Experiential nostalgia,ironic homage,and literary awareness in the Italian gamebook

The English-speaking gamebook

A gamebook is a narrative printed on paper and divided into sections connected by links. By choosing the links to follow, the reader experiences alternative narrative paths which lead to multiple endings. In some cases, a gamebook can also include game mechanics such as rolling dice and keeping track of changing stats and inventory. While the story element is always there, the play aspect varies immensely, from gamebooks where it is not present at all (you just choose what to read next) to texts where applying game mechanics and making ludic decisions represents most of the engagement (like in DestinyQuest by Michael J Ward). ¹

Early branching texts include the ancient I Ching, the Renaissance libri delle sorti, and experiments like Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes. But branching fiction as a mainstream form of interactive literature only emerged in the USA and in the UK in the 1970s with the gamebook, and it expanded to produce thousands of works and sell many millions of copies in the 1980s and 1990s. ² This was also the Golden Age of the tabletop role-playing game, of course, and the relationship between the two coterminous forms was fruitful. Gamebooks gave visibility to role-playing games (like in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Gamebooks) or simply called themselves role-playing games on the covers (like the series Wizards, Warriors & You and Combat Command did). Role-playing games, meanwhile, published solo adventures in the format of gamebooks and included short branching stories in their manuals as a means to give aspiring players a feel for the experience. Some adventures for the game Tunnels & Trolls were published as RPG modules in the 1970s and gamebooks in the 1980s, showing the complete fluidity between the two.

In the first season of the gamebook, the Choose Your Own Adventure series dominated the market for children and tweens, becoming the most iconic line of them all. In the 1980s, the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series emerged as the most prominent examples of gamebooks that included game mechanics.

The main target for this first generation of gamebooks was juvenile, as proven by their topics, length, language, price tags, and several external factors. Endorsements in Choose Your Own Adventure books were from readers aged 9–12 years from 1979 to 1985 (volumes 1–46), and from readers aged 11, 13, and 17 years from 1985 to 1998 (volumes 47–185). Whether these endorsements were genuine or not, they showed the age bracket the publisher was trying to reach. Meanwhile, after “roar[ing] with laughter at the idea” of gamebooks, Penguin accepted to publish the foundational The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) only as part of their youth division Puffin (Green, 2014: 15; Livingstone and Jackson, 2022: 242). A 1986 survey about the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series showed that, out of over 500 respondents, almost all were between the ages of 9 and 17 (Warlock magazine #6, 42, in Wake, 2022: 199).

After thriving for about 15 years, the market for gamebooks contracted suddenly and dramatically in the mid-1990s, possibly due to competition from collectible card games, lack of innovation, and saturation of the market (Gideon, 2021). All classic series ceased publication: Fighting Fantasy in 1995, and Choose Your Own Adventure and Lone Wolf in 1998. According to Demian Katz's gamebook database (the largest in existence), publication of English-language gamebooks dropped from 286 titles in 1985 to 88 in 1995. ³

Some of the most popular series, like Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy, reopened in the early 21st century, and in a more subdued form they continue to exist to this day. ⁴ From the late 2000s and early 2010s, now-adult readers of the original works started supporting a market for gamebooks (Salter, 2014: 17–18). The presence of this returning audience brought the number of English-language titles back to more than 100 per year, but never to the levels of the 1980s. On the other hand, the new market of adult readers became able to support the publication of gamebooks that can be much longer than the originals, can deal with mature themes, can be experimental in form, style, and gameplay, and can sport higher production values. The return of the gamebook can also be seen as part of the surprising “revenge of the analog” (Sax, 2016) that the hobby world has experienced since the 2010s as a reaction to the pervasiveness of digital mediation.

The presence of the gamebook in the modern market can be explained only in part in terms of nostalgia, even though it largely involves the same people who read gamebooks in the 1980s and early 1990s. Adults acquiring gamebooks these days follow a pattern of “cult collecting” (Geraghty, 2014; Noxon, 2006; Reynolds, 2011) that manifests itself in three main ways. The first is through the purchase of the same artifacts the fan owned back in the day (because they lost their copy or want a better one); the second through the acquisition of vintage items the collector did not originally own; the third through the collection of modern, deluxe editions of older gamebooks. In the latter case, the nostalgic collector explicitly and consciously connects to a past that did not exist. The deluxe version of the original artifact corrects and improves upon the past, so to speak. Given the laws of diminishing ends, it is also possible that a materially magnified version of a 1980s gamebook is helpful in giving adult readers the kind of thrill that a more modest production could deliver back in the day.

