This week we’re reading "Mountain Survival" during #StorytimeWithSteve, book #28 in the original #ChooseYourOwnAdventure series. Bonus is that I’m reading it from a special library edition, which makes it a hardcover! You just know the story is better because the cover won’t bend! 🙂
Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson's Vulcanverse solo adventure series is almost complete and it's huge. I can certainly see why the final volume has taken a year and a half to write. Solo gamebooks lost most of their market to computer games, but when they're done well they still offer something unique. Are any new, younger players discovering them, though?
Choose Your Own Adventure Leans into Gaming: "Shannon Gilligan, co-founder and publisher at Chooseco, noted that, excluding sales through Ingram, gift and toy stores recently took over from bookshops as the company’s top direct-sales channel. “Bookstores are carrying more games as well,” she added."
👋🦶"I caught the plague and my feet and hands rotted off, and no one knew how to save me. Sometimes, my heart was cut out of my body and eaten while I was still alive." 💛
(📷: "Blood Island" by Liz Windover. Illustration by Gabhor Utomo. Choose Your Own Nightmare #3, 2014)
Written by Edward Packard in 1992, it only has 12 endings, but the cover has a kid riding a flying bicycle over some cows. C'mon, you want to know how he got into that situation, right?
I like to joke that whenever the authors of vintage #ChooseYourOwnAdventure books ran into a storytelling challenge, they fell back on the trope of time travel. Didn't see it coming in a ninja book this week!
Not surprising when you recall that the first #CYOA is "The Cave of Time" ⏳
(📷: "Return of the Ninja" by Jay Leibold. Choose Your Own Adventure #92, 1989)
While I have an original, this is one of the few that's been updated and reprinted by Chooseco as part of the new generation of #CYOAs, rereleased in 2019 (yes, you can buy a copy now: https://www.cyoa.com/products/return-of-the-ninja!)
Dug out my gamebooks and dusted off the Fighting Fantasy ones. There should also be some FF magazines around, although they weren't boxed with the books, so it might be a bit before they emerge.
For #StorytimeWithSteve at work this week, giving Edward Packard's "Horror House" a scary read.
This 1993 #ChooseYourOwnAdventure appeared towards the end of the original run (book 140 of 185) - a time when the number of endings dropped considerably. There are only 8 in this book. At what point are you just writing a linear story with just a few page hops? Very glad the relaunch of the series moved away from this trend!
🦄 Started reading “The Magic of the Unicorn” with my 2 boys before bed - my wife and I alternating summer nights with #TheChroniclesOfNarnia.
Fun fact about author Deborah Lerme Goodman: She’s authored #CYOA books for both the original Bantam run as well as the Chooseco revival. This version is updated.
(Choose Your Own Adventure #51/From The Lost Archives, 1985/2017)
Ending 1/27, Page 66: Transformed into a unicorn🦄. I guess that's better than dying!
(📷: "The Magic of the Unicorn" by Deborah Lerner Goodman. Illustration by Suzanne Nugent. Choose Your Own Adventure #51/From The Lost Archives, 1985/2017)
This week I'm celebrating 9 years of leading social media & online communities at #Relativity - so I thought I'd take a look at 9 interesting things about 9 things that interest me:
The title of the 9th book in the classic #ChooseYourOwnAdventure series - "Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?" - inspired the name for the victim in the first #KnivesOut film, Harlan Thrombey