Steve Jackson will remember that.
Way back in the day, long before video games were any good, the cool new narrative mechanic was Choose Your Own Adventure books. Wildly popular back in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the CYOA genre died off sharpish with the invention of point-and-click games, text adventures, and video games with vast, sprawling branching stories, which allowed players to have all the fun of meaningful choices without all the tedium of having to turn to page 32 only to find out that you’ve died, again. Well, you still died a lot. But the computer did the page-turning bit for you, at least.
The CYOA genre came back around full circle in 2013, with Inkle’s fearless adaptation of the Sorcery! books by the founder of Games Workshop and Lionhead Studios, Steve Jackson. Inkle is a studio known for its mastery of word-wrangling; the very thought of attempting to map out the intricacies of the stories the team writes is enough to send just about any writer screaming for the sweet release of death. It was Sorcery! that catapulted Inkle into the spotlight — and now, with its four-part series ported to the Nintendo Switch, hopefully more people can see why.
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