# Gamebooks & Interactive Books - Genre: Tabletop genre - Date: 1976 (Sugarcane Island, Buffalo Castle); boom 1979–late 1980s; precursors from 1930 - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/gamebook/ > The book that asks what you do next: turn to 214 to open the door, to 87 to flee, with a pencil, two dice and a finger holding your place in case the troll wins. **Why it matters:** Gamebooks carried branching story and dungeon adventure to millions of young readers in the 1980s, taught a generation that narrative could be played, and seeded both the solo roleplaying tradition and the grammar of narrative video games. ## Quick answers **What is Gamebooks & Interactive Books?** The book that asks what you do next: turn to 214 to open the door, to 87 to flee, with a pencil, two dice and a finger holding your place in case the troll wins. **What are the hallmarks of Gamebooks & Interactive Books?** Second-person narration: "you" are the hero; Numbered sections or pages, with the reader choosing where to turn; Multiple endings, many of them sudden deaths; In the RPG-derived strand, a character sheet, dice and combat rules; Designed for a single reader with no referee; Cheap, pocket-sized paperbacks sold in bookstores rather than game shops. **When did Gamebooks & Interactive Books emerge?** 1976 (Sugarcane Island, Buffalo Castle); boom 1979–late 1980s; precursors from 1930. **What are the key works of Gamebooks & Interactive Books?** Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and Tunnels & Trolls. ## What it is A gamebook is a printed story divided into numbered sections, told in the second person, in which the reader decides what happens. At the end of a section, a choice: open the iron door (turn to 214) or creep back along the passage (turn to 87). Follow the right thread and you reach the treasure; follow the wrong one and the book tells you, in a sentence, that your adventure ends here. The genre has two strands. **Branching-path books**, of which [Choose Your Own Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/choose-your-own-adventure/) is the archetype, are pure choice: no dice, no rules, just forks in the story. **Adventure gamebooks**, pioneered for [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/) and made famous by [Fighting Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fighting-fantasy/), add a character sheet with scores such as SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK, a pair of dice, combat rules and an inventory, so that the reader is both player and, in effect, their own [Game Master](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/game-master/). The second strand is a solo [Tabletop Roleplaying Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/tabletop-rpg/) bound into a paperback. ## Origins Branching fiction predates games. Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins's *Consider the Consequences!* (1930) let readers choose among endings; the TutorText programmed-learning books of the late 1950s onward branched on a student's answers; and Jorge Luis Borges imagined forking narratives in 1941 stories such as "The Garden of Forking Paths." The modern gamebook, though, was born of a bedtime ritual. [Edward Packard](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/edward-packard/), a lawyer, asked his children what should happen next in his stories, and wrote *Sugarcane Island* in 1969. After rejections, it appeared from Vermont Crossroads Press in 1976, and in 1979 [Bantam Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/bantam-books/) launched Choose Your Own Adventure with Packard's *The Cave of Time*. The roleplaying strand arrived at almost the same moment. In 1975 [Ken St. Andre](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ken-st-andre/)'s [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/) became the second commercial RPG, published by [Flying Buffalo](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/flying-buffalo/), and in 1976 Flying Buffalo's founder Rick Loomis wrote *Buffalo Castle*, 150 numbered paragraphs that let a single player take a T&T character through a dungeon with no referee. It may have been the first published adventure gamebook. ## Evolution The boom belonged to Britain. In 1982 [Puffin Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/puffin-books/) published *The Warlock of Firetop Mountain* by [Games Workshop](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/games-workshop/) co-founders [Steve Jackson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/steve-jackson-uk/) and [Ian Livingstone](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ian-livingstone/). Penguin printed only 5,000 copies at first; the book went on to sell over two million, and the Fighting Fantasy line eventually sold some 20 million copies across 59 Puffin titles. Jackson's four-part *Sorcery!