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Categories: Books, Commentary
Tags: gamebooks, lone wolf
Last year I read The Crimson Labyrinth, which renewed my interest in gamebooks. Gamebooks are those choose your own adventure type books where you play the role of a character by reading a few paragraphs leading up to a choice and then turn to the page number corresponding with the choice you want to make. The image next to this text is from a map Sean Michael Regan made of The Mystery of Chimney Rock.
Choose Your Own Adventure is probably the most well known and venerable gamebook franchise, but back in the 1980s everyone wanted a piece of the action. I routinely devoured Star Trek, Indiana Jones, D&D, Marvel Superheroes, and Tolkein gamebooks, but I especially liked the Lone Wolf and The Way of the Tiger series.
What made these two series different was the fact that you played the same character as you moved through the books. Lone Wolf began as a survivor from an attack on a Kai monastery (Kai=druid+Jedi-technology). As the books progressed, Lone Wolf gained abilities making him a full on Kai Master towards the end of the run. Plus, gold and equipment followed you, so Kalte Fire Spheres you saved from book 3 could be used in book 5. Lone Wolf spanned 28 books (with some new ones under way) and two spin-offs. The Way of the Tiger only ran six books (and ended with the protagonist about to get eaten), but had a cool ninja storyline and powerful moves to learn (like Kwan’s Flail).
Okay, so all this leads to three things which disappoint me:
1. Why are today’s gamebooks limited to romance? You can’t tell me there’s not a market for young adult/adult horror/scifi/fantasy-themed gamebooks. However, the only ones I’m finding are
A Pick-Your-Own-Ending Escapade, Create Your Own Erotic Fantasy, Miss Adventure, and Pretty Little Mistakes.
2. Why haven’t gamebooks migrated to the web? Okay, they have to some extent, but not an any appreciable way. The basic construction of these books — short blocks of text with links to other pages — sounds like they should be native to the web. Hell, The Abominable Snowman was probably W3C compliant when it came out in 1982.
3. Why can’t video games be as interactive as gamebooks? Look at Ragan’s map of The Mystery of Chimney Rock. Chimney Rock is a 121 page book from 1979, but it has 36 endings based on 44 choices the reader makes. Okay, now think of a similar map of Half-Life 2. Yup, it’s a straight line. How about BioShock? Straight line with a little fork in the end.
On March 13th, 2008 at 8:44 pm, anon wrote:
the ultimate was Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! which were full-blown trade paperbacks and twice the price of the CYOA books. in this series, you often learned spells in one book that you couldn’t even use until a later book. they had to be good since I was already in my twenties when the first one came out (either that, or I was kinda retarded).