Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Page 173
Trigger Happy
175
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