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CHOOSE YOUR OWN ARTICLE
Henry Northmore catches up with one of the keynote speakers at this year’s
Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Ian Livingstone, as he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his choose your own adventure books Fighting Fantasy
Y ou are a magazine reader. You have opened page 106 of The List and want to learn more about Edinburgh Interactive, a three-day festival of digital culture, and in particular RPG authority and games guru Ian Livingstone OBE.
To find out how Livingstone first got involved in the world of gaming, read on. To skip to how he got started in videogames go to 5. For more on EI go straight to 7.
1 ‘I always had a big interest in games. In the 1960s I used to play Diplomacy [a strategic WWI board game] and play-by-mail games. When Steve Jackson and I met up in London in the 70s, we were old school friends and we thought, wouldn’t it be a great idea to make a living from our love of playing games. We put out a little newsletter called Owl & Weasel to everyone we knew, and one of the people who got hold of it was Gary Gygax, who’d just invented Dungeons & Dragons. We played it and were completely enthralled about the whole role-playing idea, got pretty obsessive about it, ordered six copies and got a distribution agreement for Europe on the back of that, which was very fortuitous [laughs]. We began selling it mail order then set up Games Workshop shops, then expanded the whole thing with White Dwarf [a RPG magazine], miniatures and of course we got hugely into the game ourselves.’
106 THE LIST 9–16 Aug 2012
To find out how that led to the Fighting Fantasy books go to 4. To stick with RPGs and what Livingstone thinks about MMORPGs go to 6.
2 ‘We’ve got a rich heritage of making games, thanks, I think, largely to computer science being taught in schools in the 1980s. The BBC Micro was the cornerstone of computing in schools, the ZX Spectrum was a fully programmable computer in the home, mixed with the fact that we are perhaps the most creative nation in the world. You put a programmable computer into the hands of a creative person and, hey presto, one of those outcomes will be videogames. So it’s no coincidence that some of the best franchises in the world were created in the UK.’
If you missed the Fighting Fantasy info go to 4. To find out what sets EI apart from other games conferences see 9.
3 ‘I think the most compelling feature was that you, the reader, were the hero. Traditional books are a passive experience where you are reading about someone else’s adventures, but in Fighting Fantasy you make all the decisions. Living or dying by your decisions and swordplay made it a very atmospheric and involving experience.’
To read about the 30th anniversary go to
8. To find out how the FF books lead to videogames go to 5.
4 ‘We thought, wouldn’t it be nice to extend the whole role-playing concept beyond the niche of D&D, so we came up with this branching narrative book idea with a game system attached to it where the book replaces the dungeon-master. We wrote a description of it that we sent to Penguin Books and they hummed and hawed for about a year. Then we finally got the green light and wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and the rest, as they say, is history.’
To hear about what made the Fighting Fantasy books so successful go to 3. To read about the 30th Anniversary plans go to 8. For Livingstone’s move to videogames go to 5.
5 ‘During the high point of Fighting Fantasy I’d written a book called Deathtrap Dungeon. It got to number one in the charts and got a lot of publicity, so games company Domark asked me to write their first game for them. At the same time I became a shareholder in the company, then in 1981 I was asked to join the board of Domark, which in turn became Eidos in 1985. We floated Eidos in 1995 – I became chairman from 95-2002 and helped acquire franchises such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Hitman and Championship Manager. So it was a natural progression for me moving