Poke ogre with a stick. Turn to page 23. You died.
No good thing ever dies, Stephen King once wrote, and while he was talking about hope, the saying could well be applied to the hugely popular ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books from the 1980/1990s. That’s because one person has decided to revisit the magic of those books and old-school text-based RPGs, by inventing a bespoke e-ink handheld device for reading and gaming.
Although I got my first computer at a relatively young age, games in the 1980s weren’t especially cheap and so much of my pocket money was spent on acquiring a series of books known as ‘Choose Your Own Adventure.’ If you’ve never heard of them before, think of them as being a roleplaying game, where each page describes a location or event, before giving you options about what you can do next.
You made your choice, flicking through to a page as instructed, and the story would continue. Or not, if you made a bad choice and ended up dying.
Anyway, inspired by his son’s lack of interest in reading, Daniel Pucha, an electronics and programming entrepreneur (who prefers to go by the name Dana) decided to develop his own handheld device, called the Ink Console (via The Verge), that can be used to play/read CYOA books. While the prototype looks like nothing more than a simple e-ink reader, the device offers more than just an interface for electronic books.
That’s because while you’ll be able to purchase new books to read/play in the form of tiny cartridges that you pop into the device (which Dana calls Gamebooks), he and developer Rafa Laguna are also working on creating a software kit that will allow you to create your own CYOA stories and text-based RPGs.
Although I’d prefer to just be able to download a new game, rather than swapping cartridges about, I have to say that the whole concept looks really appealing. I adored the CYOA series and for many years, I probably spent more time reading those than playing on my computer (the interminable loading times being the reason why). It’s no exaggeration to say that the hours spent disappearing into other worlds pushed me into learning programming and graphics.
As with all such projects, Dana is turning to crowdfunding, via Crowd Supply, to generate the income required to bring the Ink Console to market. At the time of writing, though, the funding project hasn’t started so it’s not clear just how much the Ink Console and the extra Gamebooks will cost if everything all comes to fruition. The image of the device at the top of this article is a prototype, so it may not ultimately look like that either.
Naturally, the specifications of the handheld are pretty basic, but the important ones seem about right. The 7.5-inch screen has a resolution of 800 x 480, which is fitting for the content being displayed, and the device should come with a 5,000 mAh rechargeable battery.
That’s far bigger than most e-readers, so it’s either a sign that it will run for a long time before requiring a charge or the screen requires more power than you’d think. Not that the rest of the hardware is energy-hungry—inside the Ink Console there’s a 32-bit microcontroller (pdf warning) with two cores, 512 kB of SRAM, 8 MB of pseudoSRAM, and 4 MB of flash memory.
The Crowd Supply page also states that once the campaign is over and the project is complete, the developers will aim to make the whole thing open source. In other words, if you’re a keen electronic whizz, then there’s no reason why you couldn’t make your own Ink Console. The spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure isn’t just limited to fantasy books, it would seem.
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