To Begin Your Adventure, Turn to Paragraph 1
by Tupperwarez
Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008
There were a lot of these 'gamebooks' as they were called, with many series. One of the more successful series were the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series, both of which got started in the UK. But then computer and video games went on the up-and-up, Nintendo resurrected the home console market, and gamebooks were slowly but surely edged out of the limelight, dying a quiet death in the mid-90s. Some do live on, like the Lone Wolf series, now available for free on Project Aon, but most are only dimly remembered.

What we're talking about here is some basic video game anatomy, I'd say. Only, instead of graphics, sound, and a computer processor, it's the prose and the player's imagination that help generate the game world. Additionally, writing a gamebook also requires design considerations that are similar to those of a video game. It demands efficiency, balance, and flow.


But inevitably someone would figure out that you can add video and audio to electronic gamebooks, and then we'd be back on the path to video games again. This outcome is not too far off from what happened in reality, actually. Not that gamebooks birthed video games, but rather that gamebooks evolved and merged with video games, living on in spirit in text adventures, visual novels, and other forms of interactive fiction. Seems inevitable, I guess, that the limitations of a medium would force the craft to either evolve or stagnate.
Hopefully I've at least piqued your curiosity regarding this near-forgotten type of interactive fiction. You can find a positively encyclopedic listing of gamebooks at Demian's Gamebook Web Page if you've exhausted the other links I've provided. Article Permalink
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