This last point is of pivotal importance to understand a fundamental trait of gamebooks for adults of the 21st century. I call this trait experiential nostalgia. When rereading a classic juvenile gamebook today, the adult fan cannot receive the same degree of challenge they faced when they were more naïve readers some 30 years ago. A more complex kind of gamebook is needed to suit readers who have become more sophisticated. Such is precisely the philosophy that has characterized the longer and more challenging gamebooks for adults we see today. Modern gamebooks for adults, accordingly, tend to pay homage to the conventions of the old genre while reinventing them, expanding on them, intensifying them, and altering them in combinations that were not previously seen. It is not only the words or the illustrations of the new gamebook that bring back a sense of connection with the past but also the process of playing a gamebook that is as engaging now as the old gamebooks were back then. Gamebooks designed for experiential nostalgia operate toward structure and gameplay the way deluxe editions operate toward material production: they do more in order to give us about the same. In the process, the newly found complexity of the Italian gamebook is giving rise to a legitimately new and dynamic genre, and one that is in line with contemporary preference for interactive and mobile forms of communication.

Gamebooks in Italy: The first generation

From the UK and the USA, the gamebook quickly expanded internationally, and it made a major splash in Italy too. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Italian market for gamebooks remained massively dominated by translations from English texts.

A fundamental early event was the publication by Mondadori of 42 gamebooks under the brand Scegli la tua avventura between December 1986 and July 1988. This line presented the translation of 32 volumes originally from the Choose Your Own Adventure series, and 10 volumes featuring Indiana Jones from the Find Your Fate series. This was a brief but intense output of about two new volumes per month, and as these gamebooks were published by a major publisher, were distributed through newsstands, and had a low price tag, their impact was likely enhanced. These simple branching stories showed the potential for analog interactive fiction to a young audience who had not experienced anything like it before.

Differently from what happened in the UK and the USA, in Italy a single publisher managed to corner the market for gamebooks early on, and it shaped the perception of gamebooks among Italian readers. This publisher was Edizioni EL of Trieste, which published an impressive range of 186 gamebooks divided into 34 series between 1985 and 1999. Their output of gamebooks started and ended with volumes of the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever, for which Italian readers always had a special affection. Of the 186 gamebooks by EL, the majority were written by English and American authors, a minority by French authors, and a handful by German ones. Not a single gamebook by EL was authored by an Italian.

Edizioni EL did more than printing and selling gamebooks, though: it invested in creating a brand estheticism that played a significant part in their dominance of the market. It was EL that launched the term librogame, which is popular among Italian fans to this day and retains in its very body an element of foreignness (librogame, not librogioco). Most importantly, all publications of gamebooks by EL were supervised by a single person, Giulio Lughi, making it possible to situate a disparate number of series and works under a strongly unified vision. Lughi did not hesitate to change elements of the original stories according to his personal taste, like when he turned Lone Wolf's Order of the Kai into the Order of the Ramas. Gamebooks originally of a different format were published to be of the same size (with the sole exception of seven smaller books in the Compact series). Lughi also had the photographic covers of the Solve It Yourself … The Mystery Squad and Robin of Sherwood series replaced with original illustrations to align them with the drawn style of their other publications. He further replaced the illustrated covers of several series (like Golden Dragon and Unicorn Fatemaster) with illustrations by Peter Andrew Jones, who was the cover artist for Lone Wolf. In the process, the general look of EL publications became less varied.

Lughi's centralized approach even explains the exclusion of Italian authors from EL's librigame. As he candidly admitted in an interview, he rejected proposals by Italians because he felt that he wouldn’t be able to manipulate their works as freely as he did with foreign texts (“avere un testo in italiano avrebbe significato non poterci mettere le mani e lasciare il taglio così come voluto dall’autore”; Orsini, 2006: 2).

Also, regardless of original design, all series by EL were identified by a specific color that appeared both in a band at the bottom of the cover and in a header banner. The banner and the band wrapped around the spine of each book, and the banner showed a specific icon for each series (a wolf head on light blue for Lone Wolf, a compass on red for Fighting Fantasy, and so on). Each series was thus clearly identifiable as its own line and also as part of the larger EL family. Lined up on the shelf of a library or a bookstore, EL gamebooks stood out visually in a way that other juvenile publications couldn’t match.

Other series of gamebooks were published in Italy in this period but none ever rivaled the size and diffusion reached by EL. Italian readers of the first generation had access to Avventure infinite (six volumes in 1986–1987, partial translation of Endless Quest), Falcon (six volumes in 1988, from an English series of the same title), I fantastici 5 (14 volumes from 1988 to 1993, translating from two series inspired by Enid Blyton), Asterix: Alea iacta est! (four volumes from 1988 to 1990, from French originals), Tunnel e troll (six volumes in 1988–1989, partial translation of Tunnels & Trolls), and Tattica Game (six volumes in 1992–1993, translating from different international series). Even in these cases, the general pattern remained that gamebooks of the first generation, in Italy, would be largely a foreign product.

Italian gamebooks: The first generation

This is not to say that during the gamebook craze of the 1980s and 1990s there were no gamebooks written by Italians. It is just that these works were not comparable in number and visibility to the output generated by EL, by Scegli la tua avventura, and even by some of the secondary lines mentioned above. For one thing, early Italian gamebooks were scattered. With some partial exceptions examined later, there were no Italian gamebook series. Those few early Italian gamebooks were produced either by small publishers that granted minimal circulation and visibility or by large publishers that released a plethora of other content and did not invest in Italian gamebooks per se.

