Today would have been the 69th birthday of Joe Dever, the late amazing writer and creator of the Lone Wolf series of game books (among other things). Anyone who has followed the long development of Fallen Gods knows that Lone Wolf was one of its core inspirations; not once, but twice, it had an important influence on me as a game designer.
I first discovered Lone Wolf in the 1980s when I was a kid, and I was enthralled. Dever’s writing and Gary Chalk’s art brought the world to life with spare, vigorous prose and evocative ink drawings.
As an avid consumer of all things fantasy, the books could have held me if they were nothing more than novels. But what really sank the hook was that they were structured somewhere between a Choose Your Own Adventure (which I loved) and Dungeons & Dragons (which I had struggled to connect with). If you haven’t played these gamebooks, you should because they have a particularly special quality seldom captured in computer games: the options you don’t take—whether the Kai Disciplines (super powers) or gear you forgo at the start, or the choices you opt not to take as the adventure progress—are as evocative as the ones you do take. Even after you’ve “won” a book it’s impossible not to pick it up and play it again and again. Over time, the character sheet was shredded from erasures, the spine broken, and nearly every page dog-eared... in book after book.
In fact, the first game I ever designed was a dice-driven gamebook called The Road to Doom’s Castle, made using The Print Shop on our Apple IIc and a borrowed thermobinder. (I imagine the clip art will be familiar to anyone of a certain age...) As homages to Lone Wolf go, it is a poor one (given the limited abilities of an 9-year-old), but it was one of my first steps on the road of game design, with Joe Dever pointing the way.
And then, video games and computer games caught up to Lone Wolf in storytelling, and I drifted away from gamebooks and into Gold Box and later Infinity Engine cRPGs, Sierra and LucasArts adventures, and every jRPG I could get my hands on. My designs and stories for Primordia, Strangeland, Infinity, and other games have their roots in those adolescent obsessions of mine. I probably never would have spared another thought for Lone Wolf, and never would have launched the great undertaking of Fallen Gods, except that Joe Dever did something else that showed what an amazing person he is.
In 1999, Dever authorized Project Aon to republish the Lone Wolf books, for free online. He wrote:
I would be especially pleased if my granting of the rights to distribute my books in this way was seen as my ‘millennium gift’ to all those devoted readers who have kept the Kai flag flying high, through all the good times, and the not-so-good. It would make me very proud indeed if this enterprise laid the foundations of a lasting legacy, securing the longevity of Lone Wolf by making my creation freely and readily accessible to current and future online generations.
(Gary Chalk, naturally, showed the same generosity and allowed his illustrations to be used as well.)
As a result, in 2005, the games were waiting for me to play again—without wearing out erasers or pages or spines in the process—and I consumed them avidly, enjoying that rare double-vision delight where you look through jaded and youthful eyes at the same time, and through both sets see something splendid. “Nostalgia” doesn’t explain it. The gamebooks are just damn good. The choices still have their impact. The balance remains excellent. The writing is still lean and muscular. The art is still fantastic. The world of Magnamund and the nation of Sommerlund remain as enthralling as ever.
Joe Dever’s generous heart is as much an inspiration as his creative mind—it’s one reason I’ve enjoyed releasing free games (and free content) to our fans whenever I can.
In whatever summerland his soul rests, I hope he knows that the lasting legacy of Lone Wolf left its DNA in Fallen Gods. “Blessed is the giver, richer through the giving of a gift.”
