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I just sort of launched into it and I was about a third of the way in when I suddenly realised I was lost in one of Steve Jackson’s mazes.” “I should have planned it a little bit more than I did. We were so into interactivity, because it’s empowering, rather than passive reading, which is a linear experience Livingstone pulls out a sheet of paper with a map showing how he tries to keep things under control – various pathways lead to exciting-sounding endings like fire dragons, or worm dogs. The books each contain around 400 mini-sections, nearly all of which provide the reader with a choice, or a battle, meaning that the stories can quickly become sprawling affairs.
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It is packed full of terrifying demons and deadly monsters, and Higson has clearly had a whale of a time writing it – although, he admits, it was something of a challenge.
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Their only hope is YOU, who must “travel to the Invisible City with a smoke-oil antidote”. Higson’s title, The Gates of Death, asks its reader if “YOU are brave enough to face the all-powerful Queen of Darkness”? In Allansia, a “terrible plague has devastated” the land, “striking its people down with a sickness that turns them into hideous, demonic monsters”. “We started talking and got on OK, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a hoot if he wrote one of these with his twisted imagination, adding a new dimension to Fighting Fantasy?’” “It was a bit of a meeting of minds,” agrees Livingstone. “We went out for a couple of drinks,” says Higson, sitting in Scholastic’s London offices. Livingstone and Higson met years ago at a gaming event Higson, one of the creators and actors of The Fast Show, describes himself as “big into gaming”, and had long wanted to meet Livingstone, who with Jackson co-founded Games Workshop in 1975, and launched Dungeons & Dragons in Europe. It has poured money into the cult series, preparing a swanky new look for the first 12 books which brings them more in line with titles like Charlie Higson’s Young Bond books or Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider titles, and signing up Higson himself to write a new adventure to head up this week’s relaunch. He is here today because the major children’s publisher Scholastic believes the time has come for Fighting Fantasy to have its day again. ‘Penguin’s MD laughed so hard his head hit the desk’ … Steve Jackson, left, and Ian Livingstone in 1982. Thirteen years of being at that level was huge,” says Livingstone. “Video games were around, in force they’d had a pretty good run. By 1995, though, it had run out of steam, and publisher Puffin closed down the series.
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The series had an amazing run into the 90s – there were 59 books, with Jackson and Livingstone roping in co-authors to keep up with demand, and 20m copies sold around the world. Typically set in the fantasy world of Allansia, the books dispatch their reader on a quest armed only with a pencil and dice, battling foul creatures, deploying magical potions and making a continuous series of choices in an attempt to make it through the Deathtrap Dungeon, say, or City of Thieves. Once hugely popular, the Fighting Fantasy books – billed as “a thrilling fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero” – launched in 1982 with Livingstone and Jackson’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. You can’t call it cheating – it’s taking a sneak peek.” “You used to see it on public transport everywhere,” says Livingstone, who with Steve Jackson dreamed up Fighting Fantasy back in the early 80s. You’d insert a finger into various sections of your Fighting Fantasy adventure game book in order to be able to return if, say, your choice to drink the “sparkling red liquid” and turn to section 98 turned out to be a bad one, or if attacking the Mirror Demon “from another dimensional plane” proved fatal.
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Ian Livingstone calls it the “five-fingered bookmark”: that grip known to children of the 80s and 90s.