In this period, the major comic magazine Topolino did publish branching stories labelled as storie a bivi (“crossroads stories”), starting with Concina and Cavazzano's (1985) Topolino e il segreto del castello. Approximately 20 such stories were published in the 1980s and 1990s, and a handful of further stories made an appearance after that. While the ample diffusion of Topolino ensured that these stories had a vast circulation, they remained a very minor presence among the thousands of linear stories Disney published in the same period. Moreover, the short length, ephemeral nature, and extreme simplicity of these storie a bivi, featuring usually only six endings, do not allow for a meaningful comparison with gamebooks that had hundreds of entries and a significant staying power in bookstores and libraries. Storie a bivi did not lead to a trend or school of Italian gamebooks or graphic novels. The only early exception is the short graphic novel by Silver Due cuori in gioco (1988), which appears to have been assembled with minimal editorial effort and had no sequels. ⁵

A major factor in the marginality of early Italian gamebooks is that they seem to have missed their ideal target audience. People who read gamebooks at the time were mainly tweens and teens. Such was the readership of the original texts (as we saw at the beginning), and there is no indication that that changed in the Italian context, where gamebooks were regularly hosted in the youth sections of bookstores and libraries.

Yet, early Italian gamebooks appear to have been born with an adult public in mind, which limited their impact from the inception. This trait is already visible in Il presidente del consiglio sei … tu! by G&L and In cerca di fortuna by Andrea Angiolino. As both gamebooks were published in 1987 a few weeks apart from one another, they share the title of the first Italian gamebook.

The author(s) of Il presidente del consiglio … sei tu! chose to hide their identity behind the label of “G&L” and this did not change even when the book was reissued in 2020 by Librarsi. The impression is that “G&L” were not necessarily proud to be associated with a gamebook … and still aren’t! Il presidente del consiglio … sei tu! is in essence a political simulator, a genre that has never had much currency in the gamebook world. The reader plays the role of an Italian man aspiring to become Prime Minister. The protagonist's first choice is between joining a partito di maggioranza (center-right party) or partito di minoranza (center-left to left party). The former option leads one to deal with endless bureaucracy and social gatherings with influential people; the latter, to strikes, international conferences, and interactions with ambitious intellectuals. Other elements from the politics of the time are included too, with bivi about the caso Tortora that had inflamed Italian society since 1983, the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73, the admission of Turkey to the European Economic Community, and a reform of the jail system. While the average gamebook of the 1980s sunk its roots into the archetypes of heroic adventure, Il presidente del consiglio … sei tu! pursued a satirical line that could be of interest only to adult readers invested in the subject matter. Meanwhile, the lofty ideals of the adventurous gamebook were replaced by opportunism and hypocrisy:

Bravo! Sei riuscito a portare avanti un doppio gioco sul filo del rasoio, atteggiandoti da un lato a paladino dei lavoratori oppressi dall’ingordigia del fisco, dall’altro a far passare, a firma di un collega del partito, una tua postilla altamente impopolare alla legge fiscale, che introduce una nuova, pesantissima tassa sulle sigarette. (#138)

Despite its originality, Il presidente del consiglio … sei tu! had no lasting impact and did not trigger a tradition of gamebooks in the same vein—a sign of its divergence from the interests of the audience for gamebooks in the 1980s.

The other foundational Italian gamebook, In cerca di fortuna by Andrea Angiolino, attempted to enter the existing family of the adventurous gamebook while also departing from its Anglo-Saxon roots. In this, it followed in the footsteps of the Italian role-playing game Kata Kumbas (1984) and shared with it the goal of establishing a Mediterranean fantasy based on an imaginary version of Medieval Italy. In cerca di fortuna opens in the coastal city of Ianua (Genoa) and sends the protagonist on a quest for a treasure in a land infested by the undead. The text is divided into 363 narrative sections, and it offers an opportunity for exploration as sophisticated as that of the best English and American gamebooks of the time. Still, several reasons prevented In cerca di fortuna from having any significant impact. A determining factor was its being published by a then small and young publishing house (Edizioni Ripostes) which did not invest in giving visibility and a consistent profile to gamebooks.

In cerca di fortuna also shows the first example of ‘literary awareness’ that would become a predominant trait in 21st-century Italian gamebooks. While In cerca di fortuna could be enjoyed for its story and puzzles by the juvenile readers who devoured EL gamebooks, its paratexts and some internal elements show that Angiolino took particular pride in the work's intellectual construction. The text opens with a quote by a Danish mathematician and includes a biography of the author (which EL gamebooks did not), an original musical score (La ballata del cavaliere errante), and an afterword in which Angiolino discusses Calvino, Borges, Oulipo, and the philosophy of interactive fiction. All of this could have been of interest only to (some) adult readers. The adventure itself contains an encounter with a bard called Kitsch, who sings a song mocking fantasy adventures that pack the plot with incongruous elements. The paratexts and the implications of the encounter with Kitsch were probably wasted on the tween and teen readers that were the target audience for adventure gamebooks. They cared little about the theory and genealogy of hypertexts, and they delighted in thematically divergent adventures without suspecting them of being kitsch (or knowing the meaning of the word).

