Fighting Fantasy
It’s 35 years since Fighting Fantasy took us to Firetop Mountain. Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson tell Stephen Jewell how they came to create the interactive classic…
W ith the current proliferation of online multi-players, and high-definition video, it’s hard to envisage a time when a roleplaying game could be decided on the roll of a dice and a turn of a page. With its interactive narrative, ian livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy allowed the reader to determine the outcome of the story. launching with
The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain in 1982, it has now sold more than 20 million copies. not bad for an operation that started out as a mail order business in the early 1970s based in the pair’s Shepherds Bush flat.
“We were both big gamers, so we thought it would be good to turn our hobby of playing games into a career,” recalls livingstone, who first met Jackson when they were pupils at altrincham Grammar School in the 1960s. “We published a magazine called Owl And Weasel, which was sent out to everybody we knew in games, and one of the people who received it was Gary Gygax. he wrote back and said, ‘i love your magazine, here’s this new game i’ve invented, it’s called Dungeons And Dragons.’’’
after playing – and also becoming obsessed with – Dungeons And Dragons, livingstone and Jackson signed a three-year deal to distribute the game in europe. “that’s how Games Workshop first got off to the races,” says Jackson, referring to the leading games company that he and livingstone founded with another old school friend, John peake, in 1975.
Holding their first Games Day in 1975, it was at the gaming convention’s 1980 event that livingstone and Jackson met penguin Books editor Geraldine cooke. With Jackson admitting that, “we were very lucky to come across her,” cooke originally
It’s up to the reader to make choices, which made it a lot more immersive
commissioned the pair to write a relatively straightforward “how-to”-style manual about how roleplaying games work. however, they instead concluded that it would be a lot more fun to demonstrate how it actually works.
“a lot of people didn’t really understand the concept of roleplaying, so we thought that a good way to get over that was to do a little mini-adventure,” says Jackson. “as we started writing it and it all came together, it was pretty obvious that this was a lot more interesting than a dry textbook, and that’s how Fighting Fantasy came about.”
With its cover tagline proclaiming “You are the hero!”, Fighting Fantasy adopted a story structure similar to american author edward packard’s “choose Your own adventure” format, but with some crucial improvements. “choose Your own adventure was a branching narrative, but in a very limited way, while Fighting Fantasy gave you lots of choice and added a gaming element,” reasons livingstone. “it was a branching narrative with a gaming system attached to it, as it’s up to the reader to make the choices and to fight the creatures. You’d get attributes of skill, stamina and luck, which would change during the adventure, so your stamina and skill would go up and down and you’d test your luck against various random events, so it was much more immersive because of that.”
originally titled The Magic Quest, livingstone and Jackson initially wrote their individual