Gamebook
Encyclopedia
A gamebook is a work of fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making effective choices. The narrative branches along various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. The genre was mainly popular during the 1980s.
Gamebooks are sometimes called choose your own adventure books or CYOA, the title of one particular long and popular series by Bantam Books.
Gamebooks are usually written in the second person
with the reader assuming the role of a fictional character. The titles are usually published in series containing several books, although individual gamebooks have also been published. While the books in many series are stand-alone narratives, others continue the narrative from the previous books in the series.
There are three types of gamebooks. The first is the branching-plot novel (an example of this is the Choose Your Own Adventure
series of gamebooks), which require the reader to make choices but are otherwise like a regular novel. The second type is the role-playing game
solitaire adventure (an example of this is the Tunnels and Trolls
series of gamebooks), which combines the branching-plot novel with the rules of a role-playing game, allowing the game to be played without a Gamemaster
but requiring the purchase of separate manuals. The third type is the adventure gamebook (examples of these are the Fighting Fantasy
and Lone Wolf
series of gamebooks), which combines the branching-plot novel with simple role-playing rules included with each book.
' Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain, published in 1941, featured a fictional author, whose novel is a three-part story containing two branch points, thus having nine possible endings. Borges' later work El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths
)' describes a Chinese writer who goes into seclusion to write a book and construct a maze, the twist being that the end result is a combination of the two, but in one item – the fictional novel is a maze-like narrative which only makes sense if read in the correct manner, although this fictional book requires the reader to use deduction to determine the correct order of reading, rather than providing instructions like the modern gamebook.
Branching-path books first emerged in the late fifties, although the first uses of the format were educational rather than literary. The idea of using specially prepared books to allow students to learn without a teacher is credited to American behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner
. The way this type of programmed learning
works is
"Students choose from multiple-choice answers and then are prompted to proceed to another page of the book depending on their answer. If a correct answer is given, students move on to another page with more information to learn and more questions to answer. An incorrect answer leads to comments on why the answer is incorrect and a direction to return to the original question to make another selection."
The TutorText series of interactive textbooks, published in the United States and United Kingdom between 1958 and 1972, used this method to teach a wide variety of subjects to a mainstream audience. Programmed learning books were acknowledged by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as an influence on the development of fiction gamebooks.
It is difficult to pin the origins of fiction gamebooks down to a specific time and place, since there were nearly simultaneous early developments in several different languages and countries. If we leave aside the programmed learning books, the idea of using the format for literary purposes seems partly to have been motivated by a heightened interest in literary experimentation during the sixties. The experimental French literary group 'the Oulipo
', active during the 1960s, discussed the gamebook format, under the name 'tree literature'. Within the Oulipo the idea was proposed by François Le Lionnais
and was first implemented by Raymond Queneau
in his short story "Un conte à votre façon". The Oulipo also applied the idea to theatre, with Paul Fournel
and Jean-Pierre Énard implementing this in the form of The Theater Tree: A Combinatory Play.
Another early example of use of the form for literary experimentation is the work of American writer John Sladek
, who towards the end of the sixties published the short stories Alien Territory and The Lost Nose: a Programmed Adventure.
At nearly the same time, there were other early developments which were meant as mass entertainment. Lucky Les, a book by E.W. Hildick published in 1967, constitutes an example. The book allowed the reader to determine the fate of a fictional cat by making choices and turning pages accordingly. In this same vein, author Dennis Guerrier and some collaborators tried their hand at the medium in 1969, with an interactive thriller, a political simulation and programmed solitaire games Boxes and Noughts and Crosses (which show the influence of programmed learning methods). Another early example was Den mystiska påsen, a Swedish book published in 1970, which involved a bag of stolen gems. In 1971, Italian author Gianni Rodari
wrote Tante Storie per Giocare, a book of fantasy tales for children which allowed them to choose among several endings.
series.
