Adventure - iPhone Game Blueprints - page 223

1979 to 1999, 184 titles were published by different writers; the overall number of
copies printed was more than 250 millions. This is simply amazing!
How did the system work? Each page or individual chapter of a gamebook had a
special section where several options were printed in a list. The reader just had to
select the one that suited him the best, look at the specified number, and turn some
pages to navigate to a chapter where the story continued according to his choice.
The topics featured multiple endings (up to a couple of dozens), had some object-
ives and RPG Mechanics, used a second-person perspective in their narrative, and
were well illustrated. However, a wrong choice may lead a protagonist to death since
they surely could be considered as prehistoric text-based adventure games.
The idea of interactive topics was truly a breakthrough for its time. It changed the
face of traditional media, creating a new image of a topic as an object you can play
with. But it also had obvious disadvantages. Navigating to a specific section of a pa-
per topic was not very convenient. It was not a smooth and instantaneous job (this
is why they have a second version being republished in electronic form with real hy-
perlinks). Another weak point is that of easy access to any part of the topic, so some
elements could be intentionally peeped, spoiling the element of wonder.
The full potential of interactive stories was exposed only on computers that simply
madenavigatingmuchpleasantandaddedsomefunctionalities whicharesimplyim-
possible on paper. It happened in the middle of 1970s when William Crowther used
700 lines of the FORTRAN code to create Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as
Adventure), a game that gave the name to the individual genre, which we are talking
about in this chapter. By modern-day standards, that product was pretty simple. It
had no graphics and used only text, but that was not the barrier for interesting game-
play. William Crowther was a cave enthusiast, so he carefully reproduced some real
cave labyrinths (the original game included 140 map locations), adding some portion
of fantasy elements.
The player got a textual description of a location or situation, then he could act by
using one-or two-word directives in a form of verb-noun pairs, which were parsed by
the game. It has 293 words in the vocabulary, since the game was capable to per-
ceive and interpret a quite long list of player's commands.