Here’s the app link if you’d like to give them a try again! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.GDVGames.LoneWolfBiblio
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Glad they’re mostly all online, seems like getting physical copies of the earlier books is hard now unless you search for them on Ebay…
Got my copies of Jeffery Dean’s Westward Dystopia and Lords of Benaeron today, thanks Jeffery for mailing those out to me so quickly! 
I was pretty surprised they arrived this soon given how slow Amazon is being with the current batch of IF books I ordered (including Spire Ablaze), though I guess I can’t blame them! 
Anyone played the Way of the Tiger books? I noticed them lately and they sound interesting with the the Ninja mechanics and some of the books involving politics and overseeing a full scale battle… plenty of good inspiration for my own stuff!
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Ok, just had to upload a photo of part of my little collection… I keep these next to my desk, while I write. Recently I had started re-reading book 1 of Lone Wolf (I have a one book compile of books 1 and 2, aside from a copy of book 1 by itself which I recently lent to a friend… hopefully it’ll come back…). There are more in storage, but I keep some of these close… not sure why… maybe for inspiration of some sort as I write?
Lone Wolf was amazing… if anything I thought it was superior to FF, as there was a common plot running through them (FF had great individual books, but often few over-arching plots… I mean there was that deathtrap dungeon that rolled onto armies of death, but it was vague at best). I also played Way of the Tiger. I remember the mechanics were interesting, but it just didn’t stay in my mind like FF or Lone Wolf… and countless others! (the DnD books, also next to my desk still, middle earth, and a long list of others! basically, I was obsessed with gamebooks, and played whatever I could get my hands on)
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I definitely used to own Island of the Lizard King, but never got the chance to check out Way of the Tiger.
Thanks so much for that picture - the artwork for ALL of those books was incredible!
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Ha! I was just about to start a thread like this myself, having realised that there are are probably a good number of us who owe a lot of their current interest in IF to the gamebooks of the past. There are also probably a good number of young ‘uns here who’ve never experienced the unique pleasure of reading a book with your fingers stuck in several of its pages, rolling dice with your teeth…
CYOA were always bigger in the states than over here in the UK but I read quite a few as a kid and the one that contained a utopian planet you could never reach by following the choices pretty much blew my young mind! https://io9.gizmodo.com/remember-inside-ufo-54-40-the-unwinnable-choose-your-o-1552187271
FF was my absolute jam all through the 80s. I’m old enough that my mum bought me the first one, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, when it was released in 1982 and I played that copy until it literally fell apart. My collection is sadly depleted these days but I still cherish the few that I have, Check this out, playas:
Yes, that is a City of Thieves colouring book.
If anyone wants to wallow in a bit of very funny nostalgia, I remember really enjoying the hilarious playthroughs of the first 12 or so books on this blog: http://turnto400.blogspot.com/
One thing I always loved about the FF books (though I couldn’t articulate it as a kid) was that you never felt completely in control of the main character, one of the limitations of the print form compared to something like CoG. Your options were few and might not turn out as expected. For example, you’d come up against a powerful vampiric wizard at the top of his tower and the book would ask if you wanted to attack him, jump through the window or talk your way out of it. Attacking and jumping were clearly ridiculous choices if you wanted to stay alive so you’d talk to him, only to find out when you turned to that page that your character’s idea of talking was to brag and tell the warlock how he was going to regret his evil ways! Woah there, champ…
So it felt at times like a fun exercise in damage limitation, guiding your big fantasy lunk through the adventure in as close to one piece as you could manage. I wrote a sort of exagerrated pastiche along these lines myself a few years back. I also had an idea to do something Wodehousian since the format seemed to lend itself to a valet and “hero” set-up (I’m not bitter that @Gower got there first, by the way, just bitter that they did it better than I ever would have!).
It was a real shame that videogames effectively killed off the format so early. In its later days there were some really interesting, form-breaking experiments which I would love to have seen developed further. The great, open world adventures of Fabled Lands and the Sorcery series. The 4th-wall breaking shenangians of the GrailQuest books. Also some amazing two-player gamebooks like these:
You had to give the other player codes after you both read a paragraph at a time and could lay traps, empty chests and fight one another. Clever stuff! I also remember a set of books with a similar premise but only pictures, so you actually saw your opponent as you stalked them through a maze, a kind of analogue FPS. It pains me that I can’t remember the name of the series so I will go FULL NERD in gratitude on anyone who can help me out!
