"Part story, part game, this is an adventure with a difference - one in which YOU become the hero!"
- The back of just about every FF Gamebook.
Fighting Fantasy - a personal reflection
Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were, quite possibly, one of the main influences on my childhood tastes and whatnot.
The FF world was just as rich as any Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, yet without the tremendous outlay necessary to engage in any such table-top RPG. With just a £3.99 paperback, two dice, a pencil, and an eraser, you could enter the fantasy world of Allansia for a few hours and lose yourself.
I was about eight years old when I came into possession of FF 54, named Legend of Zagor. Within hours, I was hooked into a world of orcs, trolls, Animated Armours, and the FF system's three attributes of Skill, Stamina, and Luck. Within that time also, I first read the immortal line, "Your adventure ends here," which was how the book told you that you'd snuffed it somehow or screwed the whole quest up irreparably. A few days later, I picked up FF 51, Island of the Undead by name, and my Fighting Fantasy addiction snowballed from there on in. In my mind, I defeated the almighty Night Dragon, stopped Karam Gruul, the Grand Inquisitor and his black arts, defeated the archmage Balthus Dire (who called me an "impudent peasant") and became the first person to beat Deathtrap Dungeon and win 10,000 gold pieces prize money.
So imagine my shock when, in 1997, after the 59th gamebook, Curse of the Mummy, I found out that the rumours of the 60th book were just that - rumours. The series was being discontinued. No longer would the green-spined paperbacks grace the shelves of WHSmiths. But, in all honesty, by then my interest had waned rather. I took it upon myself to try and track down as many of the books as I possibly could in second-hand places and charity shops. I was reasonably successful in this (including what I think is a first edition of the first gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) and I credit my singularly awful performance in my mock GCSEs back in early 2002 to this newly-rediscovered obsession.
Now, some of the FF gamebooks were really rather awful, that is true (cf. Star Strider) but there were some which were classics. Legend of Zagor was one such (it even spawned a rather nice but poor-selling board game) and another was the abstract yet delightful Creature of Havoc. In this one, the player is not the standard adventurer type (which was only referred to as "you" or "adventurer" and was always male, probably reflecting the FF readership) but some form of hideous monster thing which starts with little or no control over its faculties searching for answers. The difficulty of this book was rather high, yet not frustratingly so, and besides, the reptilian 10-year-old part of me just loved the idea of being transformed into a hugely powerful monster (which, incidentally, was never described) and smashing ten bells out of everything.
Incidentally, if you're interested, certain FF Gamebooks have, in fact, been reprinted with swankier cover art by a company named Wizard Books, at least in the UK. The US market wasn't quite as friendly to the FF Gamebook in the first place, so only books 1-21 were published there, and I doubt any of the reprints being extant over the pond.
Edit:
Cletus the Foetus says that the reprint FF books are, in fact, extant in the US and Canada.
Sources -
Various FF gamebooks
http://www.fightingfantasy.com
http://www.advancedfightingfantasy.com