I haven't seen this topic on the boards yet and i'm curious

As a child of the 70's and 80's, I soon fell into the world of gamebooks. I used to own numerous franchises with my favorite being Fighting Fantasy with Lone Wolf coming in a close second and have recently started collecting the books again.

Some of the franchises I used to own some or all:
Fighting Fantasy
Lone Wolf
Wizards, Warriors and You
Grailquest
Way of the Tiger

just to name a few

So how about you guys? any favorite titles or brands? maybe even tell me some that i've either don't remember or even heard of?

Cheers, Hovi

Here in Uruguay we had an awesome series that was a reworking of the Greywolf books and also a company that would turn early D&D modules into solo-player RPG books ala Fighting Fantasy. I don't know if they actually had a license to do that or if they were just ripping off TSR, anyway, they put out awesome books.

The one that comes to mind inmediately was one based of the "Tomb of Horrors" module, yeah, that one. I never knew there were so many interesting and gross ways to die in a fantasy setting.

Nintendo of all people also had some gamebooks out in the late 80s, i had four of them but they were terrible, more like CYOA books than proper RPGs.

Anyone else remember those?

edit: Fabled Lands!!! I just remembered them, they were also pretty big around here but only had 5 or 6 books out, they were a pretty good fantasy setting where you could make your own characters and just run around the continent if you felt like it and do merchant given quests and ignore the main "quest".

Think Elders Scrolls but in print, shit was awesome. I'm sure i still have the books somewhere.

edit2: Well, there goes my productivity this week. Turns out there's an app that let's you play the first 6 books on your desktop, books are included.

http://flapp.sourceforge.net/

I still have the Grailquest series, but I missed last part. And i played few local (Czech) ones.

It always has special atmosphere and i kinda liked it.

Sometimes I think about some modern take - Game(web)page. It could be fun.

Yeah, i always hated CYOA books, They catered to the really young crowd. When I found out that they were America's answer to FF, I choked. Took me a long time to realize as a child that most of the authors of the FF books and Lone Wolf were British. I wanted to move to England after that...lol

Edit: Ah yes! i remember Fabled Lands, I really enjoyed that series as well

Loved the Lone Wolf books, as you can probably tell from my user name here :P
You, Americans, got a bastardised version that often cut many passages, so the stories failed.

Fear not, though! For Sir Joe of Dever, despite battling with pancreatic cancer, gave permission for e-books to be released for pretty much all of his works.

http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/novels.html are also reissuing them in hard copy, for us purists! Of which, Mr. Dever himself, has reworked them a little to fit more in line with his original vision for them....ferinstance, Book 1 starts with you trying to evade the initial assault, rather than as originally written, waking up after knocking yourself out on a tree branch. It works!

Steve Jackson's and Ian Livingstone's FF series were lightweights compared to LW, but there was the odd gem. And they weren't as lightweight as the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series....

I collected quite a few series' in my youth : Skyfall (IIRC, sci-fi setting), Demonspawn, Way of the Tiger (ninjas!), Blood Sword (a particular favourite of mine), Sorcery! (Steve Jackson jobbie. Pretty good, but book 3 was a bitch), and Cretan Chronicles, to name a few that I can remember :P

I got introduced to gamebooks by some CYOA books that got translated to German. I found them so much fun that I even wrote a similar project myself (not that it would be worth reading; I was a kid). Later I played lots of the Lone Wolf books (by Joe Dever), and some of the Fighting Fantasy books (by Jackson/Livingstone).

People who liked Lone Wolf should take a peek at Project Aon: the complete series, online, playable (supported by a client), with the blessing of the author. Have fun. :)

I read some LoneWolf / CYOA books as a kid. My memories are a bit sketchy, but I remember enjoying it.

On Project Aon website you can find some (legit) digital version of Lone Wolf books.

edit: ninja'd

Wow!, Thanks bud, I knew that Joe has allowed his books to be available for free electronically but didn't know about them being released in printed word, nice news indeed

I've always meant to collect these, they were awesome when I was younger, they didn't last long, it was just serendipity that they existed at the very specific time in history when they would be important to me. I suppose if you look you can find a tarball with 100s of them in PDF format....

Fighting Fantasy were something special. Apparently they're still making them too.

In fact I've been getting some major FF vibes from Grimrock. If Jackson and Livingstone did a fighting fantasy game like that then odds are we'd have something special. Not that Grimrock isn't special. It's just that it's pretty simplistic and could use some unique moments dotted around throughout the game.

Heh.

Just found this site selling re-issues of the FF series.
http://www.iconbooks.co.uk/our-books/childrens/fighting-fantasy/?page=0

They're not in the same order : Creature of Havoc was originally 24th or 25th....Deathtrap Dungeon was the 6th....House of Hell was the 10th....Starship Traveller was 4th (and almost impossible to complete. Really insanely hard).

Yeah, Orc. I regretted losing all my old books so i'm trying to replenish my collection. Have over half of the FF series and i'm going to start on some other series soon
Yeah Nav, it seems to me that Grimlock is the Warlock on Firetop Mountain that should have been instead of that sorry excuse of a video game that it ended up being

Wow I didn't even know about that one. Doesn't look so great...

Given how well LoG did I hope we get to see a sequel. Or at least some more dungeons for the first game. Or, you know, something along the same kind of lines. After all there's clearly a market for it.

Choose Your Own Adventure - http://gamebooks.org/show_series_images.php?id=30
Endless Quest - http://gamebooks.org/show_series_images.php?id=79
Fighting Fantasy - http://gamebooks.org/show_series_images.php?id=11
Give Yourself Goosebumps - http://gamebooks.org/show_series_images.php?id=82
Which Way Books - http://gamebooks.org/show_series_images.php?id=29

I like these series and grew up with them. Good times and memories.

Ah, yeah. I was a gamebook nut when I was in High School (they had mostly fallen out of fashion at the time).

Lone Wolf, Grey Star, Fighting Fantasy, Grailquest (my favorite series) and Firewolf. So many memories.

It's good that Lone Wolf is getting reissued (and even in ebook format too), but I'd love to see Grailquest and Firewolf reissued too.