Gamebooks

This is my gamebooks page. It lists, first of all, the gamebooks I have. I'm not a huge collector, as I concentrate more on specific series, but they are a lot of fun to look through.

Currently I have pages set up for the following two series:

Interplanetary Spy which had engaging and clear right-or-wrong puzzles(ok, so they were a bit easy) and even better pictures that I managed to scan. My very favorite gamebook series.
Zork gamebooks based on the computer game.

My other books:

Narnia Solo # 5(Return of the White Witch), with a sketched review.
Thanks to HPFRI books in Virginia for this. If you have any of the other Narnia Solo books, please please mail me!
Choose Your Own Adventure # 4, 29, 58, 88. I found them in a sale at the Evanston Library for fifty cents each and decided, what the heck?

My current gamebook count is 12(Spy)+4(Zork)+1(Narnia)+4(CyoA)=21, although 3+2+0+0=5 are currently shipping. So I "really" only have 16.

I must be honest, however. Some gamebooks are quite bad, especially the Junior Edition CyoA which were only fifty-odd pages with six endings. In fact, many Choose Your Own Adventure books are more valuable as collectors' items or memorabilia. As a result it is rather easy to satirize certain gamebooks, and here are some efforts that I particularly enjoy.

Choose your own damn adventure. Simple, yet it transcends the experience of many people! Such is great art...they also have a few other adventures which are even more tasteless. Pokemon is satirized here, and this is on the fringes of good taste. This is truly sick.
An adventure with a psychotic Curious George.
The sequel to the adventure above, involving high-tech spy rings.

If anyone knows of an Apple disk where you could create your own gamebook, tell me. I remember having one in the '80s...

There are also some authors that have a gamebook-ish quality to them. I include:

Douglas Adams. He of course helped write two interactive computer fiction games, Bureaucracy and Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and with his "pollution of time streams" in that trilogy added a gamebook-esque flavor--but again, much higher quality than the usual.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot. Really entertaining. There are so many "what-if" questions that although this book comes to a conclusion, it leaves a lot of ways to branch off.
Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories were universal gamebooks in a way--and much better written! He considers all sorts of non-linear stories.

So far,

people have visited this page since 1/27/2000. Thanks! Back to my books page.

Mail me!