HDK 219 † GNOLL “F.I.S.T.” Soundtrack CASSETTE

Fantasy Interactive Scenarios by Telephone (F.I.S.T.): Who remembers this brilliant invention? It was 1988; smartphones didn’t exist, and phones were rudimentary devices on which you could simply dial numbers. The inventive game designer Steve Jackson—the creative mind behind the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, along with his partner Ian Livingstone—imagined a phone number that could connect us to another dimension. There, a voice would guide us on fantastic adventures, armed only with our phone’s number pad, through which we could make choices and manage thrilling battles!

That’s how “The Castle of Mammon” came to be—the first interactive fantasy scenario for the telephone! This precursor to audiobooks was brought back to life a few years ago by the brilliant Swedish independent software company Sound Realms. After obtaining the official license from Steve Jackson, the Sound Realms team patiently digitized all the analog tapes created back then and developed an app that can be played on our modern smartphones. Could Gnoll have resisted the temptation to create the soundtrack for this incredible, authentic ’80s game? Of course not!