Archive for the ‘Gamebooks’ Category

Japanese Gamebooks

Thursday, June 15th, 2017

At the Mandarake rare bookstore in Nakano mall, I happened to notice the attendant (a stunning Italian lass cosplaying as Sailor Moon) packaging some sort of Japanese RPG rules book for sale. I asked if they had any others – daring to think I may finally, after six trips to Japan, find a gamebook – and she directed me to the glass case outside. There I saw this:

And this:

And this:

And more, including some AD&D books and quite a few Japan-specific titles. Almost all in fantastic condition but also sporting fantastic price tags. As a rule of thumb, estimate ยฅ100 at about $1.

I would have needed over $1000 to buy all the Fighting Fantasy titles alone…

Now it’s hard to leave me speechless these days, but this sight did. I’ve been looking over and over again every time we’ve visited Japan for gamebooks and never ever seen a single one before. My mind was blown; I was overcome. But it was early days in the trip, which means I wasn’t yet at the point I was spending without reason. So I only bought one item – the cheapest one – this:

FF Gamebook 19, Demons Of The Deep. I bought it when it was first released in 1986 but at the time wouldn’t have known (or cared!) that it was also released in Japan.

Here’s an interior shot:

You can see there’s little trace of western influence here, with vertical text and using Japanese numbers! The presentation is beautiful though, with very sharp printing and perfect reproduction of the art.

The book comes with a separate adventure sheet with rules on the back:

And includes a nice section at the end detailing the other available gamebooks:

It’s noticeable smaller (and thinner) than the western editions too. Here it is compared to my UK and US imprints:

I’m enormously happy to finally own a non-English FF book, and something about it being as exotic as in Japanese makes it quite special.

And yet I do regret not buying more. I wasn’t going to spend over $300 for Sky Lord, but why didn’t I buy at least Out Of The Pit? Silly me!

Now I move toward the next challenge: a non-English Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Given it was published in over 20 languages that shouldn’t be too difficult. Should it?

Thanks Mr Dever

Thursday, December 1st, 2016

Most of you probably haven’t heard of Joe Dever, even though he was an author of over 50 books that sold more than 10 million copies combined in many languages. As the owner of more than 50 of his books (in several imprints), it was sad to hear that he passed away the other day at the age of 60.

IMG_2344

Starting in 1984 Joe Dever was the creator and sole author of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks that continued for 29 installments and spun off into other gamebook series, novels, computer games, audio books, role-playing games and even a phone-based adventure game. It’s still going strong (more or less) with iOS games, reprints of the books and even a new installment which was released a few months ago. Lone Wolf was every bit as important as the Fighting Fantasy series, and is as much-loved today by it’s legions of fans.

As a 12-year old already caught up in gamebook mania via the Fighting Fantasy series, I ate up the Lone Wolf books when they were first released. Unlike the FF books, they were all set in the same world and told a continuing narrative where you played the same character through each book. You could even use your old character sheet, which was remarkable in those days! The world of Lone Wolf, inhabited by the jedi-like Kai Lords (and more powerful Magnakai) and the evil Daaklords was exotic and dangerous and fascinating and illustrated by the wonderful art of Gary Chalk.

lonewolf

In those days I had no way of knowing when (or if!) a new book in the series would ever come out so it was a real treat when I went to the bookstore and found the latest one. I must have played through at least ten in the series before I grew out of them (as a youth at least). As an adult, when I fell back into gamebooks about a decade ago, it wasn’t long before I’d acquired most of the low-number Lone Wolf books. My collection grew to include a mishmash of USA, UK and Australian imprints and would soon expand to include Dever’s other gamebooks (Combat Command, Grey Star and the Mad-Max Freeway Warrior) as well as Long Wolf novels and the (long sought-after by myself) The Magnamund Companion Lone Wolf Atlas. All of these are now important parts of my collection.

IMG_2342

And yet to this day even in my expansive and encyclopedic gamebook collection there are a few books that remain elusive. And many of them are from the Lone Wolf series. I have books 1 through 20 (in some cases, multiple versions of each) and then book 25. This leaves 9 books out there to be one day found, with evocative titles like The Hunger Of Sejanoz and Vampirium. These books had small print runs, are quite rare, and very expensive (hundreds of dollars for some). One day I may own them.

