Branching Narrative

A branching narrative is a story whose path depends on what the player does: a choice at a numbered paragraph, a mission failed instead of won, a suspect shot instead of spared. The period sources held here describe it in three forms — the gamebook, the adventure with more than one ending, and the campaign whose missions depend on the last one — and by the late 1990s reviewers were weighing how much of a game’s “less-than-linear” feel was authored and how much was chance.

Fast facts

Gamebooks: Puffin’s Fighting Fantasy series had “UK sales exceeding 1½ million copies” by November 1984, and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was already a Spectrum game.
Story Tree (Scholastic), reviewed in 1986, let children write their own: every screen links by “Continue”, “Choice” or “Chance”.
Ten endings: Infocom’s Deadline, by Electronic Games’ count in 1985; Maniac Mansion had five.
Branching campaign: Wing Commander (1990) sent failing pilots down easier “fall-back” paths, and Computer Gaming World wanted an auto-save to stop players undoing them.
Randomised plot: Blade Runner (1997) chose which suspects were replicants at the start of each game.

Gamebooks

Crash introduced Games Workshop to its readers in October 1984 by way of the Fighting Fantasy books: “computer adventure games in writ[ten] form. At certain points in the story, [the] reader is offered several options [and] may choose, or roll a dice, which to [take]. So the books may be read through [sev]eral times, each time coming up wit[h]” a different result (the scan loses the column edge; the bracketed letters are supplied). Writing in Computer & Video Games the following month, Ian Livingstone put the series’ UK sales above 1½ million copies and noted that its first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, “is also available as a computer game for the 48k Spectrum”, with Forest of Doom following as “a text adventure with the addition of graphics”.

The structure could be handed to children. Bob Proctor reviewed Scholastic’s Story Tree for Computer Gaming World in March 1986 — a tool for ages 9 to 14 that “only lets you make certain specific choices at certain points in the story” — and set out its three kinds of link: “Continue” (“From screen A, you always go to screen B”), “Choice” (“the reader can pick one of up to four alternatives. Each calls up a different screen; a new one, one seen before, or even the same one”) and “Chance”, where the designer sets the odds. Proctor thought the form new: “The idea of writing a story to be read several times — with different plot twists each reading — is a fairly recent one as far as I know. It is not limited to computer games; it is also used in the popular ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books.”

Adventures with more than one ending

By January 1985 Electronic Games was treating a second ending as something to hunt for once an adventure was solved. “Not all adventures have more than one ending — actually, most don’t,” wrote Charles Ardai. “But for those that do, finding all the possibilities is a worthy challenge.” Mysteries were the natural home: “the ending changes according to how much evidence the detective has procured and whether motives have been established and alibis broken. Infocom’s Deadline has a total of ten separate endings, of which only one ends with the guilty parties locked up.” Planetfall “has two equally good endings”, and Sierra’s King’s Quest branched at the puzzle rather than the plot: “each problem that he faces has two possible solutions, a relatively obvious, low-scoring one and a less obvious, higher-scoring one.”

Commodore Magazine’s Adventure Road column made the same point of Maniac Mansion in December 1987 — “The game has five alternative endings, so you can play it more than once” — with the practical footnote that each saved position needed its own disk.

The branching campaign

Computer Gaming World’s December 1990 review of Wing Commander (Origin, designed by Chris Roberts) is the earliest account held here of a story that branches on performance rather than choice. “Which star the Tiger Claw settles at determines the nature of the missions which the player will conduct there,” Dennis Owens wrote, and the game assumed players would lose some: “There is a ‘tolerance’ factor built into the game. New players, it is assumed […], will make mistakes early on, fail in several missions, and want to keep campaigning to set things right. It speaks well of Origin, therefore, to include in their game a certain amount of ‘beginner fall-back positions’ from which to keep playing.”

The magazine saw at once that the saved game undermined it. “Too many players will cheat themselves out of discovering the entire campaign game that is Wing Commander. They do this every time they restart a saved game after a less than successful mission.” Its remedy: “An ‘auto save’ feature after returning home from each mission would do the trick.”

Chrono Trigger’s endings

Nintendo Power devoted part of its November 1995 Chrono Trigger strategy to “Alternate Endings”, and placed the idea in its console context: “While multiple endings are nothing new, they have shown up most often in action or fighting games and have been dependent on obvious factors like the number of lives lost or continues used.” Chrono Trigger tied them to decisions instead — whether to fight Magus, for one — and to replay: “If you’re playing a regular Chrono Trigger game, there are only three possible endings you can reach the first time through.”

Blade Runner: branching by chance

Westwood’s Blade Runner moved part of the branching out of the author’s hands. Louis Castle told Edge in September 1997 that “in order for it to be a real detective story, you can’t know the ending”, and that “Of the 13 major characters under investigation by McCoy, five are Replicants, but the actual ones are randomly determined at the start of each game.” Edge’s review that Christmas gave it nine out of ten and separated the two mechanisms: “Granted, there are still a number of predefined plot strands to work through. But with all but two of the Replicants randomly chosen from a possible 15 suspects for each new game, and code to give every in-game character the ability to move around and make rudimentary decisions for themselves, there’s a real sense that events are unfolding in a semi-random, realtime manner. It’s even possible to miss out key events completely if McCoy isn’t in the right place at the right time.” Players “can even elect to switch sympathies, aiding and abetting the quest to extend their short lifespan”.

Your story, your choices