IN THE EARLY 1980s A dangerous craze was sweeping Britain’s playgrounds. Critics scorned it as dumb and regressive. Child psychologists fretted that its wanton violence would derail youthful morals. A distressed Christian “young wives group” in Berkshire claimed that “all kinds of exterior evil things had been happening to their children” since they’d taken up the hobby. One mum claimed that, after partaking in this dark art, her son had actually levitated.

The cause of all this hoo-ha was a series of books called Fighting Fantasy – now celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special edition of the first volume, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Fighting Fantasy books are “gamebooks” in which you – the reader – become the hero. Written in the second person, and divided into numbered paragraphs, they allow you to navigate your own way through the story: after each paragraph you must make a decision (turn east or west, bribe the gate-keeper or attack him) that then sends you off to another page. As the name suggests, the landscape is usually dark, gothic fantasy – the covers and pages are adorned with dramatic illustrations of grisly monsters – and the action often involves bloody battles.

It seems quaint to picture adults up in arms at a spot of imaginary orc-bashing: parents today would be so grateful that their 11-year-old son was actually reading a book rather than practising Grand Theft Auto hit-and-runs, downloading porn onto his iPhone or instant-messaging death-row inmates that they wouldn’t give two hoots whether it was Fighting Fantasy or Harry Potter or The 120 Days of Sodom. At any rate, even those Christian mums couldn’t hold back the tide: launched in 1982 by Puffin, Fighting Fantasy went on to sell more than 16 million books in 21 languages.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, however, was not the first work of interactive fiction. The possibility was mooted in Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Garden of Forking Paths, in which the characters discover an extraordinary novel where “all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings”. It was Raymond Queneau, founder of Oulipo (Workshop for Potential Literature), though, who wrote the first proper example of the genre in 1967, even if his A Story As You Like It is unreasonably concerned with vegetables (“Do you wish to hear the story of the three alert peas? If yes, go to 4; if no, go to 2”).

Nobody quite grasped the commercial possibilities of gamebooks until one evening a couple of years after Queneau’s experiment. Edward Packard, a Manhattan lawyer, was telling his daughters a bedtime story, and he asked them what they thought the hero should do next. They each chose something different. Packard wondered: “What would happen if you wrote both endings?” So he did, and the resulting book The Adventure of You on Sugar Cane Island was eventually published in 1975. Its immediate success led to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, which now has almost 200 titles and 250 million copies in print worldwide.

So when Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, founders of wargaming empire Games Workshop, created Fighting Fantasy, the format was already established. But, crucially, they had something that their predecessors didn’t: fighting! Choose Your Own Adventure books were all about evasive action but in FF combat was instrumental to the game: a clever system of dice-rolling and stamina and skill scores allowed you to hack away at winged gremlins and wererats until you either reached the treasure or hit the floor.

The FF books really were compulsive reading for a ten-year-old: I remember spending an entire 15-hour car journey one holiday ploughing through The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, mapping my progress and losing my dice under the seat. When we finally arrived I was still completely lost in Firetop Mountain, and eventually had to be prised from the car and returned to the real world, where the decisions seemed a lot more complex and there were considerably fewer goblins. Reading was a solo pursuit, but games you usually needed friends for: FF ingeniously combined the two and so proved invaluable to solitary kids.

Despite the accusations of moral decay, FF proved itself in some ways a force for good: a young boy wrote to a newspaper in 1986 complaining about the bad press and explaining that “these books are complicated and exciting and stretch a child’s mind and make them want to read more”.

And only last year a Year 8 tutor writing in the TES described his success in using a FF book in the class-room to engage reluctant readers.

Fighting Fantasy can also be thanked for the explosion in gamebooks in the late 1980s. When I grew tired of swords and sorcery, there were plenty of other options: I could hang out with interactive reworkings of the Famous Five, or fly Biggles’ plane (which turned out to be rather confusing, involving fuel gauge cards that I never could quite work out) – had I been more of a sportsman I could even have kicked an imaginary ball about in The Football Adventure Game.

Both Jackson and Livingstone work in computer games now (Livingstone is creative director of Eidos, publishers of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) but, remarkably, there is still demand for the old-fashioned adventure books: Wizard Books are producing new FF titles, and a range of Doctor Who “Decide Your Destiny” books was published last month.

And this year HarperCollins US brought out possibly the strangest gamebook yet: Pretty Little Mistakes by Heather McElhatton, an adult interactive novel with 150 possible “real-life” endings, in which you might end up a phone sex operator or running an award-winning B&B. What next, I wonder: Fighting Families? Choose Your Own Mortgage? I think I’ll stick with the warlock.

THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN: 25th Anniversary Edition by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone

Wizard Books, £8.99; 240pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £8.54 (inc p&p)

The back story

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone began their Games Workshop business in 1975, distributing the American role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and publishing a cultishly-monikered gaming newsletter, Owl and Weasel

FF produced games for the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 in the 1980s, and several titles are available as mobile phone games in – where else? – Japan

There are 68 official Fighting Fantasy books, all with “evocative” titles such as The Keep of the Lich-Lord, Slaves of the Abyss, Master of Chaos and Island of the Lizard King

The only country where FF has never been out of print is France. So that’s what all the bespectacled intellectuals are hiding behind their copies of Camus and Derrida . . .

Seven noninteractive novels have been written, set in the FF universe. You'll no doubt be pleased to hear that old friends Oldoran Zagor, Yaztromo and Verminthrax the crow make appearances

Fighting Fantasy has a huge online fanbase at fightingfantasygamebooks.com, where you can take part in such polls as “Which type of environment do you like to experience in FF? Outdoor wilderness, urban cityscape, claustrophobic dungeon, high seas or a mixture?” Ooh – a little bit of everything, please.

What would you do

From THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN (entry 25)

The original Tolkienesque quest The paintings are portraits of men. Your spine shivers as you read the nameplate under the one on the west wall – it is Zagor, the Warlock whose treasure you are seeking. You look at his portrait and realise you are pitting yourself against an awesome adversary. Do you have the courage to try to combat the Warlock? You may either leave through the north door straightaway (turn to 90). Or you may look through your pack for a weapon to use against the Warlock's power – turn to 340.

From APPOINTMENT WITH F.E.A.R. (entry 26)

One-off Superhero Adventure A crowd is gathering around a large black limousine which has crashed into a streetlamp. A fire has started in the rear of the car and is spreading. Do you wish to run downstairs in your street clothes (turn to 102), or nip into the toilet to change into the Silver Crusader (turn to 23)? Alternatively you may ignore the incident and go back to work (turn to 167).

From SORCERY! THE SHAMUTANTI HILLS (entry 279)

Hardcore magic in the heart of darkness You have been captured by ELVINS! Elvins are impish creatures, more mischievous than malevolent. They ask whether you are a magician and, if so, will you show them some tricks. If you will perform for them, turn to 132. Otherwise turn to 218.

Times Recommends

• 10 things you should avoid in hospital (unless there really is no option)
• Exclusive: Philip Pullman's essential reading list
• The White War by Mark Thompson