* (from 1983) linked books into a single epic, and in 1984 [Joe Dever](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/joe-dever/)'s [Lone Wolf](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lone-wolf/) went further, letting one hero carry skills and gear across dozens of volumes. J. H. Brennan's *GrailQuest* (1984) brought Arthurian comedy. In the United States [TSR, Inc.](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/tsr/) published its Endless Quest books from 1982, and D&D gained its first solo module, *Blizzard Pass* (1983), whose hidden paragraphs appeared under a special pen. Translations spread the form across Europe. The numbers were extraordinary: Bantam's Choose Your Own Adventure sold more than 250 million copies in some 40 languages, and Lone Wolf more than 12 million in over 30 countries. Dever, the first British winner of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Championship in America in 1982, had built his world of Magnamund in his own home campaign; the gamebook was, for him and for thousands of readers, a way of carrying a roleplaying campaign into places no Dungeon Master could reach. The decline came in the 1990s, as home computers and consoles offered branching adventure with pictures and sound; the original Puffin Fighting Fantasy series ended in 1995 and Bantam's Choose Your Own Adventure in 1998. Revival followed in two forms: reprints (Fighting Fantasy returned with Wizard Books in 2002 and Scholastic in 2017, and Project Aon has put much of Lone Wolf online free since 1999) and digital adaptations, most celebrated in inkle's app versions of *Sorcery!* in the 2010s. ## How to tell it apart **Versus interactive fiction.** A text adventure such as [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/colossal-cave-adventure/) or [Zork](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/zork/) parses whatever the player types and tracks the world in software; the gamebook offers only the choices printed on the page, and the reader keeps the state with a pencil. [Interactive Fiction & Text Adventures](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/interactive-fiction/) also grew up simultaneously with the gamebook in the late 1970s, and each borrowed from the other. **Versus the solo RPG.** A gamebook is authored: every outcome was written in advance and the story's branches are finite. A modern [Solo & Journaling RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/solo-rpg/) uses oracles, random tables and journaling to generate a story nobody wrote, and it can be played indefinitely. **Versus the tabletop RPG.** The adventure gamebook borrows an RPG's character sheet and dice but removes the table of friends and the referee's improvisation. It is roleplaying with the conversation replaced by a book. ## Where to start - [Choose Your Own Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/choose-your-own-adventure/) — *The Cave of Time* (1979), the pure branching book. - [Fighting Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fighting-fantasy/) — *The Warlock of Firetop Mountain* (1982), the adventure gamebook's classic. - [Lone Wolf](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lone-wolf/) — *Flight from the Dark* (1984), a campaign in paperback, legally free online. - [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/) — for the solo adventures that began it all. - Then compare [Interactive Fiction & Text Adventures](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/interactive-fiction/) and the modern [Solo & Journaling RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/solo-rpg/). ## Hallmarks - Second-person narration: "you" are the hero - Numbered sections or pages, with the reader choosing where to turn - Multiple endings, many of them sudden deaths - In the RPG-derived strand, a character sheet, dice and combat rules - Designed for a single reader with no referee - Cheap, pocket-sized paperbacks sold in bookstores rather than game shops ## Facts - Consider the Consequences!, a 1930 novel by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins, already offered readers branching choices and multiple endings. - [Edward Packard](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/edward-packard/) wrote Sugarcane Island in 1969; it was not published until 1976. - Rick Loomis's Buffalo Castle (1976), for [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/), may have been the first published adventure gamebook with dice and character stats. - Bantam's [Choose Your Own Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/choose-your-own-adventure/) series ran to 184 titles between 1979 and 1998. - In March 1983 [Fighting Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fighting-fantasy/) books held the top three places on the Sunday Times bestseller list. - [Lone Wolf](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lone-wolf/) needs no dice: a printed table of random numbers does the work. - In France, Fighting Fantasy and its kin were sold as "livres dont vous êtes le héros," books in which you are the hero. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook) - [Wikipedia: Buffalo Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Castle) - [Project Aon (Lone Wolf online)](https://www.projectaon.org/) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.