Broken Gamebooks #7: Creature of Havoc

There's only one error to discuss here. But it is quite possibly the most celebrated error in the history of interactive fiction in print, and it would be remiss of me to run a series on such errors without including it.

Creature of Havoc (originally published in 1986) has a well-earned reputation for being one of the most difficult gamebooks of all, and not just in the Fighting Fantasy range. It's pretty 'hard' fantasy for a series supposedly aimed at young children and teenagers; a lot of it wouldn't be out of place in author Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series. It also features a number of other techniques Jackson pioneered in that series, chief among them reference modifiers allowing you to take an option not explicitly given in the text. It goes even further by actually making up its own language, because the player character initially can't understand English. Awe-inspiring stuff.

But it's one of those reference modifiers that causes the problem here. One of the items in the game is a pendant that will glow in the presence of secret doors. This is deployed with the following mechanic: if you ever reach a section that starts "You find yourself...", add 20 to the section number and turn to the new number to find the secret.

Reference 213, which contains a secret door you need to find to progress in the game by using the amulet, does not start with that. It says "You reach..." instead. (Note that there is only one other secret door you can find using the amulet, the reference it's hiding in correctly begins "You find yourself..." and the door in question is a red herring and you will die if you go through it.)

Now, the reason this is so interesting is because some people have tried to argue it's not actually an error at all. Check out this fantastic review, where the author tries to argue that this is a deliberate attempt to encourage lateral thinking, and hence the only Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook that actually qualifies as interactive fiction. I don't agree with his point there at all, but it is a fascinating possibility. Was this intentional on Jackson's part?

Well, er, no. Almost certainly not, anyway. Even if it was intentional, then the way you force the final confrontation with the Archmage in The Crown of Kings is far more clever than basically lying to the reader (acquiring the reference modifier after the section you need to use it in, then travelling back to that section later). In fact, there's something even better in Creature of Havoc: a section that ends in your death requires you to take another nonstandard action. Jackson didn't need to deliberately mislead the reader to challenge them.

The secret door error was finally fixed when Wizard Books reprinted CoH in 2002, but when they reprinted it again as part of a relaunch in 2010, it had somehow snuck back in. What I find most fascinating about this is that when they decided to relaunch their reprints, they went back to the original 80s versions rather than the first round of reprints. The book is due to be reissued again by Scholastic in early 2018, so we'll have to keep a look out for which version is used there. (Update! Thanks to Chris Malley on Twitter for confirming that Scholastic's printing also contains this error.)

But still, I think the reviewer above has a valid point (...of sorts) that this could be an accidental piece of genius, the book unintentionally forcing the reader to think outside the box. And it's done in a way a video game probably couldn't hope to replicate.

And there you have it. Steve Jackson, pushing the boundaries of interactive fiction, even when he doesn't actually mean to.