Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

choices; you made your choice and went to the next appropriate numbered section to see what happened. The Fighting Fantasy titles, such as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Citadel of Chaos and Forest of Doom, were generally darker and nastier, based on Dungeons & Dragons and with many more gory ways to die. Global sales eventually totaled more than fourteen million. (Ian Livingstone, now chairman of Eidos, in 1998 released the Tomb Raider–style videogame version of one of the early gamebooks, Deathtrap Dungeon. Steve Jackson, meanwhile, was involved in the design of God-game supremo Peter Molyneux’s Black and White [2000].)

Now these books are entertaining children’s pastimes, but as examples of “interactive storytelling” they too are instructively limited. To keep the numbers manageable, very many sections of story in these gamebooks are shared by different plotlines. Yet, if an episode can be reached by means of several different previous ones, there is no way it can ever refer to its past—because it has no way of knowing what its past is, which is to say what particular route the reader took to get there. You end up with a species of story that is totally amnesiac, that has no sense of its own history. Try to think of a film or a novel in which at no point

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