Hola gamebook creators and consumers! I hope your imps and pixies have been behaving. This one has been a busy gamebook week, and here are just some of the highlights:
Tin Man Humble Bundle
Tin Man Games have teamed up with Humble Bundle and are offering up a big chunk of their gamebooks on Android devices. For a limited time, pay what you want to bolster your collection! Ten are up for grabs, with more on the way.
Humble Bundle have been doing this for ages now, and it’s exciting that gamebooks have finally gotten under their radar. Tin Man Games produce stylish gamebooks – old school dragged kicking and screaming into the mobile age. Their gamebook apps have page numbers and you roll digital dice and scribble on digital pages. All you need are digital fingers to unwind all those terrible choices you make!
There’s a few classic Fighting Fantasy in there, as well as some new titles, such as the brilliant Trial of the Clones, and the Shakesperean mashup gamebook To be or not to be. I bet Shakespeare could have done with the Gamebook Authoring Tool.
Growing Arborell
The Arborell chronicles continues to expand with Honour Amongst Thieves, Wayne Densley’s meticulously sculptured universe. This one is a short novel to accompany the Windhammer gamebook series. Wayne is the gamebook indie hero who brings the community together every year with the Windhammer Prize. You can download his latest work and support him on www.arborell.com/.
April A-Z
Stuart Lloyd’s April A-Z interview series continues to be brilliant, with nice surprises this week with interviews with Dave Morris and Emily Short. Emily is a giant in Interactive Fiction – she has contributed lots but I particularly enjoyed Counterfeit Monkey/. What I liked about this interview was when she gave her choice IF pieces. There’s something in there for everyone – strong entry points into the genre or exciting works left to discover.
Emily was also one of the driving forces behind the genre smashing Versu, the new world of interactive story telling. I’m not quite sure on the status of this project as there seems to have been some conflict with the publisher, which is a shame for everyone.
Whatever you decide
An intriguing essay on the Choose your own Adventure series as a spritual plaything has emerged on religiondispatches.org. In it, Daniel Silliman writes that CYOA developer R.A. Montgomery described his books as stories that teach a moral lesson – “What are you doing and why are you making these choices?” Montomgery says, “Implicit in the choice is an ethical or moral approach or decision…But that’s never spelled out and it’s never told. Whatever you decide is what you decide.”
This philosophy was later lost as CYOA paved the way for Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, the plot of each basically being a hack n’ slash bloodbath!
Serpents, Time Travel and Inkle
Inkle have today released Sorcery 3, so if humble bundle, arborell, interactive fiction and CYOA haven’t yet gamebooked you out then off you go and play with some serpents!