The hardest thing of all, of course, was the flowcharting, and the tracking of events and stuff using codewords. Open world gamebooks are very intricate and complicated.
An interview with a prolific and veteran gamebook writer, Jamie Thomson, of Fabled Lands, Way of the Ninja and the Dark Lord series. Latest in series of solo gaming interviews.
Chat with Gamebook Author Jamie Thomson
Jamie Thomson (wikipedia link) has written many gamebooks over a period of 40 years, including Way of the Ninja (with Mark Smith) , 3 Fighting Fantasy collaborations, open-world series Fabled Lands and VulcanVerse (both series with Dave Morris) and the Dark Lord Series.
We have how Jamie's first gamebook happened, Fabled Lands background, favourite gamebook to write and a bit on collaborations. Among other questions.
What was your gaming story before gamebooks?
I was about 14 or 15 at school. I'd discovered SPI games (really early wargames from the US) and then found by chance a flier from GW (Games Workshop) written by Steve Jackson in 1976 or something, advertising D&D.
I ordered it, and then that little white box turned up, with Men and Magic, Monsters and Treasure etc. Reading those literally changed my life.
How did your first gamebook come to be?
I was working for Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson on White Dwarf magazine as an editor. They'd just released the first FF (Fighting Fantasy) books and after they took off massively, the publisher wanted as many as they could get their hands on;
Ian and Steve simply couldn't write them fast enough, so they called in other writers. There weren't many who understood how to write them in those early days, and I was one of them, being so close to the centre of it all as it were.
So I hooked up with Mark Smith who was the DM of our D&D gaming group. He brought the world of Orb, and we wrote the Talisman of Death. Which we wrote in long hand, can you imagine? We had no computers or word processors in those days. Couldn't even afford a type writer :-). I had to type it up at work on Ian's brand new and very expensive word processor. It was 1984... and the rest is history.
What was the story behind Fabled Lands, the first open-world gamebooks?
Originally, we'd done a radio play with my brother (who wrote plays for radio 4), of six half hour episodes. For that I created the world that's in book 1 of FL (Fabled Lands). That was the start of the lore.
The whole open world idea Dave and I kind of got from computer games like Might and Magic and others. By that time, we were masters of the game book mechanic. Although game books were waning, we though FL could be a whole new way of playing them and maybe that would give us a second wave of big success.
The publisher thought it was worth a shot, and off we went.
But in the end, they didn't do as well as we hoped, so we only managed six of them. Sales weren't terrible, but nothing like the old days. And then computer games came along and kind of knocked game books on the head. Well, as a mass market thing, that is.
How did creating open-world gamebooks compare to more traditional ones?
In one sense easier, as paragraphs are short and pithy.
In another sense, harder, as you have to come up with a hell of a lot more storylines and plot ideas.
The hardest thing of all, of course, was the flowcharting, and the tracking of events and stuff using codewords. Open world gamebooks are very intricate and complicated.
Which was your favourite gamebook to write?
Probably book 5 in the Fabled Lands series, the Court of Hidden Faces.
I had a lot of fun with the Uttakin and their strange masked up culture. Vaguely based on the court of the Ottoman Empire crossed with a bit of Phoenician Carthage.
With Way of the Tiger, was it always the idea to have the story focus change as the series progressed?
Yes. Basically we wanted to add a role playing narrative arc to it, where your character 'goes up levels' and changes over time, unlike most game books to date that were one offs.
Joe Dever had the same idea with Lone Wolf, of course. But ours had ninjas :-).
How did working on your own compare to working in collaboration in gamebooks?
Collaboration is always easier as you can bounce ideas off each other.
We'd meet up, build a storyline etc and then go away and write our sections, having to make sure things tied up, and items matched outcomes as we did so etc. Of course, as you wrote, things would crop up that had to be tied off in the other section but that wasn't hard to sort.
Except it was of course before emails so we had to ring each other and talk.
What games (if any) are you playing these days?
Currently playing War Mongrels on PC, and about to start massive boardgame version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
Oh, and also Pandemic: Legacy.
Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
Other than endlessly going on about my supreme intellect and general greatness, not really.
Finishing Up
So if you like gamebooks, check out one of Jamie's. I can recommend VulcanVerse for an open-world series that is complete or the Way of the Ninja series.
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