American author Edward Packard
claims to have come up with the idea of branching-path novels while telling bedtime stories to his three children in the late sixties. He wrote his first such book, Sugarcane Island in 1969, and it saw publication in 1976, thus beginning the The Adventures of You series. It was soon joined by Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery
.
Both authors took the idea of creating interactive books to Bantam
, and thus the Choose Your Own Adventure
(CYOA) series was born in 1979, beginning with The Cave of Time. The series became immensely popular worldwide and several titles were translated into more than 25 languages. The series reached the peak of its popularity with children in the eighties. It was during this period that Bantam released several other interactive series to capitalize on the popularity of the medium (a few examples are: Choose your Own Adventure for Younger Readers, Time Machine and Be An Interplanetary Spy). Many other American publishers released their own series to compete with CYOA. One of the most popular competitors seems to have been TSR, who released several branching-path novels based on their own role-playing games. The most famous TSR series was Endless Quest
. Another strong competitor was Ballantine
with their Find your Fate series, which featured adventures in the Indiana Jones
and James Bond
universes. Famous author R. L. Stine
wrote several books for this line, and also for other series such as Wizards, Warriors and You. Several Choose your Own Adventure spin-offs and many competing series were translated into other languages.
Branching-path books also started to appear during the eighties in several other countries, including Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Reunion, Mexico, Chile and Denmark. In some other countries, publication both of translated series and of original books began in later years. For example, the first original books in Brazil and Italy seem to have appeared in the nineties. Translated editions of Choose your Own Adventure and other Western series only appeared in Eastern European countries after the fall of socialism.
This type of book was seen predominantly as a form of entertainment for children. Nonetheless, there were books with more didactic purposes (ranging from historical series such as the aforementioned Time Machine to books with religious themes such as the Making Choices series). Also, a few branching-path books were aimed at adults, ranging from business simulations to works of erotica.
The branching-path book commercial boom dwindled in the early nineties, and the number of new series diminished. However, new branching-path books continue to be published to this day in several countries and languages. Choose your Own Adventure went on to become the longest running gamebook series with 185 titles. The first run of the series ended in 1998. Also noteworthy is the Give Yourself Goosebumps series, based on the famous Goosebumps
property. This branching-path series was very popular in the nineties.
R. A. Montgomery started rereleasing some Choose Your Own Adventure titles in 2005. His company has also released some new titles. New books and series continue to be published in other countries to this day. Examples are the 1000 Gefahren series in Germany and the Tú decides la aventura series in Spain.
(e.g. the La Saga du Prêtre Jean series).
In the 1990s, after the fall of Communism, the genre became highly popular in Bulgaria
for a period of about ten years, although it was well past the peak of its popularity in the West by that time. While internationally known series such as Choose Your Own Adventure
and Fighting Fantasy
were also translated, the period was mostly characterized by the work of a vast number of Bulgarian gamebook authors, some of them immensely productive and popular. Since Bulgarian publishing houses at the time believed that only Western names would sell, virtually all Bulgarian gamebook authors wrote under English pseudonyms, a tradition that persisted despite the fact that their nationality soon became clear to the public. A similar phemonenon, though on a much smaller scale, occurred in Hungary
, where an appreciable number of original gamebooks were published, most of them with pseudonyms and even "official titles" in English. There have also been several adventure gamebooks released in the Czech Republic and Russia. Also in Azerbaijan the novel "Open It's Me" by Narmin Kamal. The novel offers its reader read it as random 39 short stories about the same guy, or as a novel from beginning to the end. In the last page it was published a photo of the hero of the book and author asks if the readers met this guy and do they know other stories about him.
published a bestselling gamebook for adults in 2007, called Pretty Little Mistakes:A Do-Over Novel
. It was followed by a sequel titled Million Little Mistakes published in 2010.
