Livingstone Lives On

I was browsing through video gaming blog, Kotaku, and was surprised to find a post leading me to an interview with Games Workshop co-founder, Ian Livingstone.

I'm a big a fan of the Games Workshop properties as much as the next guy who didn't have the time, money and geek friends to really get into games like Warhammer. I was actually too busy sulking, playing Super Nintendo and sulking some more. Same story with my friends, who can add "trying to get laid" and "demolishing cars" as part of their daily agenda. No, what really perked me up about the Livingstone interview and put me into nostalgia mode was that fact that he and Steve Jackson started up the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks series, of which I still own many of the books. I have some fond (and some very maddening) memories of reading through these books in elementary and early highschool. I always thought of them as "Dungeons & dragons Uber-Lite" because of their simplistic rules and combat system. That didn't stop me from buying tons of them, of course, and for a kid that had a serious lack of friends to play with, it was better than nothing. This handy Wikipedia entry does a better job that explaining the FF phenomenon better than I ever could.

Anyway, I did some further "research" aka. goofing off at work, and discovered that the FF series survived until 1995, after which the series went on extended hiatus before Livingstone returned with a pair of new gamebooks in 2005. The series is now published by Wizard books , who have done a fine job of resurrecting these literary oddities for a new generation to enjoy. They've also reissued many of the classic FF books from the 80s, complete with new Wizard branding and cover art. The new covers are neat, but can't touch the originals released by Puffin. These new covers definitely look targeted to the Harry Potter set and lack a lot of the edge you would find with the old covers. Dare to compare? - old and new. Also compare this with this. Ain't no friggin' comparison, in this geek's humble opinion.

Ian Livingstone has largely abandoned the pen & paper/gamebooks industry for greener pastures and now works as Product Acquisition Director at Eidos, creators of the Lara Croft Tomb Raider games. That's probably for the best. I was tempted to check out the latest book the series, Eye of the Dragon, for old time's sake. Some of the fan response, however, leads me to suspect that not much as changed with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook in the last 20 years. That applies doubly to Livingstone as a gamebooks writer: I've always found his particular adventures (Deathtrap Dungoen, Trial of Champions, Forest of Doom) to be high on the challenge and unfairness and low on story and engaging prose. No, actually I do remember chucking a lot of his books against the wall during fighting fits of fantastical rage. He really did screw you over a lot in his books!

But hey, Steve Jackson has jumped back into the gamebooks game too, so maybe there's still an opportunity in the future where I'll get to relive my mispent youth and have some fun while I'm at it. Who am I kidding? I'm going to waste some half my afternoon browsing through the Wizard catalogue...