In the following decade, gamebooks written by Italians remained relatively rare, isolated, ephemeral, and/or characterized by an attempt to connect with an adult readership that did not exist in significant numbers. The examples that follow are not meant to furnish a complete survey but to sketch the trends that characterized the period and to explain why the Italian gamebook could not compete with translations of international products.

An early Italian gamebook, for example, was Andrea Angiolino and Gregory Alegi's (1993) Il gobbo maledetto. The story is set in the Second World War and owes its title to the nickname of the torpedo bomber that the protagonist will control. The prose is technical to the point of dryness, and it prides itself in the accuracy of the historical detail for both the main adventure and in the informational boxes attached to it. The text even addresses the reader with the highly formal “voi” rather than the “tu” that was and is used in almost all gamebooks in Italian.

Maria Adele Garavaglia (1996: 5) explicitly posits an adult reader in the introduction to her gamebook Due delitti per un computer: “-Un libro gioco? - mi chiederai tra il divertito e lo scandalizzato, soprattutto se non sei più un teen-ager e ancora non ti sei accostato a un testo di questo genere.” The projected target is confirmed in the book itself by adult topics like murder, satirical descriptions of the workplace, and literary references to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (in section titles such as “Se un mattino d’autunno”).

The year 1996 also saw the publication of Facchetti celo, Giubertoni manca! by Domenico Di Giorgio. This was a small, stapled booklet with minimalistic production values, to the point that the paper of the cover is the same as that of the internal pages. This short gamebook features an Italian boy collecting stickers (figurine) in 1973, and it seems therefore to posit as reader a man of about 40 years of age in the late 1990s. Facchetti celo, Giubertoni manca! also sports literary paratexts such as a preface, a bibliography on its subject matter, and a “postfazione (come nei libri veri!).” Possibly no better example exists to show how Italian gamebooks used paratexts to establish a kind of legitimacy that international gamebooks of the time never needed or sought.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Editrice Piccoli (it's in the name: Little Ones) published a line of gamebooks called Scegli tu l’avventura (later, Libriavventura) which began with four translations of English-language Which Way Books (1985–1986) and continued with three Italian books by Davide Toffolo (like Alla ricerca della megafragola, 1989) and one by Pupi Perati Lenzi (Alla conquista del Magistar, 1994). The initial Which Way Books were large and heavily illustrated, with a simplistic structure meant to appeal to early readers. The Italian contributions followed suit entirely. Giunti-Marzocco also published eight gamebooks for younger children, all authored by Stefania Fabri, between 1991 and 1994. The short length of the texts (about 20 narrative sections in each), the presence of large illustrations, the absence of game mechanics, and the reliance on traditional fairytale tropes (with titles like Tu sei un principe and Tu sei una principessa) clearly indicate that the intended audience was early readers.

In general, only two series of Italian gamebooks seemed to target the same readership that fueled the tween and teen market for gamebooks: Storia Game and Galactic Foundation Games. The former included only three pedagogically oriented booklets attached as bonus content to issues of the magazine Storia e dossier (1991–1993), starting with Il mistero del corvo d’argento by Salvatore Baffo and Jacques Le Goff (although only Le Goff's name appeared on the cover). Their mode of distribution prevented these books from having a standing presence in bookstores. Moreover, these gamebooks have an extremely linear structure and tend to punish the reader for making choices that diverge from historical events (Angiolino, 2004: 52). The potential for exploration and agency that is at the core of the pleasure of reading gamebooks is replaced by a harsh method for testing the reader's knowledge.

The Galactic Foundation Games series comprises eight gamebooks written by Leonardo Felician, starting with L’esodo su Terminus. Set in the storyworld of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, these works were all published in 1992 by Mondadori. Asimov's brand name made them potentially appealing to a generalist market of tweens, teens, and adults, and it could have been a Trojan horse to introduce Italian gamebooks to the larger market. Mondadori, however, chose to continue its long tradition of releasing Italian science fiction under the guise of foreign-sounding pen names, and it used devious tactics to market these gamebooks as translations of Asimov's works.

