Dystopian Fiction/Double Feature

In 1985, the thirteenth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Freeway Fighter, was published, the seventh entry in the range to be written by its co-creator Ian Livingstone. The book is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Livingstone (and the range in general) is usually associated with, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Between 1988 and 1989, the four gamebooks in the Freeway Warrior series by Joe Dever were published; Highway Holocaust (published as Freeway Warrior 1 in the US), Slaughter Mountain Run (published as Mountain Run in the US), The Omega Zone and California Countdown. The series is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Dever is usually associated with in his better known Lone Wolf series, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Before we take a closer look at Freeway Fighter, it would be worth noting that whilst it was Livingstone's only gamebook in the genre, it was not his only game; two years previously Games Workshop had published Battlecars, a wargame based around car-to-car combat in a post-apocalyptic world also heavily inspired by Rockatansky and friends, which Livingstone devised with Gary Chalk, who illustrated the first eight Lone Wolf books but had ended his creative partnership with Dever to pursue his own projects before Freeway Warrior began. (When Freeway Fighter was republished by Wizard Books in 2005, it was not given new cover art but instead the old cover art from Battlecars!) In 1988, the same year as Freeway Warrior began, Games Workshop also released Dark Future, devised by Marc Gascoigne and Richard Halliwell, which is sometimes described as essentially being a revised and expanded version of Battlecars. There are dozens of other games with similar scenarios, from Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars (which, for the record, predated the first Mad Max film's American release, although many later expansions took inspiration from the franchise) to Gaslands.

But anyway, the basic rules for Freeway Fighter are broadly the same as those in the rest of the franchise, with the noticeable difference that your STAMINA is calculated by 2d6 + 24, not +12, owing to the larger number of opportunities than usual to get this number hacked down. In addition, the number of STAMINA points a successful hit in hand-to-hand combat is dependent on what weapons you are using, and all hand-to-hand fights end upon one party successfully inflicting 6 STAMINA points of damage upon the other unless it is expressly stated they are to the death. There are also special rules for combats conducted with firearms or vehicle-to-vehicle fights (which require you to roll up a second set of statistics determining your car's FIREPOWER and ARMOUR), both of which are to the death.

In terms of storyline, Freeway Fighter opens in the year 2022, and the premise draws more from Survivors than Mad Max: an unknown disease wipes out 85% of the world's population in four days, and civilisation promptly falls into ruins. Six months later, the survivors are divided into those seeking to restore order and gangs revelling in the disorder, and you are living in a fortress town known as New Hope when the council receive a message from a fortified oil refinery near San Anglo offering to trade 10,000 litres of petrol in return for grain and seeds, and you volunteer to make the dangerous journey south.

Freeway Fighter was adapted into a graphic novel in 2017, which doesn't really come up in this article but does let me break up this massive wall of text with something.

The rules for Freeway Warrior are broadly the same as that of Lone Wolf; the Kai Disciplines of the latter are replaced by Survival Skills, but work very differently. Whilst in Lone Wolf you had to choose five disciplines from a list of nine or so and could add a new one for every book in the series you completed, in Freeway Warrior there are five basic skills (Driving, Shooting, Field Craft, Stealth and Perception), and the player begins with 3 points in each category plus 4 points they can 'spend' how they wish, much like an RPG (Stealth can also be negatively affected by carrying too many inventory items). For each book in the series you successfully complete you get another 4 points which you can add to your skills at the start of the next book. As with Fighter, there are also special rules for using firearms (both in and outside of combat); combat otherwise plays out more or less identically to Lone Wolf.

The backstory of Warrior is perhaps a little more Mad Max-esque than Fighter: in 2012 an organisation known as HAVOC (The Hijack, Assassination and Violent Opposition Consortium) steals seventeen nuclear warheads and plants them in major cities throughout the United States, Europe and the USSR, calling for the release of all incarcerated HAVOC agents and $2 trillion in gold. Although the World Defence League discover the location of HAVOC's headquarters and kill all its agents before the deadline expires, a transmitter simultaneously detonates all the warheads.

