“Also, there was no form of portable gaming, so when I left the house there was no way of indulging in my passion.” “I loved playing computer games on my ZX Spectrum 48k and especially loved adventure games, but back then the games were really quite limited,” Neil remembers. Now he’s bringing them to a whole new platform, so others can also have the privilege. Rennison, like many others, enjoyed gamebooks as a child. Rennison’s mobile game studio, Tin Man Games, has worked on its own original gamebook productions as well as with the Fighting Fantasy license.
Neil Rennison is one of the people most responsible for this rebirth. Books that seemed destined to become little more than historical curios-my personal introduction to the Fighting Fantasy series was finding a stack of them in a charity shop, priced at 25 pence each-have traded their fusty, yellowed pages for the swanky modern screens of our iPads.
FIGHTING FANTASY BOOKS LOT ANDROID
It’s curious, then, that the gamebook format should be enjoying such a renaissance in recent years, reappearing in our tech-obsessed world as apps for our iPads and Android tablets. Words were the past, polygons were the future, and everyone got so caught up in the race for progress that they temporarily forgot all the fun they’d had with gamebooks. We’re sure that format sounds familiar even to the newer generation of RPG players out there.īut as you’d expect, the market for gamebooks began to collapse as videogame technology improved so rapidly. The player was always the hero and, more often than not, their decisions alone would dictate not only their own fate, but the fate of everyone else in the universe. The writing was geared toward the reader, placing them at the centre of richly detailed fantasy landscapes. At a time when videogames were so basic, not to mention access to the new-fangled hardware being limited, Fighting Fantasy offered an interactive story “in which YOU become the hero!”-a claim that adorned every cover, and a very enticing one indeed. It’s not hard to see why they were so popular. These books were essentially wordy single-player RPGs for bookish kids and adults alike. Spearheaded by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy series, it became a burgeoning form comprising a number of different works from authors and publishers all over the world. If you’re a child of the 1980s you’re probably familiar with the notion of gamebooks.