Research task – interactive storytelling

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston’s fighting fantasy series

In 1980, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone attended a Games Day, and after meeting with a Penguin Books editor Geraldine Cook decided to create a series of single-player game books. The Magic Quest, was a short adventure intended to demonstrate the style of game.

Puffin books (1982-1995)

Jackson and Livingstone began writing individually to create additional Fighting Fantasy game books. In 1983.  The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom were published by Jackson and Livingstone.

Then four more titles were released:

Jackson wrote a self-contained four-part series titled Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! (1983-1985) This is as known old world. These featured dice images at the bottom of each page, making it possible for the player to randomly flip through the pages for the equivalent of a dice roll.

Although the Fighting Fantasy titles had successful sales the increasing dominance of video games in the 1990’s caused gradual decline.

Video Games

Façade is a prime example of a build your own adventure style type game which probably had inspiration from the build your own adventure books. The aim of this game was that you can either try and repair their relationship or do the complete opposite.

There was a computer program which was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1964 to 1966 called ELIZA, this program was designed to be a computer therapist but obviously it was easy to break in a sense that it will ask you the same questions over and over again and take your words and repeat what you’ve said.