have been published by major publishers. In 1994 Derrière la porte by Alina Reyes was published by Pocket Books France
and Éditions Robert Laffont
, and later translated into English for Grove Press
and Weidenfeld & Nicolson
(as Behind Closed Doors) and into Italian for Ugo Guanda Editore (as Dietro le porte). Melcher Media
in 2003 packaged two "Choose-Your-Own-Erotic-Adventure" books for Penguin Books
' Gotham Books imprint, including Kathryn in the City by Mary Anne Mohanraj
, a well-known writer of erotica.
system, beginning with the book Buffalo Castle
in 1976, making Tunnels and Trolls the first role-playing game to support solitaire play. Flying Buffalo released 24 solo adventure books (plus several pocket size adventures) in the period 1976–1993. A number of the adventures are still in print today. They were very successful among players of role-playing games and inspired many imitators. Starting in the seventies, several solo modules were released for other games (one of the most famous is The Solo Dungeon for Dungeons & Dragons).
Another early role-playing game with solitaire modules made for it was The Fantasy Trip. The first such module was Death Test, published in 1978. Eight adventures were released in total. One thing that set them apart was the need for miniatures and a hexmap, in order to take advantage of the combat and movement systems. These adventures were also very popular and influential.
Solitaire role-playing adventures also experienced a boom in the eighties. Many role-playing rulesets included solo adventures which were intended to teach the rules systems to the players. Some companies released lines of solitaire adventures for their own games. Examples of games with prolific solitaire lines were Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, Das Schwarze Auge, DC Heroes and Call of Cthulhu. Solitaire adventures were also featured quite frequently in professional RPG magazines and fanzines. Several solo adventures (such as those for Tunnels & Trolls, Dungeons & Dragons and Das Schwarze Auge) were translated into other languages.
As was the case with other types of gamebooks, the production of solitaire RPG adventures decreased dramatically during the nineties. However, new solos continue to be published to this day. Some companies continue to produce solo adventures for Tunnels & Trolls. There are also new solo adventures for a variety of systems, and even some influenced by the The Fantasy Trip solos (such as the ones by Dark City Games). The Internet has provided a channel to distribute solitaire adventures, with both free and commercial adventures made available as electronic documents.
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
was published in 1982, the first of what became the Fighting Fantasy
series of gamebooks, one of the first adventure gamebook series. With over 60 titles, including a variety of spin-offs, the series popularised the gamebook format in the UK and many other countries, like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, the United States, Portugal, Tanzania, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Israel, Japan, and after the fall of communism, Eastern Europe. Also in 1982, American author Jeffrey C. Dillow published solo adventures in book format for his High Fantasy role-playing game which, unlike previous RPG solitaire adventures, included all rules required for play. These did not prove to be as popular as the Fighting Fantasy books.
Adventure gamebooks experienced a publishing boom in the eighties, most notably in the United Kingdom, the United States and France. British series such as Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and The Way of the Tiger were translated into several languages and became very popular worldwide. The boom decreased considerably in the nineties, with Fabled Lands being the last major British gamebook series. In the 2000s, the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series started being reissued, with some commercial success. Several authors in different countries continue to publish adventure gamebooks to this day. Notable examples are German fantasy authors Wolfgang Hohlbein
and Markus Heitz
, and British author Jonathan Green
.
.
In the late 1980s, a new type of non-linear text-based storytelling, known as the addventure
, was created by Allen Firstenberg with collaborative, round robin
-style authorship in mind. The idea has led to the creation of large, web-based archives of potentially neverending stories linked together by hyperlink
s.
Gamebooks are sometimes called choose your own adventure books or CYOA, the title of one particular long and popular series by Bantam Books.
Description
At the end of a text section, the reader is usually presented with a choice of narrative branches that they may follow, with each option containing a reference to the number of the paragraph that should be read next if the option is chosen. The reader may eventually reach a concluding paragraph which will bring the narrative to an end. In most gamebooks only one (or if more than this, a distinct minority) of the concluding paragraphs will end the narrative with a "successful" ending, with the others ending the narrative with a "failure" ending.Gamebooks are usually written in the second person
Second-person narrative
The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun "you"....
with the reader assuming the role of a fictional character. The titles are usually published in series containing several books, although individual gamebooks have also been published. While the books in many series are stand-alone narratives, others continue the narrative from the previous books in the series.
