Two prominent personalities in the
RPG industry, it should be stressed that there are two entirely different flavours of SJ:
The better-known in North America is the one who's the founder of Steve Jackson Games (you know, the creator of GURPS and the one that got raided by the FBI?) wheras
the UK version of this fellow co-started the Fighting Fantasy gamebook phenomenon with Ian Livingstone in the late seventies and rode it out for almost a decade until they split paths to try their hands at the computer game industry. This latter Steve Jackson always insisted on trying new things, messing around with the system, genre and context of the gamebooks, and unfortunately his experimentations were rarely appreciated by his audience, with the notable exception of the Sorcery! gamebooks. Since then, one prominent contribution of his to gaming has been work on the F.I.S.T. ('Fantasy Interactive Scenarios by Telephone') system, a venture which was successful enough for him to buy a villa in Spain!
A slight further complication is that the US Steve Jackson ('Steven Gary Jackson') also tried his hand at a couple of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks - Scorpion Swamp (#8), Demons of the Deep (#19) and Robot Commando (#22). Don't be fooled!