To Reach Utopia, Turn To Page 101

Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? If you’re of a certain age, you most certainly will. They were the ones where the narrative was all told second-person, about you the reader, and there were decision points in the narrative where you could choose this or that way to progress.
One of the very early books was entitled Inside UFO 54-40 (cover pic). In this, your protagonist ends up aboard a spaceship travelling in search of utopia.
Anyone who’s read one of these books knows that the way you interacted with them was never exactly as the book’s narrative assumed; you’d flick through pages at random and read entries for the thrill of seeing what might happen later on, you’d stop to look at art for entries you hadn’t yet reached, you’d keep your fingers in the pages so you could backtrack on your decisions if they turned out badly.
Flicking through Inside UFO 54-40 showed you that entry 101 was the grand finale, where you made it to Utopia at last, and success was yours!
Only one catch: the book was designed so that there was no way to ever reach entry 101. Utopia was unattainable.
That’s just wonderful.
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Aside of extra geekiness: Inside UFO 54-40 was written by Edward Packard, who was the originator of the choose-your-path format. Those who, like me, assumed the format emerged out of the success of Dungeons & Dragons may be interested to hear that Packard wrote his first such book five years prior to the publication of D&D. (What, I wonder, would roleplaying look like today if it emerged from gamebooks instead of wargames?)

7 thoughts on “To Reach Utopia, Turn To Page 101”

  1. I was always a Lone Wolf fan myself. To this day I still have a rather geeky collection of books by Joe Dever.

  2. Fighting Fantasy all the way – I’ve still got in excess of forty of those books on my shelves…
    But, damnit, that ending to “Inside UFO 54-40” is perfect.

  3. Interesting! I only ever read fantasy pick-a-paths, and I had no idea there even were others when I was a kid.
    I seriously loved the Rose Estes ones when I was quite young.

  4. “(What, I wonder, would roleplaying look like today if it emerged from gamebooks instead of wargames?)”
    Did it emerge from Wargames?
    I’m sure it did – but I’ve never really read up on the history of roleplaying. Any references you could point me to?
    I know that for me, personally, roleplay came 100% from wargames. My older brother was a serious wargamer (and, when he died, he left me his bookcases full of GDW wargames, which I still own). And, via him, my initial experience of roleplay gaming was the very first edition of Warhammer, which was a very revolutionary attempt to combine tabletop model-based gaming with tolkienesque fantasy with special rules for “characters.”
    Never looked back from there, really… and, in some ways, I guess the English game industry didn’t either.

  5. Scott: yeah, the canonical start of D&D came about when Gary Gygax’s innovative Chainmail wargame, which allowed 1 figure to represent 1 character and included fantasy elements, was used by Dave Arneson to
    run a scenario in which members of the army could infiltrate a city through a sewer. Running “hero” characters through a sewer opened the door to one player -> one character, with a game master holding the secret map and describing the environment, and things progressed from that.
    The first edition of D&D was not a game in its own right, but a supplement to Gygax’s wargame Chainmail; it didn’t have any combat rules because you were meant to use those in Chainmail.
    Man, I guess I know a lot about this stuff. Although I had to check the facts here and discovered I’d got one wrong, so not as well as I could do. There’s a lot more to the stories, Dave Arneson’s and Gygax’s different proto-RPGs, etc.

  6. My first introduction to fantasy was a series called Wizards and Warriors. So cool. You could be the Warrior and choose a weapon or two. The wizard I seem to recall could choose a spell or two. This meant, in many ways, that your success was predetermined before you had even started the first page. E.g. if you needed a mace to smash the skeleton at the end of the adventure and had chosen a bow, you died. This meant you got quite a lot of leverage out of the book playing the different characters and choosing different skills to get you through. Fighting Fantasy came along after this.
    And then Morgue introduced me to D&D, and 20 years later I still love it!
    So, I guess quite a big thanks goes out to you Morgue.

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