Have you ever tried gamebooks, AKA Choose Your Own Adventure books? You read a paragraph of text, then you get to choose what the main character should do next, and turn to different pages depending on what you choose. If all goes well, you reach a good ending. More likely, you don’t. A number of gamebooks have been published, most in the 80s and 90s.
Over the last few years, nine gamebooks have been converted to computer game format, by SD Separa. These games are entirely text-based. The program keeps track of your abilities, what you’re carrying etc. I have released a collection of these games for the retro computers C64, C128, Plus/4 and MEGA65.
The collection can be found at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EbMDCND_Vw58pJsaRta9f7ODDvH6W7YL
In retro computing terms, these games are big. All of the games require a disk drive. Three of them require either an REU or dual disk drives or a 1571 or 1581 disk drive.
If you want to play on a modern PC, you can find the games at at https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=author%3ASD+Separa . You can then either click “Play on-line”, or download the Z-code file (e.g. gamename.z5) and google for a Z-code interpreter for your platform – Gargoyle is a popular choice, but there are many.
This is the complete list of games included in the collection:
- Secret of the Knights, 1984, by Jim Gasperini
- Sail with Pirates, 1984, by Jim Gasperini
- Green Blood, 1993, by Mark Smith and Dave Morris
- Down Among the Dead Men, 1993, by Dave Morris
- Necklace of Skulls, 1993, by Dave Morris
- The Coils of Hate, 1993, by Mark Smith
- Heart of Ice, 1995, by Dave Morris
- The War-Torn Kingdom, 1995, by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson
- Over the Blood-Dark Sea, 1995, by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson
These games have been released with the permission of the original gamebook authors.
