So there I was, newly unemployed, back in the rust belt of South
Australia, and determined never again to be subjected to the tedious
wage slavery of such organisations as the Australian Public Service. Yet
I had no clear idea of what to do, only some vague impulse to create
something. Paint? Draw? Write? And then by chance The Warlock of Firetop
Mountain passed through my hands on its way as a present from my
parents to my younger teenage brother.
This was so
early in Fighting Fantasy history that there was not even a Fighting
Fantasy series yet. There was only "Warlock of Firetop Mountain".
Years
before this, back in third year university, where I had majored in
psychology, we had been given valuable time on the university's new
mainframe to learn the intricacies of the Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences (SPSS). The new mainframe (a Vax-11/780) was a great
improvement over the old (a Cyber 173), mainly in that it was also provided
with video terminals. The old Cyber had to be fed punched IBM cards and
waited on patiently for it to spit out a few pages of dot-matrix output.
I
immediately began using this valuable computing resource to write an
interactive random text-based dungeon bashing computer game based on
D&D. In first year I'd done half a subject on Pascal and Fortran
programming, and chose Pascal for the job. My programming skills were
not well developed at that time, and I recall overhearing some real
Computer Science students who had somehow got hold of a hacked version
of my game decrying how badly written it was. Eventually enough people
were spending enough time playing hacked versions of my game that the
system admins deleted it from everyone's storage.
As
soon as I saw the future Fighting Fantasy book #1 I realised that it was
just a text based dungeon bashing computer game based on D&D
without the surrounding hardware. I knew that I could write one, too.
I
started work on Assassin, choosing a science fiction theme rather than
fantasy because clearly these Jackson and Livingstone fellows -- whoever
they were -- had already cornered the fantasy corner. As I wrote it, in
an ad hoc, haphazard way, not really planning my way through it, I
wrote my own combat rules. Since I had no idea that a Fighting Fantasy
series was being spawned, it didn't occur to me that I would be part of
it. I wrote expecting that Assassin would stand apart. And finally, at
the end, I had this ungainly manuscript of some 360 sections -- the
future Space Assassin -- which I sent off to Penguin in Australia.
