I found an amusing spam blog that mentioned Joe Dever and Lone Wolf. Far be it from me to actually link to the spam blog, so here’s a screenshot of it with the relevant bit highlighted.
Because I’m curious, I had to find out where the text came from: Wikipedia of course. It’s a strange kind of notoriety that gets your name included in spam.
Way back in 1984, the first two Lone Wolf gamebooks—Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water—were adapted for computer play. The games are a combination of text adventure and ‘combat simulator’.
Project Aon has decided to make these games available, since they are part of the history of Lone Wolf. Each of the two games is available in a perfect TZX file, which can be loaded into a Spectrum 48k emulator. Also included are text files of the instructions for each game. They are available here. Here’s a lovely SCREEN$ of the title pic:
We have already done a great deal of work in collecting together previews, reviews, solutions, adverts, and competitions relating to these games in the Lone Wolf Software Articles PDF file, which was recently updated with some new materials. If you happen to know of anything we’ve missed, please let us know!
(Currently, we are not making the game Lone Wolf—The Mirror of Death available for download. We are in contact with the rights holder for that game, and we are still in discussion. More news as we receive it.)
We are indebted to Martijn van der Heide and all who have contributed to the wonderful World of Spectrum website for these games and the relevant magazine articles. For information on emulating the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, this is probably the best resource on the Internet.
We hope these games are more than mere curiosities, but will appeal to any fans with nostalgia for computer emulation, and perhaps even a new generation of fans of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. So grab your sword and prepare for combat–just be careful not to damage your rubber keyboard!
For Sommerlund and the Kai! (And for PEEKers and POKErs everywhere!)
—
Simon Osborne
Project Aon
To help you enjoy our newly published edition of Highway Holocaust, we’ve released the Freeway Warrior Action Chart.
This is a release candidate, so please report any problems that you have so that we can improve it.
For Sommerlund and the Kai!
Jonathan Blake
Project Aon
Project Aon has merited a mention in a rather in depth and serious entry at Intute which seems to be a web directory. Personally, I find it interesting to see how Project Aon is perceived.
You are Cal Phoenix, the Freeway Warrior, champion and protector of Dallas Colony One. A murderous gang of HAVOC clansmen, led by the psychotic Mad Dog Michigan, are bent on destroying your fragile colony as it crosses the wastelands of Texas on the first stage of a life-or-death exodus to the California coast. These bike-riding clansmen are a formidable enemy: armed, cunning, and extremely dangerous, capable of launching a lightning raid at any time, day or night. You will need all your wits about you if you are to defend your people and reach your destination intact!
Keeping the momentum going, we’ve published the first of the Freeway Warrior series, Highway Holocaust. I understand that this series holds a special place in Joe Dever’s heart, and if you haven’t experienced it before, I think you’ll like it. The storytelling and gameplay are very similar to Lone Wolf, but the story is set in a post-apocalyptic America.
This is the first book with full Unicode and PNG support which will make things look more polished, but if you experience any problems, let us know.
Once you’ve completed the adventure, also make sure to check out our latest creation (that’s actually been lurking in the background for years), the Flowchart, a diagram of all the paths through the book.
As always, enjoy!
—
Jonathan Blake
Project Aon
Some more press for the DS project, this time about Fire on the Water.
The generous gamebook fans at the Italian-language Librogame’s Land site have graciously allowed us to host an English-language interview they conducted with Joe Dever regarding his four-book Freeway Warrior series. This is particularly timely in view of Project Aon’s imminent release of the first of these books–Highway Holocaust.
The interview covers the origins of the series through to Dever’s thoughts on how it reflects current fears. Although the interview does contain some spoilers for those who may not have read all or any of the series, these are clearly highlighted, allowing fans to read the bulk of the interview without having their enjoyment spoiled.
To download the interview, visit the Project Aon website. It can be accessed via the Books page as with all of our downloads. This link will take you straight to the download page.
We hope it will whet the appetites of those who have read the books before, and those who are entirely new to this less well-known gamebook series.
For Cal Phoenix and Dallas Colony 1!
—
Simon Osborne
Project Aon
We’ve just received word from Joe Dever that the title for the forthcoming 29th Lone Wolf gamebook will be The Storms of Chai. That’s all we know so far. I’m guessing that this means things are progressing. 🙂
The new edition of Flight from the Dark is a semi-finalist in for the 34th annual Origins Award in the fiction category.
Starting with the semifinalist list, game retailer attendees at this week’s GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas will select up to five finalists in each award category. From those finalists, attendees at the Origins Game Fair and members of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design will select the ultimate winners of the 34th Origins Awards.
This year’s winners will be announced during the Origins Awards ceremony at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday, June 28, at 8:00 p.m.
(via William’s Ramblings)
On Wednesday we published the “Joe Dever’s Tabletop Heroes” PDF file. Although its release was not with any great fanfare, it marked the end of several months of painstaking work to compile these twenty-year-old columns from scans taken from old White Dwarf magazines. On the download page we wrote:
Joe Dever’s Tabletop Heroes was a regular two-page monthly column in White Dwarf magazine between issues #52 (April 1984) and #77 (May 1986). The first 15 are credited as being co-written with Gary Chalk.
The column was devoted to reviews of contemporary miniature releases, but covered other aspects of relevance to miniature collectors, such as painting and photography techniques. As such, while this document will not necessarily be of interest to all fans of Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf gamebooks, it is part of his body of work and merits a place on the Project Aon site.
It seems, therefore, a good opportunity to publicise some of the other documents that Project Aon has compiled regarding Joe Dever’s other works.
Issue #4 of GamesMaster magazine (December 1988) contained a competition in the form of a rewritten mini-adventure based on The Battle of Cetza from Lone Wolf #10: The Dungeons of Torgar. It also featured a two-page interview with the Wytch-king himself–Ian Page. We have faithfully recreated the pertinent parts of this magazine for the benefit of Lone Wolf fans out there.
To date, there have been three official 8-bit Lone Wolf computer games, the most recent of which was The Mirror of Death in 1991. We have collected as many previews, reviews, walkthroughs, and associated articles from the computer press as we could find in the Lone Wolf Computer Games document. The software is not currently hosted on the Project Aon site, though the games can be found on other sites, such as World of Spectrum.
We have a separate document for tracking information pertaining to the forthcoming Ksatria computer game in Lone Wolf Ksatria Articles.
We have attempted to photographically catalogue all of the official Lone Wolf Miniatures in another document. Included are photographs of all of the Games Workshop range of miniatures, as well as scans of the original box packaging and official adverts from Games Workshop.
And finally, there are the two Lone Wolf Miscellaneous documents. The first deals with mail order forms, pricelists, and adverts relating to Lone Wolf and other items developed by Joe Dever. The second is comprised of various correspondence with Joe Dever, and related images, as well as reproducing articles written by Joe Dever, or about his works.
Of course, there are bound to be plenty of magazine articles that we are missing. For example, we have little or no previews or reviews of The Mirror of Death for the Amiga, Amstrad, Atari, C64/128, and MSX platforms. Also, we are aware of a number of articles relating to Joe Dever/Lone Wolf in magazines we have been unable to track down.
If you have any back-issues of role-playing or computer magazines from the 80s and 90s, you might be able to help us track down some known (or unknown) articles such as those found on the Wishlist. If you can help us, please Contact Us with more details. Your fellow fans will be most thankful.
For Sommerlund and the Kai!