The front cover of all these gamebooks showed the words Asimov Galactic Foundation Games at the top, and the title of the individual volume at the bottom, with no mention of the Italian author. Due to its prominent placement and in the absence of other names, the word “Asimov” could be easily misunderstood as indicating the author of the book. The desire to conceal Felician's identity even led to the unusual solution of placing no name on the spine of the books. A glance at the internal title page confirms the initial impression by showing the name of Isaac Asimov in bold on top. Underneath, a smaller text said “progetto e testi della serie … a cura di Leonardo Felician,” making the actual author sound like a mere editor. Even the copyright section only gave information about the Foundation cycle by Asimov, without any acknowledgement that these were original Italian works. The earliest and to this day longest sustained series of Italian gamebooks was therefore born under very inauspicious omens. So deep was the lack of faith in the possibility of an Italian gamebook that Mondadori chose dishonesty over promotion of a national author. Such was also the challenge Italian gamebook authors faced when entering a creative arena whose rules, goalposts, conventions, and topics had already been set by foreign writers.

Italian gamebooks: The second generation

In the early 2000s, when the gamebook seemed to have disappeared from the English-speaking world, now-adult Italian fans begun to share their passion through the website Librogame's Land. Initially an archive of information about EL gamebooks, the site later turned into a community with forums, a market, a magazine, and a section where the users share strategic guides, fan translations, and also gamebooks of their own creation. These works of fanfiction are called librinostri and are designed to have the look of EL's librigame. These librinostri may have had little impact outside of the community, but they contributed to keep the flame burning in the fans’ hearts and became a training ground for a new generation of Italian authors.

Italian publishers, also, showed to be receptive to this new trend in a way that their English-speaking counterparts have not. Today, most new English-speaking gamebooks for adults are self-produced and released through print on demand or crowdfunding. The result is a range of publications that varies immensely in terms of editorial quality and production values.

By contrast, in Italy, professional publishers have consistently invested in the resurgent genre of the gamebook since the mid-2010s. GG Studios, later renamed Space Orange 42, started the trend by publishing gamebooks based on Italian role-playing games. Vincent Books, Watson Edizioni, Aristea, Acheron Books, Librarsi, Serpentarium, Dracomaca, and GateOnGames followed suit, and released gamebooks with solid production values, professional illustrations, and accurate editing. These publishers also worked to create some of the brand recognizability that had characterized EL gamebooks. Twenty-first-century Italian gamebooks tend to have a consistent look that is immediately recognizable in the aggregate on a collector's bookshelf. Aristea and Serpentarium have gone as far as reproducing a restyled version of EL's graphic choices, with their gamebooks being divided into series associated with a specific color in a band at the bottom of the cover and a header banner wrapping around the spine.

The output from these publishers since the mid-2010s has already far exceeded the number of Italian titles published between 1987 and the early 2000s. The print runs may be lower than those of Mondadori's faux Asimov gamebooks but the variety, richness, complexity, and quality of the results, together with the way in which these publishers promote a fan culture, are a culturally significant phenomenon of their own.

The literary awareness that Angiolino first expressed in 1987 in the paratexts of In cerca di fortuna has now become a stable trait. Gamebooks by Watson Edizioni and Dedalo routinely open with introductions framing the work as a literary text, clarifying the intentions of the author, praising the style, and showcasing literary genealogy. The gamebook Il sangue del barbaro (Costantini et al., 2022) goes even further in this direction. This is a collection of five interactive tales based on short stories or story ideas by Robert E Howard in the lore of Conan the Barbarian. While the gamebooks of the 1980s were full of generic Conan-like warriors, this work takes pride in its philological accuracy. Each story's introduction summarizes the editorial history of its source, furnishes a professional biography of the Italian author, and describes the textual choices that have been made. The introduction to La figlia del re dei ghiacchi, for example, explains that the title is an homage to Howard's preference for the title The Frost King's Daughter over the originally published title of Gods of the North. This gamebook is explicitly framed as a work of literature that takes itself and its sources seriously. By contrast, new English-speaking gamebooks for adults do not routinely include paratexts of this type. They simply introduce the story and explain the rules like their forebearers did.

The current Golden Age of the Italian gamebook also includes texts for children and tweens (like Castello Spavento by Giovanni Avolio or Geronimo Stilton's In trappola … dentro al museo!), which is to be expected since this is the traditional audience of the form. However, Italian gamebook writers from the early 2010s most often target adult readers, just as their predecessors of the 1980s and 1990s had done. The difference is that now that audience exists. The very same people who read EL gamebooks in their tween years are now supporting the writing and publishing of gamebooks for adults written by fellow Italians. The writers, too, tend to base their work on international precedents published by EL. Fabio Passamonti, for example, dedicated several gamebooks to the memory of Joe Dever (La tomba dimenticata, 2021; La chiave nera, 2023), and not to the influence of G&L, Angiolino, or Felician.