Fortunately, at the moment this happens you are 300 feet underground, being given a guided tour of the oil mine run by your Uncle Jonas, and spend the next eight years trapped there until the radiation clears and a tunnel is built through the central shaft of the mine, which was blocked by the impact of the warheads. You and the other survivors emerge to an uninhabitable wasteland and begin contacting other communities, but learn the survivors are divided into those seeking to restore order and gangs revelling in the disorder. The group of survivors you are in establishes base at a frontier post which becomes known as Dallas Colony One.

Six months after DC1 is established, a drought threatens to destroy the food and water supply, but then the colony is contacted by another group of survivors some 300 miles west, whose situation is the opposite: they have plenty of food and water, but are running dangerously low on fuel. You also learn from this group that much of southern California escaped the worst of the apocalypse and is still largely populated, giving you hope your family might also have survived. DC1 decides to rendezvous with the other group of survivors as soon as possible to exchange food and fuel, then begin the journey to California (although from the second book onwards, you are usually on your own rather than part of a convoy).

Obviously Dever came up with the more ambitious storyline, not least because he had four books to tell it in instead of one. Both Fighter and Warrior have some similarities you might expect: in both cases petrol is a valuable commodity, and keeping some in reserve is vital (although as you spend most of Fighter on your own it is more of a pressing matter, with not having a full canister of petrol liable to lead to a game over). You are frequently given the opportunity to loot long-abandoned buildings for equipment, which has to be balanced against the risk of meeting someone or something hostile in the course of your scavenging. You can be ambushed by various eccentric or murderous characters, race other cars, or play a game of chicken with them. Both feature a hyper-violent gang as their main villain (the Doom Dogs led by 'the Animal' in Fighter, the remains of HAVOC led by 'Mad Dog' Michigan in Warrior). In Freeway Fighter you can meet Amber, your contact from San Anglo, who becomes your Guest-Star Party Member for a while; a roughly analogous character in Warrior is Kate, a girl you rescue from marauders early on in the first book, who is -- unusually for Dever -- expressly presented as your character's love interest. The two series give virtually identical names to their primary means of healing (Med-Kits vs Medi-kits).

As against all that, Dever requires you to keep track of how much ammunition you have to hand and gives you a choice of four different guns (Pistol, Machine Pistol, Shotgun or Rifle), with your gun being unusable if you run out of ammo until you find some more, whereas the instructions for Fighter expressly say your revolver is assumed to have unlimited ammunition. (Fighter puts more emphasis on finding petrol as your priority when scavenging, whereas Warrior puts more emphasis on finding more ammunition for your gun, with each weapon requiring a different type of ammo.) Warrior also does not include special rules for car-to-car combat, and Fighter also equips your car with missiles, iron spike canisters and oil slicks as optional weapons, which is not so in Warrior. Freeway Fighter also includes an optional sidequest, which is very unusual for Livingstone; partway through the story you learn that New Hope's council leader, Sinclair, has been kidnapped, and rescuing him is optional but not required. Warrior feels in general like it goes to some slightly darker places, with an encounter with two victims of severe radiation poisoning in the first book standing out as being borderline unsuitable for children. (The fourth book also has a logic puzzle I've always been quite fond of where you have to serve on a jury when a colonist is murdered and vote for who is guilty, which is not dissimilar to a puzzle which crops up in the second Lone Wolf book.)

The American cover of the first FW book, which as mentioned was just titled Freeway Warrior 1, presumably (and quite understandably) because someone took issue with the use of "holocaust" in the original title.

The illustrations for Fighter were the sole Fighting Fantasy commission for video game artist Kevin Bulmer (the cover art was provided by Jim Burns, who also provided art for Battlecars), whilst those of the first Warrior book were the only collaboration between Dever and Melvyn Grant, who provided the cover art for several of Wizard Books' Fighting Fantasy reissues over a decade later; Grant only provided the covers for the latter three books whilst Brian Williams, who replaced Gary Chalk as Lone Wolf illustrator, was on internal duties.

Dever goes for a slightly more definitive "society is recovering" ending than Livingstone's "society is hopefully beginning to recover"; again, this is likely down to the greater scale of Warrior (although I've always found it a little curious that Dever covers the revelation that all your family really did survive in a single line in the final section!)