There are three types of gamebooks. The first is the branching-plot novel (an example of this is the Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...
series of gamebooks), which require the reader to make choices but are otherwise like a regular novel. The second type is the role-playing game
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...
solitaire adventure (an example of this is the Tunnels and Trolls
Tunnels and Trolls
Tunnels & Trolls is a fantasy role-playing game designed by Ken St. Andre and first published in 1975 by Flying Buffalo. The second modern role-playing game published, it was written by Ken St...
series of gamebooks), which combines the branching-plot novel with the rules of a role-playing game, allowing the game to be played without a Gamemaster
Gamemaster
A gamemaster is a person who acts as an organizer, officiant for questions regarding rules, arbitrator, and moderator for a multiplayer game...
but requiring the purchase of separate manuals. The third type is the adventure gamebook (examples of these are the Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy is a series of single-player fantasy roleplay gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volumes in the series were published by Puffin in 1982, with the rights to the franchise eventually being purchased by Wizard Books in 2002...
and Lone Wolf
Lone Wolf (gamebooks)
Lone Wolf is a series of 28 gamebooks, created by Joe Dever and initially illustrated by Gary Chalk. The series began publishing in July 1984 and sold more than 10.2 million copies worldwide....
series of gamebooks), which combines the branching-plot novel with simple role-playing rules included with each book.
Pioneering efforts (1940s–1970s)
The gamebook format was speculated on before it actually existed. Argentinian author Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
' Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain, published in 1941, featured a fictional author, whose novel is a three-part story containing two branch points, thus having nine possible endings. Borges' later work El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths
The Garden of Forking Paths
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan , which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones in 1944...
)' describes a Chinese writer who goes into seclusion to write a book and construct a maze, the twist being that the end result is a combination of the two, but in one item – the fictional novel is a maze-like narrative which only makes sense if read in the correct manner, although this fictional book requires the reader to use deduction to determine the correct order of reading, rather than providing instructions like the modern gamebook.
Branching-path books first emerged in the late fifties, although the first uses of the format were educational rather than literary. The idea of using specially prepared books to allow students to learn without a teacher is credited to American behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, baseball enthusiast, social philosopher and poet...
. The way this type of programmed learning
Programmed learning
Programmed Learning or Programmed Instruction is a learning methodology or technique first proposed by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner in 1958. According to Skinner, the purpose of programmed learning is to "manage human learning under controlled conditions"...
works is
"Students choose from multiple-choice answers and then are prompted to proceed to another page of the book depending on their answer. If a correct answer is given, students move on to another page with more information to learn and more questions to answer. An incorrect answer leads to comments on why the answer is incorrect and a direction to return to the original question to make another selection."
The TutorText series of interactive textbooks, published in the United States and United Kingdom between 1958 and 1972, used this method to teach a wide variety of subjects to a mainstream audience. Programmed learning books were acknowledged by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as an influence on the development of fiction gamebooks.
It is difficult to pin the origins of fiction gamebooks down to a specific time and place, since there were nearly simultaneous early developments in several different languages and countries. If we leave aside the programmed learning books, the idea of using the format for literary purposes seems partly to have been motivated by a heightened interest in literary experimentation during the sixties. The experimental French literary group 'the Oulipo
Oulipo
Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
', active during the 1960s, discussed the gamebook format, under the name 'tree literature'. Within the Oulipo the idea was proposed by François Le Lionnais
François Le Lionnais
François Le Lionnais was a French chemical engineer and mathematician, perhaps best known as a founder of the literary movement Oulipo....
and was first implemented by Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
in his short story "Un conte à votre façon". The Oulipo also applied the idea to theatre, with Paul Fournel
Paul Fournel
Paul Fournel is a French writer, poet, publisher, and cultural ambassador. He was educated at the École normale supérieure of Saint-Cloud . Fournel wrote his master's thesis on Raymond Queneau and published the first book-length study of the Oulipo, Clefs pour la littérature potentielle...
and Jean-Pierre Énard implementing this in the form of The Theater Tree: A Combinatory Play.
