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Make your own adventure books were all the rage once upon a time, at least that’s how this scribe remembers the late ’80s and early ’90s. With nothing but descriptive text, maybe a small number of illustrations, a dice and a good imagination, you would embark on journeys around the world, try to win the league as manager of a football / soccer team, or save the galaxy as Samus Aran. Yep, in Japan you didn’t need a video game to experience the series thanks to the Metroid entry in the Famicom Adventure Game Book series – Metroid: Zebesian Incursion.
For those of you not clued in on this fun bit of publishing history, Did You Know Gaming has produced an entertaining look at how the book incorporated mechanics and ideas from the game, and even introduced ideas that would pop up in the games decades later – pretty standard sci-fi tropes, to be fair, but a fun coincidence.
Check it out below:
More notably, thanks to the sterling work of Devin Monnens (@deserthat) you can experience the book as a text adventure online; it makes adjustments to suit the format, but considering the book itself is both extremely rare and in Japanese, this is the way to try it out in English. You can give it a whirl here.
A fun bit of trivia as we eagerly await Metroid Dread this week, we just need to roll a 4 to beat Mother Brain…
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