As a genre, adventure in declinations such as fantasy and science fiction remains popular. The very existence of Italian authors of science fiction breaks Carlo Fruttero's curse that “a flying saucer would never land in Lucca” (Saiber, 2011). They also tend to reproduce the tenets of Anglo-Saxon models faithfully, with examples in the steampunk Alice Key e l’origine del mondo (2019) by Antonio Costantini, the space opera of Persephone X (2021) by Antonio Costantini, and the cyberpunk Hong Kong Hustle (2020b) by Andrea Tupac Mollica. With fantasy, an imaginary version of Italy is preferred to Anglo-Saxon models. Examples are in Mauro Longo's Il tesoro della regina (2015), set in a Renaissance Italy plagued by zombies; Thomas Mazzantini's Fausto & Furio: Solo zanne originali (2020), set in a Collodi-inspired version of Tuscany; and Andrea Tupac Mollica's Negli eoni fedele (2020a), set in a version of present-day Italy where magic and werewolves exist. “Pure” Anglo-Saxon fantasy or Italy-based sci-fi are much less frequently practiced. ⁶

These adventurous genres are brought to life in texts that tend to be longer, more complex, and more sophisticated than most gamebooks of the 1980s. Precisely as we would expect in the presence of experiential nostalgia, today's Italian readers of gamebooks favor a magnified and improved version of the same type of gamebooks they loved 30 or so years ago.

This mechanism is explicitly acknowledged by Alberto Orsini in his Sherlock Holmes: Prima con delitto (2019). This gamebook is inspired by the American Sherlock Holmes Solo Mystery series, which was more successful in Italy than in its native country. While only seven volumes saw the light of day in the USA (1987–1988), EL published eight, including a translation of The Lost Heir by Gerald Lientz, which was never released in English. These texts presented some of the more sophisticated plots in gamebooks of the time, if at the cost of forcing some cumbersome bookkeeping upon the reader. They also relied on a significant random element, to the point that vital reading paths could be accessed only by being lucky with dice. While these flaws did not bother juvenile readers of the 1980s, they have become noteworthy from the perspective of today's adult fan. Francesco Di Lazzaro writes this in so many words in the introduction to Orsini's Prima con delitto: “Da lì [Sherlock Holmes Solo Mysteries] è partito l’autore, provvedendo poi a svecchiare quello che era un sistema di gioco piuttosto farraginoso in certi punti e soprattutto eccessivamente legato all’influenza del caso e al massiccio uso dei dadi.” This remake of classic gamebooks reproduces the atmosphere and overall experience of its source while reducing bookkeeping and luck, in turn emphasizing reader agency and improving the experience for a more demanding audience.

Similar considerations can be applied to Francesco Di Lazzaro's Carmilla: Il bacio del vampiro (2020). Not only does this book rewrite in interactive format Sheridan LeFanu's classic horror tale, but it also repurposes the structure of two gamebooks by JH Brennan: Dracula's Castle (1986a) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1986b). Both were published in Italy by EL and are characterized by the inclusion of two parallel stories seen from the perspective of a monster and a human. Di Lazzaro renders the same concept by pairing the stories of the vampire Carmilla and the young woman Laura, but he expands them to reach a total of 750 narrative sections, while Brennan's books only featured 230 and 279 respectively. Adult readers can therefore lose themselves in Carmilla's storyworld for much longer, and can have an experience as immersive or more immersive than they had back in the day with Brennan's books.

Another Italian gamebook series that exemplifies experiential nostalgia is Hellas Heroes by Francesco Di Lazzaro and Mauro Longo, which begun with Le fatiche di Autolico in 2018 and is still ongoing. The series is set in the ancient Greece of myth and is inspired by the gamebook trilogy Cretan Chronicles (1985–1986) by Butterfield, Honigmann, and Parker. While the style and tone of this source is very lofty, Hellas Heroes adopts a humorous and informal approach that is reminiscent of the Italian heroicomical tradition. The protagonist of Hellas Heroes is Autolycus, a minor character from Greek myth known as a troublemaker, trickster, and thief. The lore of Autolycus allows Di Lazzaro and Longo both to be faithful to their ancient sources (like Cretan Chronicles had been) and yet to create an original antihero who prefers drinking, gambling, philandering, and napping to embarking on adventures.

In terms of game mechanics, too, Hellas Heroes echoes its sources. Cretan Chronicles, for example, employed a method of coding sections called “taking a hint.” If a section number was printed in italics (66 instead of 66), the reader who noticed that detail could choose to jump ahead by 20 sections (to 86 in this example) and follow the story from there. The purpose of these indirect and blind choices was to render some of the sense of ominous inscrutability that permeated Greek myth. Hellas Heroes reproduces this mechanism in the first two volumes of the series, while in the third a section number printed in italics allows the reader to request the help of a nymph by adding 10 to that number.

Cretan Chronicles also allowed the reader to invoke the help of Zeus once per adventure, gave the protagonist the protection of a certain god, and required the reader to keep track of the amount of favor or disfavor they accumulated from the other gods. It also included stats to track the degree of Honor and Shame. If too much Shame was accumulated by “cultural faux pas as … marrying one's own mother or failure satisfactorily to maintain one's armour,” the protagonist “will either disembowel himself with a shortsword, if one is available, or be struck down by a thunderbolt from Olympian Zeus” (Butterfield et al., 1985: 9). In the heroicomical world of Hellas Heroes, the relationship with the gods is replaced by the ambiguous and often erotic friendship between Autolycus and a group of nymphs. Autolycus can summon the help of this or that nymph in specific sections of the text, and the situation may develop in risqué and/or amusing events. The original stats of Honor and Shame are replaced by Astuzia and Stoltezza. It is losing all Astuzia (not Honor) that causes the protagonist to fail, and no action in the series is ranked as too shameful for Autolycus. In true Italian heroicomical vein, the ultimate shame is only not to be crafty enough!

Both thematically and ludically, then, Hellas Heroes is a functionally serious and tonally amusing rewriting of a gamebook classic. But as it happened for Orsini's Sherlock Holmes and Di Lazzaro's Carmilla, the beloved source was not Il presidente del consiglio sei … tu!, Il gobbo maledetto, or Due delitti per un computer, but a foreign series published by EL.

The Darkwing gamebooks by Davide Cencini can be analyzed along similar lines. Cencini is the author of a saga that includes linear fantasy works and that began in 2010 with the novel La spada dai sette occhi. The Anglophone filiation is evident from contents that echo the most popular foundations of Anglo-American fantasy, from Tolkien to Moorcock, Howard, Zelazny, and Donaldson. The saga has a decidedly “meta” element, almost as if an Italian author entering Anglo-Saxon fantasy felt the need to apply some ironic distance between his or her work and the source. The protagonist of the Darkwing saga is Peter Klein, an American security expert who, contrary to the stereotype, is also a fan of fantasy and role-playing games. When Peter finds himself transported to the fantasy world of Corown, he mediates the strangeness of the situation with his previous knowledge of genre fiction. When encountering a dwarf, for example, Peter expects him to talk like Gimli from Tolkien (Cencini, 2020 [2010]: 85). Later, Peter prevails in a fight thanks to an intuition based on Conan the Destroyer (Cencini, 2020 [2010]: 327). Even during a climactic duel, Peter can’t help but call his enemy “Skeletor” (Cencini, 2020 [2014]: 474).

Cencini employed his world of Corown as the setting for the gamebooks La caccia (2018) and La voce di Greyven (2020). These gamebooks target adult readers, as evidenced by the complexity of their game system, the length of the text (775 and 806 sections respectively), the inclusion of coarse language (“Ti ricordo che il culo te l’ho salvato io per primo”; Cencini, 2020: #793), and the presence of explicit sexual content. La voce di Greyven includes scenes of homosexual and heterosexual eroticism, while La caccia features an extensive visit to a brothel populated by fantasy humanoids.

In terms of gameplay, these gamebooks are exceptionally complex. They feature a detailed system of rules and mechanics by default, and they can be paired with an optional set of advanced rules that fills an entire separate volume. In this, Darkwing gamebooks follow in the footsteps of La terra di mezzo series (4 volumes by EL, 1991–1992, partial translation of the American Middle-earth Quest series). Those books, too, came with three sets of rules: a basic and an advanced system printed in the books themselves, and the ruleset for the Middle-earth Role Playing system, which was optional and came in a separate volume.

Darkwing gamebooks also follow the trend of affectionate homage showed in Cencini's own saga and in recent Italian gamebooks. In this case, the texts bring back key ideas and elements from the Lone Wolf saga, whose impact on the Italian gamebook culture was described earlier. Like Lone Wolf, the protagonist is a member of a sect of warrior monks known only by his battle name (in this case, Wyvern). La caccia features a scene where the protagonist is unconscious during a battle involving members of his order, paralleling the opening scene of the first Lone Wolf book (Joe Dever, Flight from the Dark, 1984). Ironic distancing is never far behind affectionate homage, though, and it is visible as a series of collectable achievements of the kind one finds in videogames. These rewards for completing specific tasks are named after famous movies and TV shows. In La voce di Greyven we have achievements called Il signore degli anelli, Uccellacci e uccellini, and Tremors; in La caccia, we can collect Balla coi lupi, Duro a morire, L’attacco dei cloni, Albion perdona, io no, Fight Club, and Stranger Things. The latter can be obtained by accessing scenes in which a group plays a game called Carceres et Dragones, clearly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. These glimpses of pop culture are not subversive enough to turn the gamebooks into a parody of high fantasy or EL gamebooks, but simply add an ironic touch to what is ultimately an amplified reimagining.

A further example of ironic friendship with the models is in Luca Lorenzon's Sopravvivere sottoterra (2020a), which pays homage to the Choose Your Own Adventure series on many levels. The title itself is a reference to Packard’s Survival at Sea (1982; in Italian, Sopravvivere in mare), while the structure of the text references Packard's The Cave of Time (1979). While Packard's titular cave was a system of tunnels that led to different periods in history, the maze in Sopravvivere sottoterra leads to different situations that are taken from well-known Choose Your Own Adventure books. The result is not a parody of the classic series but a sort of playful culmination of it.

A last example is in Luca Lorenzon's gamebook Il giorno del librogame (ricomincio dall’1) (2020b). The protagonist is a 40-something Italian collector of librigame who wants to steal a rare copy of Steve Jackson's La casa infernale (Italian translation of House of Hell) from a local library. The subtitle of the story (ricomincio dall’1) also echoes Ricomincio da capo, the Italian title of the movie Groundhog Day. This reference adds a further level of intertextuality while also mirroring the structure of the story, in which failing means to be brought back in time to the morning when the theft was first attempted. Like in the movie, there is evolution through repetition, and the only way to complete the mission is to fail at least three times and use that accumulated knowledge. Furthermore, Lorenzon's (2020b) preface connects this structure to the book which is the object of the quest:

Come saprete se siete appassionati del genere, le opere di Jackson hanno una caratteristica peculiare: sono mostruosamente difficili da completare! Anche Il giorno del librogame sarà così, ma con un’importante differenza: nella storia che state per leggere infatti… non sarà possibile perdere!

All cases above exemplify the peculiar trend of ironic yet affectionate homage in many modern Italian gamebooks. Italian authors are all too aware of their status as newcomers and of the second-degree nature of an operation based mainly on foreign precedents. Yet, Italian authors do not reject their international heritage in order to elevate themselves.

This approach differs from those taken by contemporary English-speaking writers of gamebooks. Some of them contribute to ongoing historical series like Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure and the relationship is completely non-problematic: they simply add to the canon. When modern American and English gamebook writers acknowledge the classics from a distance, though, the angle is regularly that of parody. English-speaking authors have parodied the Choose Your Own Adventure series by appropriating its iconic graphic design and imbuing its format with adult content. ⁷ English-speaking authors have also parodied Fighting Fantasy books by combining their adventurous profile with trivial and mundane content. ⁸ Among English-language writers of gamebooks there is no trend of gently ironic homage of the kind Italian authors have produced.

The awareness that the modern Italian gamebook stands on the shoulders of other gamebooks also converges with the propensity of Italian culture toward literature in general. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, gamebooks based on classic literary works have been rare and pedagogical in nature. In the 2010s, only the English Jonathan Green and the Canadian Ryan North have written successful gamebooks for adults that remake previous works of literature. These examples pale in comparison with the number of modern Italian works that have turned preexisting narratives into gamebooks. We already saw some examples in Sherlock Holmes: Prima con delitto and Carmilla. These two texts are also part of a larger line published by Watson Edizioni that includes gamebook renditions of literary works about Lupin, Allan Quatermain, Gordon Pym, Moriarty, and Jekyll and Hyde. Integrating Italian sources with international ones, Watson Edizioni published a gamebook about Dante's Inferno (by Alberto Orsini) and shorter gamebooks about Charon and Pier Delle Vigne. Officina Meningi, the publisher of Il sangue del barbaro, also produced Edgar Allan Poe: The Horror Game Book (2021) and the Lovecraftian Dagon (2020) and Carcosa (2020), all by Valentino Sergi. I myself am guilty of the Lovecraftian remix Four against the Great Old Ones (2020) and its expansions Dawning Horror (2021) and Carcosa Rising (2023), all published by the Italian Ganesha Games.

The Dedalo series by Vincent Books has hosted gamebooks with significant literary backgrounds. The first volume is Nicolas Eymerich Inquisitore: Il sabba nero (2019) by Lorenzo Trenti, which expands the storyworld created by Valerio Evangelisti and allows the reader to take on the role of its prime character. Along similar lines, In cerca di Angelica (2023) by Andrea Angiolino is a sequel in gamebook format of The Frenzy of Orlando, while also echoing Angiolino's own gamebook In cerca di fortuna. Anna Aglietti's Biblioquest: Il libro dei libri (2022) is a playful remake of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The protagonist is a member of the order of the Monaci Copiosi and an apprentice of Father Umberto Ertoerto (a pun on Eco/echo). The task for the protagonist is to retrieve a mysterious book. Just as The Name of the Rose contained a vast fresco of literary references, Biblioquest includes homages to classics such as Dante, Calvino, Levi, and Borges, fantasy literature by Ende and Pratchett, and gamebooks in JH Brennan's series Grailquest. From this latter source, Aglietti borrows the ironic and metafictional tone and the use of section 14 to describe the protagonist's death. ⁹ However, Aglietti is not content with simply inserting these intertextual signals within the story; rather, she turns them into ludic elements by giving bonuses and access to extra information to the reader who identifies the references correctly.

Aglietti's work exemplifies how Italian gamebooks based on literary sources tend to rely on extensive and detailed knowledge of their source materials. Their looking back at previous traditions is not a facile way to repurpose well-tested plotlines. Rather, it shows an active engagement with the sources and establishes a productive tension between two traditions (canonical literature and gamebooks) and the author's creative take. In this, Biblioquest perfectly embodies the traits of experiential nostalgia, ironic homage, and literary awareness that characterize many Italian gamebooks of the 21st century.