The dice men

‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of coffee in his airy open-plan kitchen. ‘This is a bone I have been waiting to pick for, oh, 35 years. That bloody maze!’

Livingstone chuckles. ‘That was Steve’s. He’s the sadist.’ That maze, in a way, is the reason we are meeting. The near-unnavigable labyrinth featured near the end of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain — the choose-your-own-adventure novel which launched the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy series. Here was an adventure ‘in which you are the hero’. Some 400 numbered paragraphs, connected in a web of decisions: ‘If you head west, turn to 125; if you choose to stay and fight the monster, turn to 74.’

City of Thieves, Forest of Doom, Deathtrap Dungeon… in the 1980s these Puffin paperbacks, with their covers bearing lurid, lovingly painted monsters with dripping fangs and bulging eyes, were touted in the schoolbags of the nation. In the corners of playgrounds, pallid children were to be found (hedging their bets against a choice that led to a pit full of poisoned spikes) with fingers knotted arthritically through the pages in what Livingstone affectionately calls ‘the five-fingered bookmark’.

This summer is the 35th anniversary of Warlock’s release — and it sees the long out-of-print book (and a handful of its successors) relaunched in new editions; along with the first new Fighting Fantasy gamebook for decades, Livingstone’s Port of Peril.

Their creators are now two of the most influential men in the British games industry. Ian Livingstone is an amiable, stocky man with a receding fuzz of brown hair; his co-creator Steve Jackson, who arrives on his bicycle (they live near each other in the comfortable suburb of Barnes, west London) is leaner, grey, with a slightly pointed face and a quick grin.