Starship Traveller by Steve Jackson was published 40 years ago today on 1 September 1983.
Having only written one fantasy gamebook by himself, why was
it that Jackson abandoned an alternative Tolkien-esque past for a gleaming,
rocket-fuelled future?
“I liked to try new things out,”
says Jackson. “Sorcery! had a new magic system, Starship Traveller was the first SF
adventure.”
Set in the distant future, Starship
Traveller (FF4) had the hero become the commander of the eponymous
starship and its crew. After his interstellar vessel is sucked through
a black hole into an unknown quadrant of space, the hero has to search the
local star systems for the coordinates to another black hole and the way home.
As well as keeping a track of his own attributes, the reader
had to keep a note of the attributes of his officers. Starship Traveller also added
the stats WEAPONS STRENGTH and SHIELDS so that the reader
could re-enact battles between spacecraft.
Jackson: “I was a big
Star Trek fan.
Always preferred it to
Doctor Who. Mr
Spock was my hero. I liked the episodes where Kirk & Co landed on a planet
where they encountered alien races and philosophies. Never liked the deep space
battle episodes.
Starship Traveller was unashamedly
based on
Star Trek. And the long dedication
was a listing of the entire Games Workshop staff as it was at the time. Some of
the GW department heads appeared in the adventure too. ‘Bran-Sell’ was a
reference to Bryan Ansell, who ran the Citadel division and later became GW
Managing Director. There was a race called the Dar-Villians; a reference to GW’s
Sales Manager Peter Darvill-Evans. Fioral was Albie Fiore, who ran the
Production Dept. And lots more.”
Both the cover artwork and the internal illustrations were
by Peter Andrew Jones, a first and last for the Fighting Fantasy series.
Many years later, Tin Man Games turned Starship Traveller into an app, commissioning new full-colour artwork for the adventure in the process.
While the gamebook was reissued by Wizard Books, Scholastic UK have yet to publish the adventure. So, watch this space...
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