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Early Stuff

 
 

At the bottom of this page is Diamond Theft, my first book, written when I was eight. It was self-published, i.e. stuck together by my dad. It was based on a series called ‘Tracker Books’, which was a very early example of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of gamebook. Each page offers choices of route and action: you decide which way to go and turn to the appropriate page. There are multiple routes through the book, with various endings, some good, some bad.

In Diamond Theft the reader pursues the wicked robber Steve Jones through the English countryside, into castles and pubs, through forests and across rivers, in an effort to retrieve Lady Moneybag’s diamond necklace.

Between the ages of eleven and fourteen I created a large number of more sophisticated gamebooks, this time inspired by the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. They required dice to resolve combats with a wide variety of enemies. The examples on the right are the self-explanatory Tower of the Undead and a science-fiction one, Star Hunter, in which the reader is an intergalactic mercenary.

 
Link to Books