Another early example of use of the form for literary experimentation is the work of American writer John Sladek
John Sladek
John Thomas Sladek was an American science fiction author, known for his satirical and surreal novels.- Life and work :...
, who towards the end of the sixties published the short stories Alien Territory and The Lost Nose: a Programmed Adventure.
At nearly the same time, there were other early developments which were meant as mass entertainment. Lucky Les, a book by E.W. Hildick published in 1967, constitutes an example. The book allowed the reader to determine the fate of a fictional cat by making choices and turning pages accordingly. In this same vein, author Dennis Guerrier and some collaborators tried their hand at the medium in 1969, with an interactive thriller, a political simulation and programmed solitaire games Boxes and Noughts and Crosses (which show the influence of programmed learning methods). Another early example was Den mystiska påsen, a Swedish book published in 1970, which involved a bag of stolen gems. In 1971, Italian author Gianni Rodari
Gianni Rodari
Gianni Rodari was an Italian writer and journalist, most famous for his books for children. He won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1970 and is considered by many to be Italy's most important twentieth-century children's author...
wrote Tante Storie per Giocare, a book of fantasy tales for children which allowed them to choose among several endings.
Branching-path books
However, the popularization of fiction gamebooks began in the seventies, spearheaded by several developments in the English-speaking world. The Tracker series of gamebooks, possibly the first fiction gamebooks to be published as a series, featured interactive adventures covering a range of genres. Twelve titles were released in the United Kingdom during the period ranging from 1972 to 1980. Aimed at older children, they can be considered a precursor to the more popular Choose Your Own AdventureChoose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...
series.
American author Edward Packard
Edward Packard
Edward Packard is an American author, in addition to his work as a lawyer, essayist, and poet. He was born in Huntington, New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School...
claims to have come up with the idea of branching-path novels while telling bedtime stories to his three children in the late sixties. He wrote his first such book, Sugarcane Island in 1969, and it saw publication in 1976, thus beginning the The Adventures of You series. It was soon joined by Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery
R. A. Montgomery
Raymond Almiran Montgomery is an American author and key figure in the Choose Your Own Adventure interactive children's book series.-Career:...
.
Both authors took the idea of creating interactive books to Bantam
Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by Random House, the German media corporation subsidiary of Bertelsmann; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine...
, and thus the Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...
(CYOA) series was born in 1979, beginning with The Cave of Time. The series became immensely popular worldwide and several titles were translated into more than 25 languages. The series reached the peak of its popularity with children in the eighties. It was during this period that Bantam released several other interactive series to capitalize on the popularity of the medium (a few examples are: Choose your Own Adventure for Younger Readers, Time Machine and Be An Interplanetary Spy). Many other American publishers released their own series to compete with CYOA. One of the most popular competitors seems to have been TSR, who released several branching-path novels based on their own role-playing games. The most famous TSR series was Endless Quest
Endless Quest
The Endless Quest books were two series of gamebooks released by TSR. These books were the result of an Educational department established by TSR to develop curriculum programs for reading, math, history, and problem solving....
. Another strong competitor was Ballantine
Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...
with their Find your Fate series, which featured adventures in the Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones
Colonel Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Ph.D. is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials...
and James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
universes. Famous author R. L. Stine
R. L. Stine
Robert Lawrence Stine , known as R. L. Stine, and Jovial Bob Stine, is an American writer. Stine, who is called the "Stephen King of children's literature," is the author of hundreds of horror fiction novels, including the books in the Fear Street, Goosebumps, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, and The...
wrote several books for this line, and also for other series such as Wizards, Warriors and You. Several Choose your Own Adventure spin-offs and many competing series were translated into other languages.
