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Choice is a powerful thing. It's what differentiates video games from other mediums of entertainment. Outside of watching alternative endings on DVD, the outcome of a movie cannot be influenced by the viewer; likewise, a great album's track listing can be randomised, but the songs remain the same. In games, the player is able to directly impact the world with their own actions. This liberating and intoxicating sense of involvement was also central to the appeal of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy line of interactive gamebooks, first established in 1982 - ironically, a time when the video game industry appeared to be tiptoeing dangerously close to oblivion.The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks followed a non-linear format; you started at the beginning and ended at the end, but in between you would flit backwards and forwards through the pages, picking choices at the conclusion of each passage which could either take you to glory (turn to 246) or spell certain doom (your adventure ends here). Confrontation was also inevitable, and was decided by throwing dice to resolve combat with the many monsters, aliens and other hostile creatures you faced throughout the 59 original books which were published between 1982 and 1995. Around 15 million copies were sold during that period of time - a figure that creators Jackson and Livingstone could never have possibly expected when they pitched the concept to publisher Penguin in the early 80s.
"Ian and I started Games Workshop in 1975," explains Jackson. "At the time it was an amateur operation, run from a flat in Shepherd's Bush. We published a games fanzine by the name of 'Owl & Weasel', sold obscure games by mail order and manufactured classic wooden games like Backgammon and Go - hence the name 'Games Workshop'. But then we discovered Dungeons & Dragons and very quickly everything switched over to role-playing games. We promoted the new hobby and obtained exclusive European rights to D&D and many other RPGs. We published White Dwarf magazine, established a shop and ran the Games Day convention. It was at one of these conventions in 1980 that we met Geraldine Cooke, an editor at Penguin Books. We managed to persuade her to consider publishing a book based on the role-playing hobby."
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