Other honorable mentions for me are Kim Newman’s “Life’s Lottery” (a really amazing and thought-provoking take on the genre), the Lone Wolf, Car Wars and Way of the Tiger series, and a short story from my favourite author which is sometimes credited with kicking off the whole trend - “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges.
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Gamebooks were my passion in my early teenage years. There was a cheap second-hand bookshop in my town where all the town nerds would buy their gamebooks, then sell them back and buy other ones, so the same set of FF books probably circulated around all of us eventually! I used to love Fighting Fantasy: I have particularly fond memories of City of Thieves and Creature of Havoc. Also greatly loved Lone Wolf: I always thought the prose in those was of a higher standard than the average for gamebooks. Also have very fond memories of a series of gamebooks based on the amazing British fantasy RPG kids’ TV show Knightmare, which were obviously cheap cash-ins but at the same time were weirdly satisfying. Happy days!
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Ah, I forgot about the Knightmare books. And the show itself was great. Spellcasting!
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“Simon, sidestep left!”
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Yeah, I loved Lone Wolf too – the first 12 books, anyway. A very satisfying story arc on the whole, with books 2, 3, 5, 11, and 12 as the real standouts in my view. Earlier on this thread I linked to a playthrough blog of the series that I really enjoyed.
After reading that, I was toying with the idea of trying a variation, the “Amnesiac Wolf” playthrough blog, where I would faithfully chronicle my attempt to take Joe Dever up on his highly implausible claim that it was possible without cheating to beat any of the gamebooks in the series even if you were playing it as if it were the first and only one. Common refrains would have been “The Sommerswerd? What’s that?” “One day I’ll be a Warmarn,” and “Me and my three Magnakai disciplines laugh at you!”
But then I tried starting on Books 10, 11, and 12 without cheating, and it was such a soul-destroyingly awful experience that I knew I couldn’t turn it into a blog.
Way of the Tiger was also fun… but the world was a very weird and (to me) inauthentic-feeling mix of Eastern ninjutsu and Western high fantasy, and after the first two books the quality went very steeply downhill.
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Did anybody else ever play the Blood Sword series? I had almost forgotten about it entirely, but it just popped up out of the memory-hole while I was reminiscing about Lone Wolf. It was set in a sort of fantasy Crusades Middle Eastern setting, and was designed to be played co-operatively by up to four people, each playing a separate character, though they did include a system for adapting it for a single player. I thought they were fantastic.
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The one review of Tiger I did see seems to think the trilogy that takes place over books 3-5 was the best point, but then it sounds like those books moved away from the initial concept and placed you into a king or ruler like position instead of a Ninja one.
Anyone else here read Grailquest? I only ever read one myself but that series seemed to be a tongue-in-cheek take on Fighting Fantasy and Arthurian legends…
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Yeah I enjoyed the Grailquest books although it’s been ages since I read one. They had a good deal of humour and some neat tricks. I liked the 4th-wall break, how the book itself was meant to be a spell of Merlin’s that allowed you to control the protagonist, and also the dreamtime sections that you could risk at any point to restore your strength.
After asking the question about 2-player gamebooks earlier, I’ve actually now dug a bit more and found the one I was looking for. It was less obscure than I’d thought, belonging to a series by Joe Dever (Lone Wolf).
Double good news: It’s available for free along with loads of Joe’s other books here: https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home
This is the exact set I had, White Warlord and Black Baron: https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/WhiteWarlord
It’s a really fascinating mechanic.
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Mad props for referencing “The Garden of Forking Paths,” but I’d actually argue that the SATOR/ROTAS square was actually the first work of “interactive” writing.
Although a little bird once told me that some Egyptian hieroglyphs were meant to be read in multiple directions… 
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Ah, Grailquest, loved those too! I also have them somewhere, I think the complete set…
There were also the marvel superhero ones, for spiderman, wolverine, etc… though never as good as FF or Lone Wolf.
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I used to have the Spider-Man game book, never played the others though I found a few online with Doctor Strange and the X-Men. Thought a couple times about taking the mechanics and doing my own version once or twice (the Secret Avengers was my main idea).
Now that you mentioned Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery I have that one! Again I thought about adapting that with Batman and how his life might have turned out. I did see a fanfic version of that with Daria…
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/13319221/1/Daria-s-Life-s-Lottery
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Have you guys tried Nightshift or shadow chaser. I am in the middle of both and both are amazing