When Dice Were Made of Flint #9

Fighting Fantasy wasn’t the first gamebook series. By the time The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published in August of 1982, games like Tunnels & Trolls and the Fantasy Trip had been using a very similar format for solo adventures for more than five years. The reason that Fighting Fantasy started a worldwide craze that threatened to swallow the 80s wasn’t the format: it was market penetration.

The earlier titles had been published by games publishers and distributed through hobby game shops, which were few and far between at that time. Fighting Fantasy was published by children’s book giant Puffin Books (a division of Penguin) and reached into bookshops and newsagents the length and breadth of the land. If a shop sold books at all, it was a good bet that at least a few Fighting Fantasy titles would be on their shelves.

By early 1985, a new Fighting Fantasy book was appearing every couple of months, and every other children’s publisher was jumping on the bandwagon. Titles included Lone Wolf, GrailQuest, Demonspawn, Way of the Tiger, and Choose Your Own Adventure. The last was a systemless series that took pride in the number of available outcomes in each title. There were several other series in this rules-free sub-genre, including one featuring Enid Blyton’s plucky kid detectives, The Famous Five.

As I mentioned in an earlier column, the magazine trade was booming. Puffin took advantage of that fact, publishing the first five issues of Warlock through Penguin Magazines before handing the title off to Games Workshop, with Fighting Fantasy creators (and Games Workshop co-founders) Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson remaining as editors-in-chief. They were household names by this time. Each issue contained an adventure – half the size of a Fighting Fantasy book at 200 paragraphs – and a variety of articles, including many for Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Roleplaying Game, which was clearly an on-ramp to funnel gamebook readers toward full tabletop roleplaying games.

Puffin also published two large-format books supporting the series. Out of the Pit took its title from the magazine’s new-monsters section, while Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World was a setting sourcebook whose depth rivaled anything then published for Dungeons & Dragons or other “full” roleplaying games. Both were edited by Marc Gascoigne, who also edited Warlock magazine for Games Workshop.

Warlock was not the only gamebook-themed magazine. Proteus had lower production values but published 20 issues to Warlock’s 12. Dice Man, from the publishers of the popular and influential comic 2000AD, featured gamebook-style adventures in comic-book format, starring Judge Dredd, Sláine, Rogue Trooper, and others alongside a memorable political satire where the player was U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf are still going in various formats under various publishers, but the gamebook hobby today is far smaller than it was in its 1980s heyday. Still, gamebooks were an important bridge between the free-form roleplaying hobby of the early days and the branching-narrative computer games that were also in their infancy back then.