IMG_2345

I’ve read every Dever book I own and enjoyed them all. The gamebooks in particular are among the best written, and the quality of the Lone Wolf novels was a great surprise (since my expectations were influenced by the for-kids FF novels). The Lone Wolf books though are the keystones of his legacy, and I’m just one of millions that have enjoyed them now for over thirty years. Apparently Mr Dever was still writing new installments up until he fell ill. Even though those books will never be read, I believe the many works he left behind will keep readers entertained for many years to come.

Con Swag

Tuesday, October 20th, 2015

We bought a bunch of stuff at the con. Here’s a selection:

IMG_2590

That’s issue 1 of a magazine that ran for only 3 issues back in 1967. It’s basically a girls romance comic with some ‘true love advice’ and articles about dreamy male celebrities of the era. Some guy was selling scads of all three issues of this, probably found in an abandoned warehouse.

IMG_2592

KLS bought this disapproving cat plush. I think it’s disapproval is due to it being the smallest and cheapest plush we bought at the con ๐Ÿ™‚

IMG_2582 IMG_2584

I got these 4 old D&D Modules for a song. To my surprise, one of them is a single-player version that uses invisible ink to hide the events! Only two squares in the entire book have been inked in. I wonder if the remaining ink still works?

IMG_2586

Autographed Chris Achilleos art, now framed and on my wall. The guy I bought this from (I also got an Achilleos poster) knows the artist, and was telling me how friendly and gracious he is. He said he had another print somewhere in his voluminous stand, and I was hopeful for some FF or DW art, but alas he couldn’t find it ๐Ÿ™

IMG_2595

More art, this time a lenticular Miku poster. See how her blue matches the colour of my study wall! We bought a lot of art at the con, from posters to prints to autographed works. Much of it is already framed and up on our walls (or KLS’s office wall).

IMG_2578

Speaking of Miku, here’s the con-exclusive Nendroid they were selling at the Good Smile booth. It’s super cute, and somehow ended up leaving the con with me ๐Ÿ˜‰

IMG_2574

KLS purchased this tiny ‘sea bunny’ resin figure direct from the artist.ย  It is based on the recently discovered ‘sea bunny’ species of nudibranch slug, which looks like this:

slug

So cute! We stumbled upon this fortuitously, since the artist was only there for an hour and only selling 25 of them. I guess he’s somewhat famous since the person in front of us was very excited and had some of his other stuff for him to autograph. He was friendly and seemed genuinely happy people were buying his stuff.

Last but not least, could this be the find of the show:

IMG_2579

All 36 packs, unopened! A world of spice and worms and Gom Jabbers and Kwisatz Haderachs just waiting to be uncovered! Plus there are stickers too. Even though they are already 31 years old I’ll let them age a bit before eagerly ripping into all of them…

…unless you want a pack for your very own self? If so, let me know in the comments.

Crowns of The Collection

Thursday, August 27th, 2015

I was sent these two postcards recently:

IMG_1436

OMG, those are gamebook covers?! Let’s see what’s on the back:

IMG_1437

HOLY MOSES! Those are nothing less than the actual signatures of the creators of FF gamebooks, Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson! These are holy grails to a gamebook collector such as myself ๐Ÿ™‚

So where did they come from? Well some months ago on twitter the company Tin Man Games (who makes app versions of gamebooks) started posting pictures of their collection. I jokingly suggested it needed organization, and this led to a conversation between me and them which led to them learning about my collection, being amazed by my collection, and saying they wanted to ‘send me something small for my collection’. Little did I know the magnitude of this ‘small’ thing they wanted to send me!

Here the autographs are with the books from pictures on the cards:

IMG_1439

IMG_1440

I think I have a fourth imprint of House Of Hell as well. But I didn’t want to show off ๐Ÿ˜‰

The Gamebook History Post

Sunday, February 1st, 2015

I’ve read a few blog posts about gamebook collecting in recent months, and thought it was time to make my own.

