I’ve had a chance recently to re-discover my old collection of gamebooks and it got me thinking about which ones were my favourites and what I enjoyed reading the most.

The main two groups of books that I played the most and the ones that I returned to time and again were the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series.  However there were others that I enjoyed playing too of which I will come to later on in this post.

First up was the Fighting Fantasy books which started this whole obsession with gamebooks for me.  To some the Fighting Fantasy were the original gamebooks, created by Games Workshop founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the first book in the series ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain‘ was first published in 1982.

Although I purchased most of the 59 books that were published in its first run, it was the Steve Jackson spinoff books the ‘Sorcery!‘ series that i enjoyed the most.  I liked the fact that the four books became one epic story to find and return the Crown of Kings to your home of Analand.  Also instead of playing the role of a warrior you got to play as a wizard and having to learn a whole bunch of magic spells before playing the first book added an exciting edge to the game.

The Lone Wolf series was another favourite of mine, created by Joe Dever the brilliant series of books plotted the exciting adventures of the last remaining Kai Warrior Lone Wolf.  The setting of Magnamund in the books was incredibly well realised and the adventures took Lone Wolf to many different environments battling the evil Darklords of Helgedad.

The series ran for 28 books before the publishers pulled the plug in the late 90’s but have recently been resurrected online by the brilliant Project Aon website.  This site with the approval of Dever has been publishing online the full set of Lone Wolf books up to number 28 as well as the spin-off books that were written.  It is a fantastic resource to everything Lone Wolf related and is well worth checking out.

As well as the online editions the books have also been re-printed as special collector edition hardbacks.  The original title ‘Flight from the Dark’ was re-written by Dever and has greatly expanded the original story.  Joe Dever has also announced that he plans to complete the final four books in the series, book 29 should be due for release at the end of this year.

Although these books formed the majority of my collection there were other series that I really enjoyed playing too.  I loved the humour of J H Brennan’s Grailquest books set in Arthurian Britain and playing the futuristic time-travelling special agent in Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson’s Falcon series.  Being a child of the 80’s anything to do with ninjas was very cool and the Way of the Tiger series also by Smith and Thomson was another favourite of mine.

I am looking forward to playing through these books once more, some of these I haven’t read in thirty years and it is going to be fun re-discovering these again.  I would hopefully like to document some of my experiences of in this blog.  It would be great to know what some of your favourite books are so please feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading!