Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

composed of only nine short chapters; at the end of each chapter (except the last), the reader will be offered a choice of eight different directions in which the story might go. That sounds pretty simple. Eight, nine— they’re pretty small numbers. Unfortunately, if each possible plotline is to be truly independent of all the others, the number of chapters required by such a scheme is eight to the power of eight, or sixteen million, seven hundred and seventy thousand, two hundred and sixteen. Show me a writer who wants to work that hard and I’ll choke on my Martini.

If you begin to adulterate this hyper-purist concept, though, and allow the different story paths to cross each other or converge, so that they can “share” chapters with each other, the numbers do get more manageable. But that in turn throws up its own unique storytelling problems. And they have already been encountered in prose writing. As noted earlier, the popularity of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers in the early 1980s coincided with the rise of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, as well as the American Choose Your Own Adventure series (by various authors).

Each numbered story nugget of a few hundred words ended with something between two and four

174