Branching-path books also started to appear during the eighties in several other countries, including Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Reunion, Mexico, Chile and Denmark. In some other countries, publication both of translated series and of original books began in later years. For example, the first original books in Brazil and Italy seem to have appeared in the nineties. Translated editions of Choose your Own Adventure and other Western series only appeared in Eastern European countries after the fall of socialism.
This type of book was seen predominantly as a form of entertainment for children. Nonetheless, there were books with more didactic purposes (ranging from historical series such as the aforementioned Time Machine to books with religious themes such as the Making Choices series). Also, a few branching-path books were aimed at adults, ranging from business simulations to works of erotica.
The branching-path book commercial boom dwindled in the early nineties, and the number of new series diminished. However, new branching-path books continue to be published to this day in several countries and languages. Choose your Own Adventure went on to become the longest running gamebook series with 185 titles. The first run of the series ended in 1998. Also noteworthy is the Give Yourself Goosebumps series, based on the famous Goosebumps
Goosebumps
Goosebumps is a series of children's horror fiction novels written by American author R. L. Stine and first published by Scholastic Publishing. It is a collection of stories that feature semi-homogenous plot structures, with fictional children being involved in scary situations...
property. This branching-path series was very popular in the nineties.
R. A. Montgomery started rereleasing some Choose Your Own Adventure titles in 2005. His company has also released some new titles. New books and series continue to be published in other countries to this day. Examples are the 1000 Gefahren series in Germany and the Tú decides la aventura series in Spain.
Outside the English-speaking world
Despite the domination of translations from English in most non-English-speaking countries, a sizable number of original gamebooks – both individual books and series – have also been published in various countries, especially in FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
(e.g. the La Saga du Prêtre Jean series).
In the 1990s, after the fall of Communism, the genre became highly popular in Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
for a period of about ten years, although it was well past the peak of its popularity in the West by that time. While internationally known series such as Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...
and Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy is a series of single-player fantasy roleplay gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volumes in the series were published by Puffin in 1982, with the rights to the franchise eventually being purchased by Wizard Books in 2002...
were also translated, the period was mostly characterized by the work of a vast number of Bulgarian gamebook authors, some of them immensely productive and popular. Since Bulgarian publishing houses at the time believed that only Western names would sell, virtually all Bulgarian gamebook authors wrote under English pseudonyms, a tradition that persisted despite the fact that their nationality soon became clear to the public. A similar phemonenon, though on a much smaller scale, occurred in Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, where an appreciable number of original gamebooks were published, most of them with pseudonyms and even "official titles" in English. There have also been several adventure gamebooks released in the Czech Republic and Russia. Also in Azerbaijan the novel "Open It's Me" by Narmin Kamal. The novel offers its reader read it as random 39 short stories about the same guy, or as a novel from beginning to the end. In the last page it was published a photo of the hero of the book and author asks if the readers met this guy and do they know other stories about him.
Mainstream fiction
Heather McElhattonHeather McElhatton
Heather McElhatton is a writer and producer for Public Radio International. McElhatton produced the literary series Talking Volumes from 2001 to 2006. From 2005 to 2007 she hosted the live variety show Stage Sessions for Minnesota Public Radio at the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul, Minnesota...
published a bestselling gamebook for adults in 2007, called Pretty Little Mistakes:A Do-Over Novel
Pretty Little Mistakes
Pretty Little Mistakes is a book written by Heather McElhatton and published on May 1, 2007 by HarperCollins.The novel is written in Second-person narrative and allows the reader to direct where the story will go, similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. The book has more than 150...
. It was followed by a sequel titled Million Little Mistakes published in 2010.