What’s a gamebook? It’s a solo RPG adventure in book form. Tradaitionally gamebooks are distinct from ‘choose your own adventures’ in that they have some sort of system associated with them (usually keeping track of statistics and items, or rolling dice), but strict classification isn’t easy to do and the lines blur here and then with particular books.

While not the very first gamebook, the genre can be traced back to this particular book, which came out way back in 1982:

figfan01o

I was 10 at the time, and bought my first book – the exact version picture above – via the scholastic book club at school. It changed my life!

All of a sudden I didn’t just have to read about fantasy adventures involving orcs and elves and demons and dragons, I could play them as well! I was too young at the time to know that the authors were entrenched in interests I would eventually adopt myself (not the least being Dungeons & Dragons), and merely got swept away by the magic of the book with it’s vivid descriptions of peril, chaos and heroism and the astonishing (to this day) artwork contained within. I must have read through the book dozens and dozens of times, and the joy I experienced was only surpassed by the discovery that there would be more books like it published soon afterward.

I eagerly bought every Fighting Fantasy (as the series was dubbed) book as they were released, initially via the school book club and soon thereafter (once gamebooks had become a phenomenon) in the bookstores. Other series began (Lone Wolf, Way Of The Tiger, Falcon etc.) and I bought them too. I quickly built up a sizeable collection and it became perhaps my biggest hobby. I even wrote two books of my own (sequels to Scorpion Swamp and Forest Of Doom), compiled a bestiary (prior to the publication of Out Of The Pit) and even copied the art to hang it on my wall:

Save0032

The above was taken in 1987, when I was fifteen and still clearly still enjoying my gamebooks. I was quite proud of my collection and it was displayed prominently in my room. I even saved related miscellany, including the adverts in magazines, reviews in newspapers, related magazines (Warlock and Proteus) and even an iron-on patch I was given at a bookstore when I purchased a book once.

Then I ‘grew up’, life moved on (ie. girls were invented) and my gamebook hobby – as it did for many of my generation – took a back seat. By my first college years I still had my gamebooks but rarely purchased any new ones, and when I left Australia in ’93 I left them to my brother. Even then I didn’t consider selling them, because they were still an important (and very happy!) memory of my young adolescent years. I’m not 100% sure what happened to the collection. I know most of the Fighting Fantasy titles would move into AW’s care (where the collection remains to this day), but I don’t know what Bernard ever did with all the others.

Fast forward a few years. I moved to America, got married and a job and became immersed in video games (& video game collecting). But I never forgot about the gamebooks, and the memories were always good ones. When I first returned to Oz in 2000 I brought back two books with me (ironically Scorpion Swamp and Forest of Doom) that I purchased for a song at a used bookstore, and reading them – maybe 10 years since I last had – was just as much fun as it ever was. In those days the gamebook fad had died; no new books were being published (killed as they had been by video games and the passage of time) and even on the internet it was difficult to find much enthusiasm. It seemed they would live on in my memories only.

fod

When next I returned to Australia (in 2006), things had changed quite a bit. A British publisher (Wizard books) had purchased the rights to Fighting Fantasy books and had started republishing a few years prior. I was quite excited by this, and purchased many on that trip. In addition, when in Newcastle on that trip I bought every single gamebook (from any series) I found in used bookstores, including doubles of some. Upon returning to Sydney, I gave AW almost all of them as a gift, keeping only the doubles for myself (and of course the new imprints of FF books). I may not have realized it at that moment, but this was the start of my modern collection.

Within a few months of arriving back in America I had started buying books online, mostly (in those days) via ebay. I started with Fighting Fantasy books, and my goal was initially just the titles I had never read/owned but quickly became to build a full set of all books. This was still several years prior to the gamebook renaissance, and I was able to get books at astonishing prices (such as Night Dragon for only $3!). I remember watching auctions of lots of books – in which I only needed one or two – go buy with only my bid and winning for much less than I was prepared to pay. Those were fun days, and within only a few months I had close to a full collection of the Fighting Fantasy series. Some books remained elusive though, and it would take almost 8 years to complete the collection, by which point I had numerous imprints of many of the books including (almost) the entire US series.

