# > Choose Your Own Adventure narratives have existed in other mediums — like
books — for decades…

Interactive video-based stories have also existed for decades (in the form of
quicktime-event-based games built on laserdisc tech like…

* * *

> _Choose Your Own Adventure_ narratives have existed in other mediums — like
books — [for
decades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure), yet have
not found large audiences.

Interactive video-based stories have also existed for decades (in the form of
quicktime-event-based games built on laserdisc tech like Dragon’s Lair & later
in the form of FMV games on PCs). Bandersnatch is, essentially, an extremely
high-budget extremely low-tech FMV game (as I’m sure many people involved with
its production are fully aware).

Ultimately, if we want to see these things survive, the people making them
need to look not just at conventional AAA-style video games (even though
quicktime-oriented games like Heavy Rain are similar to what they’re doing)
but to the genres that have been mining the possibilities of interactive
narrative (with emphasis on _narrative_ ) for 35 years: visual novels (which
have similar constraints to Bandersnatch’s tech) and parser-based IF. Most of
the technical limitations that created the mechanics and tropes of FMV no
longer exist, but we ought to look at FMV games as well, in part because their
success was so short-lived.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [June 4,
2019](https://medium.com/p/f8367c541846).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/choose-your-own-adventure-
narratives-have-existed-in-other-mediums-like-books-for-decades-f8367c541846)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.