Erotica
Various erotic gamebooksErotica
Erotica are works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions...
have been published by major publishers. In 1994 Derrière la porte by Alina Reyes was published by Pocket Books France
Pocket Books
Pocket Books is a division of Simon & Schuster that primarily publishes paperback books.- History :Pocket produced the first mass-market, pocket-sized paperback books in America in early 1939 and revolutionized the publishing industry...
and Éditions Robert Laffont
Éditions Robert Laffont
Éditions Robert Laffont is a book publishing company in France founded in 1941 by Robert Laffont. Its publications are distributed in almost all francophone countries, but mainly in France, Canada and in Belgium....
, and later translated into English for Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
and Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. It is a division of the Orion Publishing Group.-History:...
(as Behind Closed Doors) and into Italian for Ugo Guanda Editore (as Dietro le porte). Melcher Media
Melcher Media
Melcher Media is a book packager and publisher in New York City, New York, founded in 1994 by Charles Melcher. The company’s focuses include magazine-, movie-, and TV-related books; environmental titles; pop-up books; and DuraBooks....
in 2003 packaged two "Choose-Your-Own-Erotic-Adventure" books for Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
' Gotham Books imprint, including Kathryn in the City by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Mary Anne Mohanraj
Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth.- Background :Mohanraj was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka but moved to the United States at the age of two and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut. She attended Miss Porter's School and the University of...
, a well-known writer of erotica.
Role-playing solitaire adventures
Solitaire adventures were a parallel development. This type of book is intended to allow a single person to use the rules of a role-playing game to experience an adventure without need of a referee. The first role-playing game solitaire adventures to be published were those using the Tunnels and TrollsTunnels and Trolls
Tunnels & Trolls is a fantasy role-playing game designed by Ken St. Andre and first published in 1975 by Flying Buffalo. The second modern role-playing game published, it was written by Ken St...
system, beginning with the book Buffalo Castle
Buffalo Castle
Buffalo Castle was a gamebook first published by Flying Buffalo in 1976 .Although it is widely believed that the Fighting Fantasy series of books were the first gamebooks to use dice and allow the character to possess statistics and equipment, Buffalo Castle pre-dates the Fighting Fantasy series by...
in 1976, making Tunnels and Trolls the first role-playing game to support solitaire play. Flying Buffalo released 24 solo adventure books (plus several pocket size adventures) in the period 1976–1993. A number of the adventures are still in print today. They were very successful among players of role-playing games and inspired many imitators. Starting in the seventies, several solo modules were released for other games (one of the most famous is The Solo Dungeon for Dungeons & Dragons).
Another early role-playing game with solitaire modules made for it was The Fantasy Trip. The first such module was Death Test, published in 1978. Eight adventures were released in total. One thing that set them apart was the need for miniatures and a hexmap, in order to take advantage of the combat and movement systems. These adventures were also very popular and influential.
Solitaire role-playing adventures also experienced a boom in the eighties. Many role-playing rulesets included solo adventures which were intended to teach the rules systems to the players. Some companies released lines of solitaire adventures for their own games. Examples of games with prolific solitaire lines were Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, Das Schwarze Auge, DC Heroes and Call of Cthulhu. Solitaire adventures were also featured quite frequently in professional RPG magazines and fanzines. Several solo adventures (such as those for Tunnels & Trolls, Dungeons & Dragons and Das Schwarze Auge) were translated into other languages.
As was the case with other types of gamebooks, the production of solitaire RPG adventures decreased dramatically during the nineties. However, new solos continue to be published to this day. Some companies continue to produce solo adventures for Tunnels & Trolls. There are also new solo adventures for a variety of systems, and even some influenced by the The Fantasy Trip solos (such as the ones by Dark City Games). The Internet has provided a channel to distribute solitaire adventures, with both free and commercial adventures made available as electronic documents.
