One of the first gamebooks that I owned was "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" from the Fighting Fantasy series. This is a whole series of gamebooks, in which you role up a character, and play through the book using the rules. Each time you come to a decision point, you turn to a specific page to continue the story. And when combat comes, if you win (honesty comes into play here...) you continue the story from another page, if you lose, you get to turn to a page that tells of your untimely end.Besides the fantasy setting, I got "Star Strider" too, set in a science fiction world. While the rules may be slightly different, they still follow the same concept of rolling up a character and flipping to pages based on decisions.
The beauty about gamebooks is that they allow me to play out my role-playing dreams without the need for a dungeon master. In a time when my fellow classmates were more worried about school results and spending much of their childhood studying for examinations, it was hard for me to find amongst my friends someone to play RPGs with. So gamebooks, and computer games, had to suffice.
Official site of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks
Speaking of spending time with your friends, I remember I a particular year (1988) where there were myself and two other friends who got together at lunchtimes at school (when it was raining and, therefore, there was not much to do) and would read Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from time to time. I ended up writing my own as well and they would read them (and quite enjoyed them too). Nowadays, I have my own published (and free) gamebooks in the marketplace so all of that practice as a teen amounted to something significant in the end.
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Thanks for reading my blog. I myself am thinking of writing as a career, actually. But it seems to be a difficult road and I don't think I am ready to commit myself to that yet. But I won't be writing gamebooks, that's for sure. I am more towards non-fiction.
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