It was exactly five years ago today that the very first post was published to cwickham.blogspot.com. It was, of course, a review of an obscure series of adventure gamebooks from the 1980s.
I'd only started writing that review the day before; as I note in it, I got into a conversation with Andrew Ellard on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd had as a child but was struggling to identify, and at his suggestion I ended up writing a review of the series. And suddenly I needed a place to post it. I'd always meant to start a blog some day, and this was the impetus I needed to finally get around to doing so. I decided to see how long I could keep updating it on a weekly basis, which turned out to be almost exactly three years; for the two years since then, I've had a similarly totally arbitrary target of keeping it updated monthly. And, to my mild surprise, some people have been quite interested in what I've written.
To mark the fifth anniversary, then, I thought I'd look at the ten most-read posts according to Blogger's stats page, and see if I can work out why these pieces are so popular and if I have anything new to say about them. If you've been a regular reader over the last half-decade, why not try to guess which posts they are before reading on?
Yes, obviously I know why not, but play along, OK?
When I started planning this article this post -- about a hidden cutscene in a video game from 1994 -- was just in the top 10, then dropped out in favour of what's at number #9, then yo-yoed back in again at the last minute, displacing another post entirely. Interestingly, there's a comment left by one of the developers of the game, but I don't have a great deal to say about it otherwise; people with an interest in the subject matter most likely already knew about it, but a lot of the blog's regular readers probably didn't.
One of my few forays into writing a "listicle"; there was a follow-up with another 20 deaths some time later, and then I moved house and lost the extensive notes I'd made whilst writing this one in the process which is why there hasn't been a third so far. (I have considered a list of the best deaths from assorted other gamebook series, but writing about ways to die, even fictional ones in adventure gamebooks, hasn't seemed like the most appealing option for most of the last two years.)
This was one of the earliest things I felt confident was good enough/actively useful to show to other people. So I stuck a link to it on Ganymede & Titan's forums, which at least explains why it's on this list.
Also: I'm really glad I exhausted the list of things I could write using BBC Genome before they revamped it and made it absolutely impossible to use.
There are other pages on the Internet that write about this, one of the most celebrated errors in adventure gamebook history. But I'd like to think they aren't quite so succinct, or tell you which printings had it fixed and which didn't.
Looking back on this one, I noted that there are certain entries in this series that work better than others, not to mention several I started writing but didn't publish because they didn't seem to be interesting for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. But eventually I think I worked it out: for an article about the error to be interesting, the gamebook has to let you get into a totally illogical (and, ideally, sustained) situation.
So this one, where the player can get trapped in one part of the story and unable to ever move on because the hidden exit is accidentally made impossible to find, works. (The fact that the player can still find it with a little outside-the-box thinking is the icing on the cake.) Realm of Chaos, the first ever broken gamebook the blog ever covered, works because it's possible to miss vitally important information about the plot by accidentally never encountering one character. Sword of the Samurai works because the book can, on multiple occasions, force the player to stab themselves to death with a sword they don't actually have. Whereas some others just ended up as lists of proofreading errors or minor inconsistences which aren't as interesting.
UK censorship of The Simpsons has been a topic of interest ever since Sky One removed the knife violence from their premiere of Treehouse of Horror in 1990. And this post, chronicling Channel 4's premiere run of Season 27, has it all: a case where they handle an entire episode very differently to how Sky did, a slightly alternate version of some episodes nobody knew about (or at least hadn't written about in exact words) before C4's run, a cut trying to change the original meaning of a scene, and a case where over a continuous minute is removed and what's left barely makes sense.
Going by what my stats page tells me, I'm pretty sure this one has been linked to on some Robot Wars-related Facebook page, which accounts for its position here. But also... it's a thing you'd expect to exist on the Internet, somewhere, but as far as I can tell it didn't before I wrote it.
You know, before I made this list, I didn't really appreciate how much of the blog is based around nineties and noughties nostalgia. This has been updated quite a few times over the years (and my tweeting out of the link every time I do so probably explains -- at least in part -- why it has so many views), and I sort of wish I'd kept better track of the changes now. Fortunately, there's an important change I made just last week that this post gives a good opportunity to highlight -- I had previously noted that the BBC's first run of Season 9 skipped two episodes, but it has been pointed out to me that I'd screwed this up, so the October 2001 section now contains the correct details.
(A note on the use of the word "ludicrously" in this article's title: at the time it was published, the blog wasn't called Ludicrously Niche, but had some other name I'm fairly sure I only intended as a placeholder until I thought of something better. As you can see, I changed the blog's name despite failing to think of anything better.)
Well, I know exactly why this one is so high on the list, at least: I stuck a link to it on r/panelshow.
I wrote this the moment I'd got home from the recording, thinking it would be best to do it whilst it was as fresh in my mind as possible, but looking back I can think of a couple of things I could've mentioned but didn't. The episode in question still hasn't gone out, so I'll do another post with those things included at some point in the future.
I am fairly certain that this particular entry is so high on the list not because of the original books it is about, but because of people Googling for assistance with the notoriously difficult (and divergent from the source material) iOS adaptation. But this is something I had planned in my head for at least a decade before I actually wrote it, and whatever the reason I'm delighted to see it so high in this list. I can't tell you how pleased I am that there's finally a place on the Internet that tells you about how the encounter with the torturer doesn't make sense if you didn't kill all of the Seven Serpents.
I also think I wrote this with the intention it would be used as a troubleshooting guide for people playing the books. These days, there's certain bits I think I'd go into more detail on.
For many years, I have been on a mission: To track down an extremely obscure CITV serial from 1991 based on Anthony Horowitz's Diamond Brothers books. This particular mission has sort of taken over the blog in the last year or so, so I'm going to do a full recap of the story so far in my "Best of 2021" post later this month, but I will note that I believe this second article in the series marked the first time visual evidence that the series actually did exist appeared on the Internet (courtesy of Steve Williams, who scanned in his old Radio Times for me).
This post leads the list of the most-viewed, and not by a small margin: It's nearly a thousand hits ahead of its nearest rival, and at time of writing it's closing in on the 3,000 mark. And the interesting thing is that I'm not entirely sure why -- it's not linked to anywhere else as far as I can see. The series was enormously obscure at the time I started writing about it (which has managed to raise its status to merely "very obscure"), and apart from its IMDb page (clearly made by someone who didn't have copies of the episodes to hand) and a BFI listing, there was very little about it on the Internet at the time -- certainly nothing questioning just why it was so obscure, to the point that no footage or still images of it could be found. I don't want to take all the credit (not least because somebody else was responsible for tracking down copies, and uploading footage, of the series to YouTube independently of any nonsense I'd written on the subject), but I do seem to have genuinely tapped in to peoples' interest here.
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