Blast From The Past: Gamebooks
January 8th, 2012 § 2 Comments
During a recent futile attempt to organize my shelves and make them more streamlined, I came across some books that I have not flipped through in over 30 years. These are gamebooks which I used to collect and were all the rave back then with kids my age.
It all started with the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ (CYOA) series. These were fun slim volumes of, well, adventures. Each book had about 30-40 different endings. You begin the book as you would any other book but with CYOA you will be presented with at least a couple of options (sometimes more) at the end of the opening pages and you turn to the corresponding page to see what happens. For example, a story has your character hiking in the woods and the path forks to the right and left. Which direction will you choose? Right, turn to page 10. Left, turn to page 25. And then you continue from there. To a pre-teen in the 1980′s this illusion of choice in my reading was something unheard of and I devoured the CYOA books. Since the books had many endings, the stories were very short but obviously encouraged multiple readings. If I had challenged myself to read a certain amount of books in those days or if they had the NILAM program in schools back then I would have totally reached my target within a month because I persuaded my father to buy a bagload of these books.
Here are 54 of the 56 Choose Your Own Adventure books I have in my collection. My daughter was reading two of them at the time:
I don’t remember why I stopped at 56 since the series went for at least another 100 books. I either grew tired of them (unlikely) or the bookshops didn’t bring any new releases (most probably). It did seem that only a handful of us were reading them back then.
The popularity of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ prompted the publisher Bantam to create a couple more spin offs like ‘Be An Interplanetary Spy’:
and TIME MACHINE:
The ‘Interplanetary Spy’ series was more comic booky than the rest, relying a lot on illustrations that emulated the style of computer games of the decade. Also, it relied more on puzzle solving and visual games like mazes and fold-ins to advance the story. Good times were had but it also meant my books were filled with pencil doodles and folded pages.
The TIME MACHINE series as the title suggests takes you back through time to solve historical mysteries except for book 6, Rings of Saturn, where you went to the future. It was all (gasp!) educational, even book 6 which was a textbook on the solar system disguised as a space adventure. Unlike the CYOA books, TIME MACHINE was didactic. Since it was based on historical facts known at the time and it was meant to be educational, the books could only have one true ending and any wrong turns you make means that you go round and round until you make the right choice. Still the cover art was nice, the adventures were well written and the internet was still about 10 years in the future then so this linear series was my gaming experience and I loved it.
Other publishers jumped in on the choose your own adventure bandwagon but many weren’t very good. One series not published by Bantam that I collected was the fantasy series, Lone Wolf.
The protagonist is a young apprentice of a class of warrior monks and one day while out chopping wood, the rest of his clan was ambushed and killed. You play the ‘lone’ wolf and he seeks revenge. Oh, It is on, baby.
This one was more like playing Dungeons and Dragons except the book is the Dungeon Master. There are skills to acquire, weapons, endurance points, meals to buy and eat and all that stuff. This was to make the role playing as realistic as possible. I just found it a chore. So I cheated a lot. Besides, by book 2 (Fire on the Water) the Lone Wolf acquires the Sommerswerd, a sword so powerful the enemy soldiers lay down their weapons and become farmers instead, that one can finish the books with little to no loss of points at all. The fun for me at least was not in the fighting but in the medieval fantasy setting which was always cool to someone who grew up reading Belgariad, The Hobbit and all that.
And finally, the other collection of gamebooks in my library are these:
‘Can You Solve the Mystery?’ was a series about two pre-teens, ‘Hawkeye’ Collins and Amy Adams, who solve crimes in their hometown of Lakewood Hills usually upon request of the local cops. How incompetent do you have to be that you need two pre-teens to help you do your work? I remember reading the comic strip version of it in one of the Sunday papers (I think it was the New Sunday Times) before stumbling onto the books. Yup, this website has some samples. The books were more prose than illustrations but like the strip it played fair with the reader as well. All clues were there to the observant reader. Sometimes the clues were so obvious, a blind person who didn’t understand English would still notice it. Difficult, they were not. Then the solution would be presented at the back of the page in a mirror image. I enjoyed ‘Can You Solve the Mystery?’. It did not ask the reader to make choices like TIME MACHINE or the Choose Your Own Adventure books but it did not talk down to the reader either and instead invited him/her to join in the crime solving and not just be a passive observer.
And what did a pre-teen wanted more than being included?
Wow, talk about nostalgia. Never owned any but grabbed a few shamelessly without permission from my second cousin’s shelves (sori, bang Kamal!). Enjoyed the Be an Interplanetary Spy the most. And cheated a lot too, because every time I died I’d retrace my steps (more like missteps actually).
I remember I had read (or play is the correct term?) such books during my primary school. Unfortunately it is not belong to me, but my friends brought it from home.
Down memory lane…