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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

An Edward Packard Gimmick

Most of you probably are familiar with Edward Packard, even if the name is just a tingle of memory at the moment. He wrote the initial Choose Your Own Adventure books which have now become an essential part of the gaming genome.

One of his books, and one I remember fairly well, was Inside UFO 54-40. The gamebooks.org site notes an interesting aspect:

My Thoughts: This is a fairly interesting science fiction adventure, though it's certainly not the best of the series. The book also contains the rather annoying gimmick of making the reader search for the planet Ultima, a place which is in the book but completely unreachable by regular play. It's on page 101, in case you care...
-- Books By Edward Packard

Nice, a gamebook that insisted you cheat. Is there a valid digital analogy here?

1 comment:

Blog said...

Captain Kirk's solution to the Kobayashi Maru scenario?