Hi everyone. As some of you may know this Monday saw the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first book in Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone’s legendary Fighting Fantasy series, Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and 30 years later the series is still going strong with Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy: Blood of the Zombies released earlier this month.
Most of us here at Laughing Jackal grew up playing the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks and in my case it was a childhood spent with Gamebooks and Dungeons & Dragons that led me into the world of Videogames via the likes of Planecape Torment and Baldurs Gate. So to have the chance to work on the PSN conversions of these was amazing. Several of us even got to meet Steve Jackson who was incredibly helpful & supportive when we were converting the games to PSN Minis. Sadly I wasn’t one of the people who got to meet him but I did get to do a two part interview with him for this blog which can be found here & here.
With so many classic Fighting Fantasy books to choose from one of the hardest parts was picking which book to convert first. In the end we settled on starting with Talisman of Death as not only was it one of our favourites but it was also one of the more suitable ones to be converted to a video game. Of course after we’d settled on Talisman of Death the choice for our second conversion was fairly obvious as we all wanted to tackle the big one The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
Actually converting the games presented a few challenges as there were a surprising number of exceptions to the rules printed in the front of the book. Obviously when a reader is playing though the book itself this isn’t a problem as they can spot what they need to do differently when the time comes and follow the instructions but clearly that doesn’t quite work when a console is doing the interpretation and each of those exceptions to the rules had to be coded into the game separately.
To celebrate this 30th anniversary our Fighting Fantasy bundle featuring Fighting Fantasy: Talisman of Death & Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain will be on sale for just €2.49 (£1.99) down from €5.99 (£4.99) until the 5th September. You’ll also be able to pick up Cubixx HD & the Ace Armstrong / Stellar Attack Minis Bundle as part of the PSN sale until the 5th September.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back next week, but until then why not on join us on our Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google+ pages?
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