A Brief History

the-warlock-of-firetop-mountain-2a8tbzw, a photo by Michael Lyne on Flickr.

In 1980, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, co-founders of Games Workshop, decided to capitalise on the spreading enthusiasm for Dungeons & Dragons by creating a series of single-player gamebooks. Their first submission, The Magic Quest, was a short adventure intended to demonstrate the style of game that they sought to create. The Magic Quest took over a year to be accepted by Penguin Books, at which point the two creators devoted a further six months to expanding and improving upon their original design, resulting in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook. After several rewrites, the book was accepted and published in 1982 under Penguin's children's imprint, Puffin Books.


Following the success of the first book, Jackson and Livingstone began to produce further gamebooks, writing solo in order to make better use of their time. In 1983, Jackson produced the second Fighting Fantasy adventure, The Citadel of Chaos, and Livingstone the third, titled The Forest of Doom. Jackson then produced the first book in the series with a science-fiction setting, Starship Traveller, and Livingstone the first with an urban setting, City of Thieves, as well as Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King.


After this, the series expanded to include many other authors and enjoyed good sales throughout the eighties but experienced the same difficulties in the early nineties as the rest of the role-playing industry, brought on primarily by the increasing dominance of video games. The series was slated to conclude with book 50, Return to Firetop Mountain, but this book was unexpectedly successful, experiencing better sales than any recent gamebook and prompting an increase in demand for the Fighting Fantasy back catalogue. As a result, nine further books were written through to Curse of the Mummy. The series was discontinued after this point, although rumours still persisted of book 60 which was apparently called Bloodbones. This title didn't appear until the series was republished by Wizard Books in 2002.

TITANNICA (2011), Series History, Viewed 26th September 2011 <http://fightingfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy>