Getting in the gamebook: the iOS resurrection of the Choose Your Own Adventure story

If you were a role-playing fanatic in the mid-'90s and you were looking to immerse yourself in a new fantasy world, then you had two real choices. You could dive into a game like Diablo, or you could pick up a 'gamebook' like, say, anything in the Fabled Lands series.

Published between 1995 and 1996, the Fabled Lands books were pioneers for the gamebook industry, offering a non-linear adventure in which you could journey between books, using a network of codewords and logic flags to maintain a persistent experience.

It was a fresh design, and it put the declining gamebook market back on an even footing against the burgeoning video games industry - though this change ultimately came about too late.

"I'll put this into perspective," Fabled Lands co-author Dave Morris says. "Gamebooks in their heyday would sell tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies. Nowadays, if you publish a gamebook and sell 20,000 units, you'll be uncorking the Moët."

The Plains of Howling Darkness was one of the Fabled Lands gamebooks, penned by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson in the mid-'90s

The gamebook market was all but forced into hibernation by the blossoming popularity of video games. But, the old adage "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" has since offered gamebook creators a solution.

Recently, then, gamebook authors have been reviving the format on mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

"These platforms are really game changing," Morris, whose interactive re-imagining of Frankenstein is popular on the App Store, says.

"In Frankenstein, you're developing a relationship with the main character based on variables like trust and compassion.

"Now, obviously I couldn't do that in an old-style gamebook because actually reading 'Victor gets +3 trust' would wreck the whole experience. In app form, though, we don't need to bother the reader with any of that technical, game rules stuff."

According to Morris, the portability of phones and tablets makes these devices perfectly suited to telling the same sort of engrossing stories that gamebooks and Choose Your Own Adventure novels did in the 1990s.

Dave Morris's interactive re-imagining of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein

At the same time, though, the fact that publishers on these platforms can hide mechanics such as Trust and Compassion meters - or Fabled Lands's old book-linking codewords - frees authors up to make much more compelling experiences.

"This is just as well, because if you want dungeon adventures and dragon slaying, video games do that much better than gamebooks could," Morris says. "The medium needs to evolve in new directions."

Looking at the way the Fabled Lands gamebooks have been adapted for mobile platforms by Mirabilis Entertainment shows Morris's thinking in practice.

The first games in the series retain all the hallmarks of a gamebook - including letting players decide where to go and what to do from multiple options - but hide many of the underlying systems, such as the dice rolls and codewords of the paper edition.

"Dice were necessary in the old paper-and-pencil days, but they make no sense now," Morris, who describes them as an "historical accident" too often carried over by developers who fail to understand that gamebooks as apps are a new genre (not merely a translation), says.

Temple of the Spider God, by Tin Man Games, lets you roll 3D dice by shaking your iPhone or iPad

Other developers disagree. Most noteworthily, Neil Rennison of Tin Man Games, who has released a successful series of gamebooks on mobile devices, which more directly allude to the paper origins of the genre.

In Tin Man's games, such as An Assassin in Orlandes, you shake your phone to roll a die and you may save your progress through linear adventures by placing bookmarks in the pages.

"We could have easily delivered a very modern-day gamey experience, keeping most of the maths and inventory management hidden," Rennison, who considered it his remit to make apps which captured the feel and soul of old gamebooks, admits.

"Then it wouldn't have been a gamebook, though - it would have ended up a sterile text-only adventure game."

To Rennison, it's the fact that tablets and phones encourage developers to include many of the old skool elements that makes them so uniquely suitable for presenting gamebooks on.

More than that, though, he seems to accuse anything that doesn't choose to retain the traditions of the genre of diluting the medium and being only a gamebook pretender.

"There are a number of new interactive reading experiences that are calling themselves 'gamebooks'. This annoys me slightly, for they don't represent what a gamebook truly is in the way they are designed."

Despite the two wildly different perspectives on what it is that has most helped the gamebook industry recover ground on mobile devices, there remains one thing on which both developers are united.

In Rennison's words, that's "whatever happens to the gamebooks in the future can only be a good thing, as it brings back a game genre that I truly love."