When games consoles were bookshelves: celebrating 35 years of Fighting Fantasy books

By Gerald Lynch

My first games console was a bookshelf. Long before I felt the call of Skyrim’s icy tundras, tackled the complex dungeons of Zelda or battled the undead foes of Dark Souls, I was exploring vast fantasy worlds through the pages of books.

The Fighting Fantasy novel series had it all – epic quests, hideous monsters and mysterious lands to visit. But they had a killer trick up their sleeves, too: they were interactive.

Armed with a pair of dice, a pencil, eraser and a character sheet, you’d create a hero to guide through the adventure laid out on the page before you. As you’d read along, you’d be presented with choices – should you take the left turn in the path, and face perhaps a marauding ogre head on? Or take the cowards option and sneak away by the right path?

For the first choice, you’d turn to, say, page 301, while for the second you’d turn to page 21, for instance, at which point each the narrative would branch off and the adventure would become all your own.

First published at a time when video games were still charmingly primitive, they were like nothing else – fully realised fantasy, sci-fi …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Gaming