Fighting Fantasy - 30 Years Old

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly thirty years since I picked up my first ever Fighting Fantasy gamebook, No. 2 'The Citadel of Chaos', and played it to death over a whole weekend. It wasn't just my introduction to gamebooks but to the gaming hobby as a whole and from there I delved into Dungeons & Dragons and never looked back.

I've still got the book, the edition is the one you see here on the left. Mine is in much worse condition - bent covers, yellowed pages, dirty thumb marks, faded spine. I got a lot of use out of that book before I bought another one, and before I knew it I'd started collecting them. Titan was a great world to game in and I introduced a lot of people to the RPG hobby using the Fighting Fantasy rules and the Port Blacksand setting.

The mind boggles - that's more than a quarter of a century ago since I bought it. It's great to see the gamebooks continuing with their official website and the fan-made material such as Fighting Fantazine. A lot of people still get a lot of fun out of it and for me it has a very special place in my heart. Even after all these years I'd still like to run a one-off Fighting Fantasy roleplaying session, using the rules as written in the book 'Fighting Fantasy - The Introductory Roleplaying Game'. You know, the one with the man-tiger exploding out of the die on the cover.

30 years of Fighting Fantasy. Wow. That means that next year I'll have been in the hobby for 30 years, too. That simply doesn't bear thinking about.