Fable Studio

Fable Studio
Information
Industry	Virtual reality, interactive storytelling, generative artificial intelligence
Founded	2017 (public launch 18 January 2018)
Founder	Edward Saatchi, Pete Billington
Headquarters	Mission District, San Francisco, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Edward Saatchi (CEO)
Products	Wolves in the Walls, Lucy (virtual being), Showrunner
Website	https://www.showrunnerstudio.com

Fable Studio is an American entertainment technology company in San Francisco that was formed by veterans of Oculus Story Studio, the virtual reality film unit that Oculus VR closed in 2017. Co-founded by Edward Saatchi and Pete Billington, it launched publicly in January 2018 with a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's children's book The Wolves in the Walls, a project that had begun at Oculus Story Studio. The project won the 2019 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media and, as Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls, a Peabody Award in 2022.

In January 2019 the company moved its focus away from VR films toward interactive AI characters it called "virtual beings", starting with Lucy, the eight-year-old girl at the center of Wolves in the Walls. Its later work is in generative AI rather than VR: a multi-agent simulation project, the SHOW-1 research model, and Showrunner, an AI service for making animated episodes that opened to the public in July 2025.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Company history, Wolves in the Walls release details, awards, virtual-beings and Showrunner facts, and current status checked against THR, TechCrunch, Engadget, UploadVR, GamesBeat, Variety, TheWrap, the Peabody listing, the Meta Quest store and Fable's own site. About review dates.

History

Formation after Oculus Story Studio

After Oculus announced in spring 2017 that it would shut down Oculus Story Studio, a group of the studio's alumni planned a new company to keep working on immersive, interactive stories. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fable Studio "quietly formed" about six months before it went public on 18 January 2018. Saatchi had co-founded Oculus Story Studio in 2014 and produced its early projects, including Henry, Lost and Dear Angelica; Billington had worked at DreamWorks Animation before joining Story Studio. Jessica Shamash, a Pixar veteran who had been a producer on Wolves in the Walls, was named head of creative production.

Wolves in the Walls had started as an Oculus Story Studio project in 2015. When Story Studio closed, Facebook-owned Oculus agreed to fund the project, which let Fable finish its first chapter and submit it to the Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program. The chapter, which ran under 10 minutes, premiered at Sundance on 19 January 2018. At launch the company had fewer than 20 employees and an office in San Francisco's Mission District.

Fable described the four other projects on its launch slate as "made in VR": drawn or animated with VR programs such as Quill, the painting and animation application created during the development of Oculus Story Studio's Dear Angelica. UploadVR also named Tilt Brush and Blocks among the in-VR tools, and noted that Wolves in the Walls itself was not made in VR because its development had begun before Quill was ready. Saatchi told The Hollywood Reporter that a lean team and the made-in-VR approach had brought budgets down to "the low six figures or even high five figures". The company planned to charge 1 US dollar for every 10 minutes of content, at a time when many VR stories were free, and said its experiences would come to several headsets. TechCrunch reported that Saatchi was aiming for Fable to break even in 2018.

Pivot to virtual beings

At Sundance in January 2019, Fable relaunched as a company built around virtual beings, which The Hollywood Reporter described as interactive AI characters that viewers can build a two-way relationship with. Saatchi told Engadget, "Just seeing the industry, I think VR movies are not the future. I think AI is the next art form we need to explore." Engadget reported that Fable would hire AI engineers through 2019 while scaling back VR production, and that it was dropping "Studios" from its name. He told GamesBeat that the new team was "50 percent immersive storytelling and 50 percent machine learning".

The first virtual beings project was Whispers in the Night, in which participants enter a memory shared with Lucy. The new version of Lucy debuted publicly at Sundance 2019 ahead of the experience's planned summer premiere. In November 2020 UploadVR still described Whispers in the Night as a follow-up Fable was working on. At Sundance Fable also showed a three-minute sequence from the second chapter of Wolves in the Walls and announced that actor Jeffrey Wright had joined the cast as Lucy's father. In July 2019 Saatchi, as Fable's CEO, organized the first Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco, where he announced a grant program.

Lucy continued outside VR. In November 2020, after Wolves in the Walls reached Oculus Quest, Fable released a limited number of sign-ups for video calls with her. According to UploadVR, Fable said the technology behind Lucy included GPT-3, procedural animation, synthetic speech and speech-to-text, and was meant to include an "AI memory" so that she could remember and grow with the user. At the online Sundance festival in January 2021, Lucy took part in Zoom sessions and presented a film. GamesBeat reported that Fable was creating more virtual beings, with a target of 16 in total.

Generative AI and Showrunner

By 2023 Fable, still in San Francisco, was running a project called The Simulation. In July 2023 it presented SHOW-1, a system that generates TV episodes covering writing, direction, voicing, animation and editing. As demonstrations it released AI-generated episodes in the style of South Park; Fable said it would not release SHOW-1 commercially. The accompanying research paper, "To Infinity and Beyond: SHOW-1 and Showrunner Agents in Multi-Agent Simulations", lists Philipp Maas, Frank Carey, Chris Wheeler, Edward Saatchi, Pete Billington and Jessica Yaffa Shamash as authors. It describes how large language models, custom diffusion models and a multi-agent simulation are combined to produce episodic content. Variety later reported that the South Park episodes had been made without the permission of that show's creators and had received more than 80 million views.

On 30 May 2024 Fable announced Showrunner, which Saatchi called a "Netflix of AI", where users type prompts to generate TV episodes. It opened its alpha test to users from a waitlist that GamesBeat put at 50,000 people, and announced ten shows, including Exit Valley and Ikiru Shinu. On 30 July 2025 the service opened to the public after several months of closed alpha testing with 10,000 users. It runs on Fable's proprietary SHOW-2 model. Amazon's Alexa Fund invested an undisclosed amount, joining earlier investors Day One Ventures, 8VC and Greycroft. At that time Fable had 15 employees and was based in San Francisco's Mission District. TheWrap reported that Fable planned to use the funding to hire more staff and to expand its team in Los Angeles. As of October 2026, Fable's former website redirects to the Showrunner site, which carries a 2026 Fable Studio copyright notice. The site also hosts a memorial page for co-founder Pete Billington, who has died; the page does not give a date.

Products

Title	Year	Type	Notes
Wolves in the Walls	2018-2019	VR experience	Three chapters; chapter 1 premiered at Sundance in January 2018, chapter 2 (It's All Over, combined with chapter 1) at Tribeca in April 2019, chapter 3 (They're Everywhere!) released November 2019; on Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest
Whispers in the Night	2019 (announced)	Virtual being experience	Conversation with Lucy set in a shared memory; announced for summer 2019, still described as in development in November 2020
Lucy	2019 onward	Virtual being	AI character from Wolves in the Walls; offered limited video calls by November 2020 using GPT-3
SHOW-1	2023	Research model	Generates full TV episodes; demonstrated with South Park-style episodes; not released commercially
Showrunner	2024 (announced), 2025 (public launch)	AI episode creation service	Powered by SHOW-2; free to watch, with planned paid credits for creators

XR work

Wolves in the Walls

Wolves in the Walls adapts the illustrated book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The viewer plays an imaginary friend to Lucy, an eight-year-old girl who believes wolves are living inside the walls of her family's house. Billington directed it, and he and Jessica Shamash created it together. Lucy can hand objects to the viewer and remember what the viewer does, a design Fable built on for its later virtual beings. Saatchi told UploadVR in 2019 that Quill had been used for visual development and for a scene with a painted look meant to resemble a therapy drawing. Production credits on the Peabody listing include Fable Studio, Third Rail Projects, Sound+Design and Story Studio & Experiences, with Saatchi and Saschka Unseld among the executive producers. Cadence Goblirsch voices Lucy.

The chapters were released episodically in 2019 through the Oculus Store, and the third and final chapter, They're Everywhere!, came out in November 2019. All three run about 40 minutes in total. The experience was released on the Oculus Rift in 2019, where UploadVR described it as free in August 2019, and was available on Oculus Quest by late November 2020. The current Meta Quest Store listing sells it for 8.99 US dollars and describes gameplay in which the player takes photographs as proof, searches for clues with a magnifying glass and defends Lucy's pig puppet.

Awards

At the 2019 Primetime Emmy Awards, Wolves in the Walls won Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media, with the award credited to Pete Billington, Jessica Yaffa Shamash, Edward Saatchi, Fable Studio and Facebook. As Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls, it won a Peabody Award in the Interactive category in 2022. The judges cited how the creators had extended Lucy's story across platforms with artificial intelligence and machine learning so that she could communicate with audiences in real time.

See also

• Oculus Story Studio
• Quill
• Cinematic VR
• Within