What is a Gamebook? Also, Holiday in Castle Quarantine Now Released!

 Welcome to the Gamebook Shack, where I will be posting reviews of gamebooks, talking about board games, possibly video games, and other weird stuff. I'll post updates about author events as well for anyone who wants to come say hello.

What is a gamebook, anyway?

Gamebooks are interactive fiction. You probably know them as "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, which is actually the name of the brand that kicked off this fascinating sub-genre of fiction way back in 1976. Gamebooks allow you, the reader, to decide what the hero does and, to an extent, how the story ends. There have been many interactive fiction experiments since the early 1940s (look up authors Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Raymond Queneau for examples), but CYOA launched the genre into the mainstream.


Countless publishers jumped on the bandwagon and launched their own gamebook brands. Some were simple and straightforward with chapters consisting of only one or two pages, while others read more like solo role-playing games. A few examples:

The simple and silly Twist-A-Plot books loved to break the fourth wall (thanks largely to R L Stine being involved, apparently), and Give Yourself Goosebumps wasn't much better, allowing young Goosebumps fans the chance to get themselves into all kinds of goofy peril. 

Be An Interplanetary Spy series went with a comic-book-like appearance, emphasizing detailed sci-fi art and a heavy emphasis on solving puzzles, with failure often meaning death or demotion. 

Find Your Fate and the Nintendo Adventure Books allowed kids to decide the fates of their favorite characters in a variety of licensed properties. FYF covered brands such as GI Joe, Indiana Jones, Transformers, James Bond, and even Jem and the Holograms. Sadly only two Nintendo Adventure Books were based on the Legend of Zelda, most of the volumes being set in the Mario universe. 

Endless Quest and Dragontales upgraded the simple narrative of CYOA and offered something more akin to YA fantasy books with multiple endings. 

Series like Fighting Fantasy, Cretan Chronicles, and Fabled Lands take the genre to its limit, adding character sheets, RPG mechanics, and dice combat, among other things.

Whether you prefer the straightforward interactive yarn or the hefty solo RPG adventure, you can't deny that gamebooks as a genre accomplish their primary goal: getting kids to read.

I have a ton of these books, and I'll be discussing them at length when I review the specific volumes I manage to snag for myself. I'll post examples of how authors, including myself, go about constructing a gamebook, too, since it can be a convoluted and difficult process.

In the meantime, my own gamebook, Dinah-Mite #1 recently hit shelves in print and ebook format, and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever else you get your books. Give it a go if you want a comprehensive example of what a gamebook can be, and the sorts of strange places they can take you.

 Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.


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