Adventure Game Book History?
Okay, a bit different from normal but I popped into a charity shop the other day and picked up a nice re-print of 1977s “Choose your Own Adventure: Journey under the sea” which I thought would be a bit of fun to cover in my playthroughs at some time. While I can’t figure out when this one was published (the inside cover details say it’s a 2006 USA/Canada printing yet it has a bit at the back saying about things which happened in 2019… huh) it does have a couple of interesting new pages which the original didn’t have. One is a short 2 page ‘History of Gamebooks’ as well as a 2 page history of the series. And while the history of gamebooks is.. brief but kinda true, I wanted to expanded on it.
The ‘Choose your own Adventure‘ line are kinda one of the big two in Adventure Game Books, pre-dating Fighting Fantasy by almost 10 years (the first Fighting Fantasy was 1982, the First Choose your Own Adventure was 1976). The main difference I would say is the Fighting Fantasy ones added the dice/combat system. that was pretty much it. Anyway, Choose your own Adventure was first released in 1976 as ‘The Adventures of you” and was one of the first books of its type, but not THE first. The series was meant to had been came up with by Edward Packard who wrote the first story ‘The Adventures of you on Sugar Cane Island” in 1970 but no-one wanted to publish it. After being rejected by nine companies, he was able to convince Ray Montgomery of Vermont Crossroads Press (co-founded with Constance Cappel) to give it a shot and it was released as “The Cave of Time” (or he rewrote it into that.. I’m not sure ^_^;)
It sold over 8,000 copies which, of such a small company, was huge. Montgomery wrote a few of these, including Journey under the sea, and though the series could do better if it was handled by a bigger company. So at first, it was marketed by Pocket Books, but it was when he took it to Bantam Books in 1979 that it became HUGE. the series was renamed ‘Choose your own Adventure’ and they gained more authors then just the two of them.
When the series came to an end in 1999, 184 books had been released, with the original authors still having a hand in them, as well as a collection of ‘For younger readers’ books (52), some Disney spin-offs (12), Horror spin-offs (18), Young Indian Jones tv tie-ins (8), Star Wars (based on all 3 films) and a bunch more. The series basically ended in 1999 the 90s had seen the rise of more and more video games, which could do the same role, often with more ‘effects’.
Despite that, they had dipped there hang into Video games and other Media, as they made a couple of films based on the series, interactive DVD movie, Video Games etc.
In 2003, a new company was created ‘Chooseco‘ in order to re-issue the books and deal with new ones. They even released a board game version of one of the books.
Anyway.. this is one of the re-issues which they have meant to have ‘revised’ some of the text, given new artwork and also added new titles. Problem is, for some reason they are in.. a random order. The first in the re-issue series was ‘The Abominable Snowman’ which was originally the 13th. I think Part of this was due to the rights. The first 12 books released in the re-issue were all R. A. Montgomery books with non of Edward Packards work being re-printed. Montgomery died in 2014, stated to be one week after finishing the latest book in the series. Packard is still alive (at 95 as of writing this) and is claimed to be the inventor of ‘interactive fiction’.
Well, this isn’t quite true. The brief history of the game book is very undercrediting to Packard in this printing (in fact, his name is missing from EVERYTHING), but starts in 1941 with Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges who published ‘Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain‘ (An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain). It was an essay talking about the works of the deceased Irish author Herbert Quain. If you have never heard of that author, it’s probably cause like this ‘essay’, he is fictional.
The Essay talks about 3 works of Quain, of which we only really care about one. 1936’s ‘April March‘, which is a novel which is the key feature here. I’ll quote from the short story:
The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that pre-cedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events of another, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually ex-clusive) “evenings-before” ramifies into three further “evenings-before,” all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first chapter is common to all, of course.) Of those novels, one is symbolic; another, supernatural; another, a detective novel; another, psychological; another, a Communist novel; an -other, anti-Communist; and so on.
As you should be able to tell, the fictional book that Borges writes about is a book where there are ‘alternative’ paths you can choose. You start at the first chapter, which is the same for each, but then can choose which second chapter to follow, and in fact, each second chapter had 2 paths to take and it makes 9 ‘different’ novels of three chapters length depending on the path you take. Well.. that doe sound like an Adventure Gamebook to me. But it isn’t quite there.. not just because it’s fictional.
He followed it up in 1941 with ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan‘ (The Garden of Forking Paths) which like wise, tells of a story where a guy is researching a book which has forking paths depending on which event you choose to do in one character, telling you to go to another. Yep, very much the idea of an Adventure Game Book.. BUT it’s still fictional! ugh.
Well.. sticking with Argentine, we come to Julio Cortázar who wrote about 4 novels in his life time, the main one known is ‘Rayuela‘ (Hopscotch) in 1963. It has 155 chapters but you can’t just read it from 1 to 155. The Author suggests that you read the book either 1 – 56 or ‘Hopscoth’ through the 155 chapter following a table of instructions which gives you an order to follow. However, you can also choose your own unique path which the author hints that the book was written in the style so the reader is part of the action. SOO much closer to and Adventure game book but still not quite there I think.
Well, funny thing.. Cortázar spent alot of time in France and around the same time (well, a year later), French writer Raymond Queneau released ‘Conte à votre façon‘. The name is translated in various ways like ‘Yours for the telling’ or, as the brief history but says “A story as you like it”. In this story, after each sentence the reader is given a choice of what to do. It’s very short but I’ll give you an idea doing a rough english translation:
- Would you like to know the Story of the Three Sprightly little peas?
a. If yes, go to 4,
b. If no, go to 2. - Would you prefer the one about the three tall, slender beanpoles?
a. If yes, go to 16
b. If no, go to 3
Okay, it might be short, but you can’t get much closer now. That is a full on Adventure game book. It’s not a HUGE adventure or anything, you basically have a collection of parts which depending on how you read it (what path you follow) you get a different story. As the title says, you have the story as you like it.
Now, what is interesting is the next milestone mention is English. The early 1970s series ‘Trackers‘. A ‘popular’ series for children with Multiple choices and endings. Yep, bingo! Adventure Game Books! but.. erm.. Trackers? I’ve never heard of the series before. Okay, the early 1970s is before my time but being that alot of stuff I’m into is late 60s to early 90s, it would 100% heard of this series if it was that popular. So I looked online…
Wanna know how common ‘Trackers’ is for children’s book? the answer is ‘Very’. I’ve asked people who would be the target audience at the time and.. nothing. huh.. FINALLY I found a hint at the British Library (well, via there online search as I’m not that close to the library). Charles Sains wrote what appears to be a series of 6 books under the ‘Trackers’ series. All published by Macmillan Education and a catalogue listing I found elsewhere says:
“Trackers are designed for Children with a reading age of 9 or 10 but with interest levels of junior secondary pupils. The illustrations (some in colour) occupy more of the page than the text, yet the text is set in regular short-line columns, not in the style of comic strips. The books are about 30 pages long.”
That doesn’t help much but possible to be the game books I’m looking for. The books listed are: “Trapped“, “Treasure Trove“, “Tall Tales“, “Monkey Business“, “Catman!” and “Mercy Mission“.
And that’s where I’m stuck again. While they say early 70s, best I can tell, the books were 1976 to 1977… so.. that’s not early. maybe these aren’t the books I’m looking for? then I’m REALLY running empty here. I’ve seen the odd one for sale but the prices aren’t fantastic but mostly, they appear to be hard to find.
Either way, The Choose your own Adventure books started not long later, followed by Fighting Fantasy and by the mid 80s, TONS of these books were being made and the field was strong and established.
So this has been a very brief (but more so than the book gave) history of Adventure Games Books ^_^
