Back in the early 1980s, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson had a smart idea. They could get fantasy games into high street bookstores (and so bring them to a much wider readership) by grafting D&D-style rules onto the branching-path stories popularized by Choose Your Own Adventure.
In fact The Fantasy Trip's solo adventures got there years earlier (and Ayn Rand beat them to it by decades, kind of) but Fighting Fantasy was the breakout hit, selling a couple of hundred thousand copies per title in Britain alone.
Unlike the Beatles and Hugh Grant they never quite cracked the US market, admittedly, but FF and similar gamebook series sold in the millions worldwide.
Nowadays a print gamebook would be very lucky to shift five or ten thousand copies, and most don't even get close. Why is that? And is there a way for gamebooks to recapture their former popularity? Join us tomorrow to discuss it.
I never knew Ayn Rand's play was interactive! Almost makes up for Objectivism.
ReplyDeleteAlmost... :-)
DeleteThere's a Kickstarter currently running for what looks like a posh choose your own adventure...Alba. and the writer Kim Newman did a whole novel in that format, Life's Lottery
ReplyDeleteNot sure that I'd call post-apocalyptic Scotland exactly "posh", but we will talk a bit about Alba tomorrow.
DeleteI never read Life's Lottery, but I remember the reviews when it came out a couple of decades ago. Mr Newman might have more luck with it today.
Lone Wolf and the later Grey Star series were in bookstores everywhere when I was young (when there were bookstores, not just Big Box chains selling more toys than books) so it think it's reasonable to say they "made it" in the US. Several publishers also did series based off existing scifi and fantasy novel settings like Tor's Crossroads Adventure books, and they were all over the place as well.
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't found it already, this site is the go-to place for gamebook info:
https://gamebooks.org/
Thanks, Dick. Demian's site is the Wiki of gamebookery.
DeleteJamie and I did have most of our gamebooks published in US editions (even the first two Fabled Lands books were released in the US, under the series title "Quest") but they sold only a small fraction of the number of copies in France, Italy, Scandinavia, Britain, etc.
Sales of dead-tree books in general are very low in the US regardless of subject or genre. Our bookstores died off under pressure from the Big Box chains years ago, and now they're finally going under themselves due to online sales and e-books. While our library system remains shockingly good in many places very few adults seem to use that resource, ever. It really leaves many people with no exposure to any kind of physical books once they graduate from school. All the reading's done online these days - and most of the writing, if one counts blog comments as writing.
DeleteBut 30+ years ago things weren't so grim, and the Lone Wolf stuff really did seem to be doing okay. I had friends at Waldenbooks and two small bookstores (now defunct) back then and they all swore sales on them were good for them, anyway.
I suppose books don't sell like they used to (does anyone have a link to historical figures?) but just to take a recent moderate bestseller as a f'rinstance, The Essex Serpent has now sold over a quarter of a million copies. Wolf Hall (a much better book btw) has now sold over a million. And those are literary novels, not genre stuff. Sales of print gamebooks in comparison have dropped off a cliff since the early 1990s.
DeleteIt's hardly a mystery. Computer games.
ReplyDeleteOf course. Computer games do the same thing fantasy gamebooks used to only better. So what should gamebooks do that computer games can't? That's how to make them successful, perhaps.
DeleteCan a gamebook save the planet? We probably need to work backwards from there!
ReplyDeleteWell, Can You Brexit didn't help to steer us away from the worst possible outcome there, so I guess not.
DeletePerhaps the multi-player format is key, Dave. Perhaps Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un found their mutual respect due to a shared love of Bloodsword, Duelmaster and Combat Heroes!
DeleteAh, Duelmaster... that's certainly my favourite of all the gamebooks I've played. But (boardgamers and loony autocrats aside) its mechanics might be a little too complicated for modern tastes.
DeleteI had Duelmaster back in the day, Dave, but not sure I ever actually read them. If you/Jamie ever decide to re-release those, you'll have one guaranteed sale at least. My abiding memory of them is the shrink wrap that they came in, which meant they wouldn't have looked out of place in the cereal section!
DeleteI wish Jamie and Mark would re-release them, Andy. I keep mentioning it but they don't seem that interested. I wish I'd kept my copies!
DeleteTo state the blindingly obvious I suppose the now ubiquity and ease of access of the internet and quality of screens, ereaders and tablets etc and the decline of delayed gratification all leads to online downloads of Ebooks and PDFs being a cheaper, quicker and easier distribution method. I wonder if you added up all the sales through the different channels whether sales of books generally are stable or rising/falling. I think though that the point Deptfordx made about computer games has definitely cannibalised the overall interactive immersive experience market which gamebooks obviously owned in the 80s. I think the ease of access to alternative forms of entertainment or games and tv/streaming services which you can carry around in your pocket is also a big factor. But there’s nothing quite like the tangible feel of paper. I confess to even printing out some of the material from this very blog to read “properly”... on the stats side a quick google turned up this discussion https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/1483/where-can-i-find-sales-numbers-for-books but I haven’t delved further :-)
ReplyDeleteOf course, we're now in the era of on-line Rpgs (some of them are even free, but I don't play them because they're said to be addictive). Anyway, I think that now the era of paperback gamebooks is over, even if some try to sell "Deluxe versions" (see what happened with the French at Cannes who tried to revamp your own gamebooks....). For reasons of price, the future is now for PdF gamebooks.
ReplyDeleteThe last gamebook I played was "Survivor of Arborea" by the excellent Umberto Pignatelli but sold in paper by a German company. What a pity ! Who will pay 20€ for a gamebook ?
https://store.spaceorange42.com/product/53
I'm not sure how PDF gamebooks can hold their own against excellent series like the Choice of Games books. They're better stories as well as offering richer interactivity.
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