I’d been well-and-truly bitten by the gamebook bug though, and long before finishing my FF collection I started on the other series. I dove in headfirst, and agressively hunted down the books from other major series such as Lone Wolf, Falcon, Skyfall, Grailquest and Golden Dragon. I discovered Demian’s webpage and it became sort of a shopping list for me. I was buying books on ebay and amazon mostly from overseas (Canada, England and Australia), and still trawling the used shops in Australia on my annual visits (I returned with 36 books in January 2011).

My collection continued to grow. By this time many of you knew about it, and I was helped significantly by Adam (who gave me many books, including returning the ones I’d given him in ’06), Bernard (who dug deep and bought me a few missing and expensive titles) and Florence (who astonished me with this graduation gift). It was getting harder and harder to find books I didn’t have, and my ‘recent aquisition’ piles tended to include more and more obscure series:

books2

So we come to today. You can view my entire collection here. I don’t know how many there are – over 300 at last count – and the website I created (to assist me when I am traveling) isn’t even complete (since it doesn’t list duplicates or all FF imprints I own). I’m still actively buying books to fill in the blanks in my collection, and have even started buying the reprints of old series being published by Morris and Thompson. The collection is physically quite large now, long having outgrown the full-sized bookshelf once dedicated to it. I really need to sort it at all and work out how to store it better…

To pre-empt questions from those that may read this:

Q: Do you read them all?

A: Yes – and no. I have played through every FF book and most of the books from other landmark series, but I haven’t yet played all Lone Wolf books, or every book from every series. However there isn’t a series I haven’t played at least one (if not more) books from, including the standalone gamebooks.

Q: What are your favourites?

A: You can’t go wrong with Fighting Fantasy titles, especially the fantasy ones from earlier in the series (pre #30). If someone was only ever going to read one gamebook, I’d always recommend the grand-daddy of them all Warlock Of Firetop Mountain. That said the other series I would recommend are the Blood Sword books (which have a deservedly high reputation), the Virtual Reality (now called Critical IF) books, the (Lovecraftian) Forbidden Gatewayย series and the recent Destiny Quest series. But to be honest, I love all gamebooks, even the ‘bad’ ones ๐Ÿ™‚

Q: What about Choose Your Own Adventures?

A: You can’t spend a decade buying gamebooks online or in used bookstores without eventually picking up some titles that blur the line between gamebook and choose-your-own-adventure. You’ll see on my website I have a few, and there are others I didn’t bother listing. Typically I find the traditional choose-your-own-adventure titles to be too childish for my interests, but some books that use the mechanic (notable Life’s Lottery by Kim Newman) are every bit as entertaining as a ‘real book’.

Q: What’s the most you’ve paid for a book?

A: Not much, maybe $20 at the very most, probably less. As I said above, I bought most of the books that are now very pricey long before people started collecting again in earnest, and got them for a song. I feel sorry for those that want to obtain something like an original Knights Of Doom or Deathmoor today). I know some of the gaps in my collection could easily be filled with a single click on amazon or ebay, but I’m not going to pay big $$$ for a book just to own it (yet).

Q: What are your most-wanted gamebooks that you don’t yet have?

A: In no particular order, these are the five that have eluded me but I haven’t yet given up on:

Trial Of Champions (original US imprint)
Sorcery box set with spellbook (I consider myself owning it ‘in spirit’ since AW has the one I bought years ago)
Blood Sword #5 (prohibitively expensive; may be reissued soon)
– high number Lone Wolf books (again, prohibitively expensive)
Citadel Of Chaos (US Wizard reissue, early 2000s. Jonathan Green mentions it’s existence in You Are The Hero, but does it actually exist?)

But the true Holy Grail would be a foreign imprint book. There’s hundreds of thousands of them out there – Warlock was published in dozens of languages – but I’ve never found one. I’ve particularly like a Japanese version, and have invested some time checking used shops and hobby stores during my many trips to that country (all to no avail). One day this may be mine:

dd

(Incidentally I do own the English language – and some JP imprints – of the Queen’s Blade books, as well as a number of Lost World gamebooks. I should probably add them to the website…)

Well that’s enough for a history. The collection is old and quite complete, but I consider it active and ever-growing. If you’ve got any questions add them in the comments, or via twitter if that’s what got you here.

And may your stamina never fail ๐Ÿ˜‰