Big Blue Bubble brings five Fighting Fantasy games to iPhone

A phenomenon for spotty English youth in the 1980s, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's book-based role-playing Fighting Fantasy games have always had been something of a draw for computer game makers.

Heck, Ian Livingstone has been running Eidos for the past 15 years, while Steve Jackson was part of Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios.

And now Canadian developer Big Blue Bubble, which incidentally is also working on DS versions of some of the books, is converting the first five into iPhone form.

These will be released in chronological order, starting with Warlock of Firetop Mountain in October 2009, and going onto cover Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon, Creature of Havoc, and City of Thieves every couple of months thereafter.

Of course, thanks to the technology, there will be no need for dice and pencil, nor will you be able to attempt brute force cheating, randomly turning over pages until you selected the correct one.

Instead, features will include automatic page progression, and the ability to shake your combat dice using the iPhone's accelerometer.

Perhaps the most scary fact about the whole escapade however is that, to date, the series consists of 70 titles of which more than 14 million copies have been sold worldwide.