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We’d been playing and selling Dungeons & Dragons since 1975, and started thinking about a single-player role-playing game system that might appeal to a wider audience. How exactly did you and Steve Jackson come up with the idea for Fighting Fantasy books? But we didn’t really care because we were following a dream and made it up as we went along. After being kicked out of our flat where we were running our mail order business, Steve and I had no choice but to live in a van for three months as we only had enough money to rent a small office. It wasn’t hard to set up a new company back then, but it was virtually impossible to get a bank loan, especially for a small games company that sold obscure fantasy role-playing games. Was it difficult to set up such a company in the ’70s? But D&D did not appeal to John and he decided to leave Games Workshop We sold games by mail order from our flat before the big breakthrough came in June when we managed to secure the European distribution rights for Dungeons & Dragons. We started by publishing a fanzine Owl & Weasel to reach out to people who shared our passion for games. So we decided to do just that, and founded Games Workshop in February 1975. We always talked about turning our board games hobby into a business. We had low-paid, boring jobs and played a lot of board games in the evenings.
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Ian Livingstone: Steve Jackson and I were sharing a flat in London in 1974 with another old school friend, John Peake. Can you give us some insight into how that came about? Starburst: Games Workshop was founded in 1975, and was the strong precursor to Fighting Fantasy. Starburst caught up with author and entrepreneur Ian Livingstone to chat about his Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, the founding of Games Workshop, and more…