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US Gamer discusses how the full library of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (and the Sorcery! spinoff series) combined the multiple-choice page turning of Choose Your Own Adventure with basic versions of D&D-style fantasy RPG rules, letting players over-come dangerous or reckless story scenarios with a good dice roll effectively, the Fighting Fantasy series offered young gamers a roleplaying experience they could tackle solo. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone first came up with the idea behind the Fighting Fantasy books in the 1980s, eventually co-writing a massively popular gamebook called The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain that was published by Puffin. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were written for young audiences, though their themes tended to be darker and they were marketed towards fans of early roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons. While the quality of the CYOA books and the choices they offered readers varied at times (with certain story choices leading to very abrupt and literal 'dead ends') the accessible, child-friendly narrative choices and second-person 'You' perspective of these novels went on to inspire the developers and dangerous modders of Mass Effect 2, along with developers of other narrative video games with dialogue trees and multiple-choice story options.

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The CYOA book series swiftly grew into a highly successful franchise with a team of authors who contributed hundreds of original stories, each set in different genres such as adventure, mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. Montgomery and Ed Packard, who each wrote the first novels in the series. Gamebooks as a concept really took off in the 1970s with the cover art-heavy Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books published by Bantam Books. The History of CYOA page on the Choose Your Own Adventure website expounds on how the original CYOA books were the brainchild of R.A. Video games where picking and navigating a multitude of narrative paths (the D&D-inspired Disco Elysium being the weirdest and most famous example currently) illustrate the potential of video games as a storytelling medium and just how much story-rich games owe to the gamebooks of the 20th century. This sort of narrative design process can be very tricky – Bioware's Mass Effect 3 RPG was criticized after launch for having endgame choices disconnected from the choices players made earlier in the game, while The Stanley Parable adventure game is a sort of meta-commentary on how many video games claim to give players freedom while simultaneously railroading the choices players make. Video game developers and writers can only create so many narrative choices (and puzzle solutions in the case of a point-and-click adventure game like Myst) over the course of development, making it all the more vital for them to create 'game routes' that are thematically distinct, fun for players, and in-character for the story's protagonists. Non-linear video game plots with multiple endings tend to show up more often in computer RPGs, text adventures, and visual novels – genres where interactions between characters are a core part of gameplay and sophisticated graphics aren't as vital to the game's success on the market.

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Related: How Wildermyth Translates Tabletop Games & Papercrafts To PC

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