Adventure gamebooks
Adventure gamebooks incorporate elements from Choose your Own Adventure books and role-playing solitaire adventures. The books involve a branching path format in order to move between sections of text, but the reader creates a character as in a role-playing game, and resolves actions using a game-system. Unlike role-playing solitaire adventures, adventure gamebooks include all the rules needed for play in each book. Adventure gamebooks are usually not divided into numbered pages, but rather into numbered sections of text, so that several sections may fit in a single page, or a single section can span several pages.The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a single-player adventure gamebook written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and illustrated by Russ Nicholson. Originally published by Puffin Books in 1982, the title is the first gamebook in the Fighting Fantasy series. It was later republished by Wizard...
was published in 1982, the first of what became the Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy
Fighting Fantasy is a series of single-player fantasy roleplay gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volumes in the series were published by Puffin in 1982, with the rights to the franchise eventually being purchased by Wizard Books in 2002...
series of gamebooks, one of the first adventure gamebook series. With over 60 titles, including a variety of spin-offs, the series popularised the gamebook format in the UK and many other countries, like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, the United States, Portugal, Tanzania, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Israel, Japan, and after the fall of communism, Eastern Europe. Also in 1982, American author Jeffrey C. Dillow published solo adventures in book format for his High Fantasy role-playing game which, unlike previous RPG solitaire adventures, included all rules required for play. These did not prove to be as popular as the Fighting Fantasy books.
Adventure gamebooks experienced a publishing boom in the eighties, most notably in the United Kingdom, the United States and France. British series such as Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and The Way of the Tiger were translated into several languages and became very popular worldwide. The boom decreased considerably in the nineties, with Fabled Lands being the last major British gamebook series. In the 2000s, the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series started being reissued, with some commercial success. Several authors in different countries continue to publish adventure gamebooks to this day. Notable examples are German fantasy authors Wolfgang Hohlbein
Wolfgang Hohlbein
Wolfgang Hohlbein is a German writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror fiction who lives near Neuss, North Rhine-Westphalia. His wife, Heike, is also a writer and often works with her husband. She often comes up with the story ideas and therefore is generally credited as co-author...
and Markus Heitz
Markus Heitz
Markus Heitz is a German fantasy author, most famous for his four-book "Dwarves" saga. Heitz has in the last couple of years gained popularity within Europe, due to the English translations of his books. As of October 2010, two out of four of the "Dwarves"-books have been translated into English...
, and British author Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green can refer to:*Jonathan Green , freelance writer of fantasy and science fiction*Jonathan Green , journalist and author*Jonathan Green , , naval surgeon, dermatologist...
.
Computers and online gamebooks
Production of new gamebooks in the West decreased dramatically during the nineties (but it has never stopped altogether). More recently some companies have attempted a revival of the medium by releasing computerized gamebooks for several platforms, including the iPhoneIPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
.
In the late 1980s, a new type of non-linear text-based storytelling, known as the addventure
Addventure
An addventure, also known as a collaborative gamebook, is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a...
, was created by Allen Firstenberg with collaborative, round robin
Round-robin story
A round-robin story, or simply "round robin," is a type of collaborative fiction or storytelling in which a number of authors each write chapters of a novel or pieces of a story, in rounds. Round-robin novels were invented in the 19th century, and later became a tradition particularly in science...
-style authorship in mind. The idea has led to the creation of large, web-based archives of potentially neverending stories linked together by hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
s.
See also
- List of gamebooks
- Interactive fictionInteractive fictionInteractive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...
- AdventureAdventureAn adventure is defined as an exciting or unusual experience; it may also be a bold, usually risky undertaking, with an uncertain outcome. The term is often used to refer to activities with some potential for physical danger, such as skydiving, mountain climbing and or participating in extreme sports...
- Adventure gameAdventure gameAn adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
- Visual novelVisual novelA is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art, or occasionally live-action stills or video footage...
External links
- samizdat.cc/cyoa/ – Visualised path-analysis of ten "Choose your own adventure" game books
- Branching Path Books - Examples of branching path books