Category Archives: Adventure Games

One out of five adult Americans with online access (90% of the population) have ever read any gamebooks, such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or solitaire RPG adventures such as the Tunnels & Trolls series. These books definitely reflect the 1980s, when publication peaked: those 35-44 years old (kids in the 1980s) are most likely to have ever read a gamebook (39%), compared to just 18% of those 45-54 years old and 30% of those under 25. While classic gamebook lines are being relaunched (e.g., Endless […]

When my 11-year old wanted to learn to program last spring, I got him a book on writing games in JavaScript. It had the source code for four games, but my son found it difficult. Four games?! A far cry from the 101 BASIC Computer Games that was my go-to (ahem) when I was his age, programming a TRS-80 Model I. So I looked at a number of different BASIC implementations for his iPod Touch, eventually landing on LowRes Coder, which turns an iOS device into an 8-bit microcomputer circa […]