How did you discover gamebooks?

I confess, I didn’t even know what gamebooks were until I joined the QuestForge team. When I learned about the genre, my first thought was that they sounded like an interesting twist on Choose Your Own Adventures. Then it hit me that knowing about gamebooks would have been great when I was younger and wanted to try out tabletop RPGs but had no friends who were into it.

Gamebook author Dave Morris mentioned that this is fairly common in a Twitter conversation. But it’s also not the only reason people get into gamebooks:

“Certainly some of my pnp group have read gamebooks – more when they were younger, though ie when they couldn’t get an RPG group together. But I am finally getting to see that not every gamebook reader is a frustrated RPGer. This surprised me btw!”

When I explain what DestinyQuest Infinite is to someone, I usually start by asking if they’d ever heard of gamebooks. At this point people either have no idea what I’m talking about, or get this glazed nostalgic look in their eyes (or in their text because you know, email) and tell me, “Oh yeah I used to love those as a kid,” or “My older brother read them to me when I was younger.”

I didn’t grow up in the heyday of gamebooks but I did enjoy some CYOA when I was a kid. So when I was tutoring a 4th grader, I brought in a CYOA book on a whim. This is a kid who grew up on game consoles and iPads, and he was absolutely amazed and in love with the idea of creating his own adventure in a book.

The gamebook genre might be changing and adapting to the times, but I don’t think the world will ever outgrow it. Even though many of the current fans have been fans since the genre’s beginning, but I know that people (kids especially) are still discovering gamebooks every day. And I love to be a part of that.

How did you discover the gamebook genre?

Yuliya

Yuliya handles marketing and writing at QuestForge, and is the self-appointed chief of keeping Chris sane (despite Chris's insistence that he is the sane one).