Fight! Fight! Fight!

In March 1983, the very third Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Forest of Doom, was published in the UK.I'm aware it's a story I've told several times now, but the range's co-creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, had jointly written the first book in the series, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which was an instant bestseller. To produce two new books in the same time it had taken to write Warlock, they divided their efforts, and Livingstone's first solo gamebook, Forest, was published the exact same day as Jackson's offering, The Citadel of Chaos. Four more books would be written in this way before Puffin Books realised that if they were going to keep up with public demand, and the copycat series by other publishers that were beginning to crop up, they were going to have to open things up to outside writers.As you might expect, Livingstone doesn't have everything down pat at this point, and Forest is a bit different to his later books. It's generally a bit easier, especially when…