2025 marks 40 years since the publication of the fifth Fighting Fantasy sci-fi title,
Rebel Planet (FF18), by Robin
Waterfield.
“I was working in the Penguin/Puffin
copy-editorial department when the series began," Waterfield explains. "My desk was free to edit one of
the books, and after that I became the default copy-editor for them all, having
got the hang of them. Later, after leaving Penguin, I became the series editor
from 1986-1988, when I handed over to Marc Gascoigne.
“By the time I wrote my first one, I had edited quite a few,
and was already involved in reading (and rejecting) the countless submissions
from hopeful kids. I knew how the games worked, and I’ve been a lifelong
games-player (though I was not involved at all in the RPG world). So I didn’t
find them too difficult to write. The first one I wrote was non-Titan (Rebel Planet), but that was because
Philippa specifically asked me to do an SF one.”
In Rebel Planet, the leaders of SAROS (a secret Earth
organization) are fighting to overthrow the alien Arcadian Empire. Having
gathered together their last few resources, they send the hero on one last
daring, and foolhardy, mission to strike at the heart of the Arcadian
homeworld.
Rebel Planet was
adapted to become one of a select group of FF computer games, available for the
ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. The cover
was provided by artist and colourist Alan Craddock with Gary Mayes producing
the internal black and white illustrations, just as he would for the next two
SF FF titles.
Robot, by Gary Mayes.
(© Gary Mayes, 1985 and 2025)
“If I remember correctly, the opportunity arose through the
Games Workshop magazine, White Dwarf, and
I think my name was put forward to the publishers Puffin, as a likely
candidate,” says Mayes, recalling how he came to contribute to the Fighting
Fantasy series. “In many ways it was a breath of fresh air to illustrate a
whole book and particularly to work in black and white, something I had wanted
to do for quite a while. My work at that time was varied and came from a number
of different sources and this [Rebel Planet]
gave me an opportunity to work within the fantasy/science fiction genre, which
I had wanted to do since I had started drawing as a child.
“My early influences were illustrators like Frank Bellamy,
Frank Kelly Freas, and numerous others that I had pored over as a teenager and
inspired me to think about work of that nature. The FF books were a significant
step along the way and provided an opportunity to develop my skill and method
of working with a subject I loved.”
Alan Craddock’s cover rough for Rebel Planet, which at the time went by the title Emperor of Arcadion.(© Alan Craddock, 1985 and 2025)
But what of Craddock? Did he have a background in RPGs? “I
had played Waddington’s Risk board game
for many hours with my friends,” says Craddock. “During the Sixth Form school
holidays we would play games which would last days at a time. So I knew the
pleasure a good board game could provide. And when I had finished reading
Tolkien I wanted more, and obviously a role-playing game could be a way of
achieving that. But painting was my particular outlet. Once I became a
professional artist in 1979 and got married soon after, those long balmy summer
days of playing Risk for days on end were gone. I
wanted to be the best artist I could be; no time for playing games. I also had
to decorate and wash dishes!”
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