Choose Your Own Adventure

You come to the end of the hallway. A hideous skeleton suddenly appears and looks at you … fury burning through his eye sockets. He raises his bony arm; a giant sword piercing the air above him as he readies for combat. If you want to draw your blunt force trauma weapon, turn to page 3. If you’d like to turn around and book back down the hallway like a coward, turn to page 4. If you’d like to stick around and ask the skeleton how he keeps his physique so fit and trim, turn to page 5.

These books were great, weren’t they? I remember spending hours and hours inside them, often going in circles because I always made the wrong decision. But it was my decision; and at the time I thought that was pretty awesome. I used to hate reading when I was younger. But this wasn’t like reading a book to me; it was just like playing a game. An even nerdier way to get my fix. No pixels. No gamepad. Just words.

Of course, I almost never performed the prerequisite rolling to determine my character’s stamina (and other) points. Yes, that’s right: I cheated. You better believe I did. I don’t know how many times I screwed up by either making the wrong page turn decision or by being such a noob and not really understanding wtf all those stats meant anyway.

Speaking of cheating… Even when I did do the pre-game dice roll, whenever I came to a battle that I knew I’d lose by points alone, I rarely followed the rules of the battle and just won because I didn’t want to have to go back to page 2 and start from scratch again. And man… this was better than a gameshark or an aimbot back then!

My nefarious gameplay aside, I really did enjoy these books. I’m not a control freak, but being able to actually make the decision and determine the outcome of my character in these stories was impressive to me at the time. Much more than a reading a book where I had no say in what happened during the story. Some of these books claimed to have something like 40 different possible endings. I’d like to see a PC or console game today pull that off!

I can’t remember what kind of consoles I may have been playing at this age (Nintendo maybe), but I’m willing to bet this was one of my first RPG experiences. Alas, those charming little books were soon forgotten when technology got so intense later on that you didn’t have to leave the visuals up to you imagination, and could just see it all being played out on a screen. Eye candy… what can you do?

I get the urge now and again to read one of those choose your own adventure books. Not sure how easy they are to come by anymore, or if they even still make new ones today. Wish I had held on to mine, though. I wouldn’t mind cheating my way through a dungeon again for old time’s sake.