The Periphery of the Mind

When I was a kid I used to get Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a neat kind of interactive fiction, where you'd be reading along and suddenly the story would ask you to make a decision! Do you choose to go follow the creepy old man down into the crypt (if so turn to page X) or would you rather call the cops on the guy (if so turn to page Y). After a while of playing you'd learn two things. First, you'd learn to leave your finger as a bookmark while you went to see if your decision killed you or not. And secondly you'd learn which pages lead to a generic death ending, and not to take them.

The stories were kind of neat and weird, with aliens and monsters and such, and illustrated in fairly decent style that drew dumb kids like me in. But truthfully I always like the Endless Quest books better. The stories and writing were usually even worse, but the characters were more memorable, and the art and monsters were a lot of fun back then.

But even they couldn't hold a candle to the weirdness that was the Be An Interplanetary Spy series. You didn't just read the text and randomly pick left or right. You had mazes to solve, pattern-based riddles, and so forth. Not to mention all kinds of gonzo sci-fi goofiness. "Choose the correct sequence to make your disguise suit work or die!"

Now, why am I mentioning all of this?

Well, there was one series that kind of stood out. "Fighting Fantasy". What made it special was that you actually had to keep track of stuff like your health and equipment, and you rolled dice throughout the game to randomize combat and the like. It wasn't a simple "page 14 or page 375" decision any more; you had to pick a choice and then hope the dice would back you up on it. Anyway, there've been fan efforts to start converting the old books into web-based games. I suspect at least one of you out there might be interested, and for me it was a fun walk down memory lane.

Labels: Geeky