Codemasters are part of why the studio is there.
Several senior staff are leading the Fable project:
Ralph Fulton is General Manager and Game Director. He co-founded the studio and has been the public face of the Fable reboot in press interviews and presentations.
Will Kennedy is Chief Designer. He spent eight years at Rockstar Games working on Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online before joining Playground Games.
Craig Littler is Associate Game Director. He appeared during the Developer Direct presentation in January 2026.
Juan Fernandez de Simon joined from Ninja Theory, the studio behind Hellblade.
Pawel Kapala came from CD Projekt Red, where he worked on The Witcher 3's combat. He spent over a year designing and implementing combat systems for Fable.
Anna Megill joined Playground Games in December 2020 as Lead Writer. She had previously worked on Control at Remedy Entertainment. She was promoted to Narrative Lead in July 2022. In August 2023, she left the project and later moved to CD Projekt Red to work on the Cyberpunk 2077 follow-up.
Her replacement has not been publicly named. Given that she departed roughly midway through development, the narrative direction may have shifted after her departure, though Playground Games has not commented on this.
Eidos-Montreal, the studio behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, contributed roughly 100 developers to Fable starting around 2022. They brought experience with action-adventure combat systems from the Tomb Raider games. The contract between Eidos-Montreal and Playground Games ended in 2025. See the development history for the full timeline.
Fable runs on ForzaTech, the proprietary engine developed by Turn 10 Studios for the Forza racing franchise. Playground Games has been using ForzaTech since their first Forza Horizon game. Adapting a racing engine for an open-world RPG was a significant technical challenge, but it gave them a head start on open-world rendering, weather systems, and dynamic lighting. See development for more details on the engine.
Playground Games' entire history before Fable was racing games. This has led to skepticism in some quarters about whether a racing studio can make a good RPG. Fulton has addressed this head-on. The studio hired people with RPG experience specifically: Pawel Kapala from CDPR for combat, Will Kennedy from Rockstar for open-world design, Juan Fernandez de Simon from Ninja Theory for action gameplay.
The counter-argument is that Forza Horizon is already an open-world game with progression systems, world events, and freeform exploration. It is not a pure circuit racer. The studio has experience building large, interactive worlds. The question is whether that experience translates when the cars are replaced with swords and spells.
While Fable is in development, the Forza Horizon team continues its own work. Forza Horizon 6 is scheduled for May 2026, a few months before Fable's Autumn 2026 launch. The two projects run in parallel across different studios within the same company.
