Crystal Book Persuasion

Name a gameshow from circa the late 80s to early 90s which you'd guess had a large number of tie-in puzzle/game books published. You might well say Knightmare first in answer to that unwieldy question, and you'd be absolutely right. But I'd be willing to bet that The Crystal Maze would be in your top two.

The very first such book, simply entitled The Crystal Maze, was published in 1990, the same year as the first series, and a pretty early example of a tie-in book for a Channel 4 show. Internet listings say it was released the same day the very first episode actually aired, which seemed like a mistake to me at first, but Iain Weaver recalls it being advertised after the broadcast of Series 1 episodes (quite possibly including episode 1). In any case, the above is the original cover, clearly recognising the marketability of Richard O'Brien; it was later reprinted with a photographic cover depicting the Crystal Dome.

Once you actually get hold of a copy of the book, then it seems much more likely that it was written whilst Series 1 was in production so it could be released right at the start of transmission -- there's an interesting little introduction by the show's director David G. Croft that seeks to explain what the show is, and we then get on to the surprisingly complex 'puzzles' section of the book. There are eight sections, with two for each TV series zone ('Medieval', 'Aztec Jungle', 'Industrial' and 'Futuristic'), and whilst the book can be played solo it is clearly a far more rewarding experience to do it pub quiz-style with as many friends as possible. The puzzles themselves are a real smorgasbord: wordsearches, maths puzzles, brainteasers, mazes, pop quizzes on various subjects such as history and geography, cryptic crosswords, those matchstick puzzles where you have to move them around to make different shapes and spot-the-difference are just some of the categories represented. Each puzzle has a time limit and a number of crystals you should add to your total for successful completion. At the start of each section there's a Crystal Dome:

Once you've picked your numbers, you turn to the Geodesic Dome (a two-page spread of various questions) at the end of the section and choose the questions corresponding to the numbers you picked, with each question having an associated money value, from £5 to £1,000, with the most 'money' earned in 10 minutes being the winner. (This is a bit at odds with the show, which didn't offer cash prizes, but its inspiration Fort Boyard did; it's almost enough to make you wonder if the authors were working from some early pitch document for the show...) All said, the book is a very impressive translation of the gameshow to a quiz book format -- this is no cheap cash-in, serious thought has gone into it.

In a thoroughly unhelpful move, the book accompanying the second series was also called The Crystal Maze, and was an adventure gamebook authored by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson -- both were (and are) prolific interactive fiction authors; their partnership also produced the incredibly ambitious Fabled Lands series, Morris wrote or co-wrote all seven Knightmare books, all three HeroQuest books, two books adapting Enid Blyton's Adventure series, and many more books using his own scenarios, whilst Thomson's other writing partnership with Mark Smith is known for the Way of the Tiger series and their two Fighting Fantasy books. As you might expect, this is a proper piece of interactive fiction that keeps up the high standard of the first book: the four members of the team you play as have strength, dexterity and intelligence statistics to keep track of, there is a somewhat basic inventory system, and you are instructed to keep a timepiece to hand for timed puzzles.

In a slightly curious move, the book takes place in the year 2090, where The Crystal Maze is the most popular holovision show around, now hosted by the amazingly lifelike android ROB 9000. This is presumably to allow for the book going outside what would be capable on the show's budget, but in practice it doesn't seem to make that much difference. Pretty much all of the adventure is taken up with recreating the puzzles as best it can, with a mixture of dice rolls, logic puzzles, mathematics, tactical reasoning (e.g. in a 'physical' game you must decide whether to keep your speed steady, go faster or go slower) and puzzles using mazes and diagrams. It's a fun and varied read, faithfully adapting as many of the show's mechanics as it can, only slightly let down by the end once you've visited all four zones: the Crystal Dome is represented by a single page instructing you to multiply the number of crystals you've found by the number of team members you still have, which gives you a final result. It's quite amusing (a score of 1-15 wins you "a trip parachuting in the atmosphere of the planet Venus, without an environment suit"), but a bit abrupt.

The Crystal Maze Bibliography Discrepancy #1: The list of tie-in books on Wikipedia refers to yet another book simply titled The Crystal Maze being published in 1994, with no further information. I am 99.9% certain that that refers to either the reprint of the first book with a different cover, or the book pictured below, which Dave Morris confirmed through friend of the blog Stuart Ian Burns is a reprint of the 1991 adventure gamebook with a different cover, bringing it in line with the later tie-in books:

I would be surprised if there were any differences between the two versions in either case, but if you happen to have a copy with that cover (or indeed a copy of the quiz book with the later photographic cover), I would be grateful if you'd get in touch so we can compare notes.

Anyway, one year on and a book entitled Crystal Maze Challenge! was published, written by a now solo Thomson, boasting a mixture of logic puzzles, behind-the-scenes features and photographs, in-universe fiction, educational content about the settings of the different zones, an extensive and quite astonishingly ambitious pull-out board game (which is in fact six different games which can be played either separately or as one big game), and some crosswords. The first editions also included a competition to win a visit to the set, but there was a reprinting the same year which expunged all references to the competition, and that is the one I have (if you look at the cover of the book, the reprints had the little triangle in the corner removed). You had to send in the answer the final logic puzzle to enter; later printings replaced the entry form with the solution to this puzzle (quite obviously, as the answer is in a different font and styled differently to the others; I was able to guess that's what they'd done even before looking up the original printing for confirmation, which I found in this YouTube video.)

We then move forward to 1993, which saw no fewer than four Crystal Maze tie-in books: the Crystal Maze Mysteries, authored by Peter Arnold. You know the Usborne Puzzle Adventures? Books like Murder on the Midnight Plane and The Curse of the Lost Idol? Well, these are pretty much the same thing, but with a Crystal Maze-based twist -- each book sees two or three fairly generic children journey into the Crystal Maze, which has a much higher budget available to it than the one on TV, and have an adventure with Richard O'Brien. Many of the puzzles are inspired by the 'mental' ones, with variations on "fill in the blank", jigsaws, mazes and basic logic puzzles being particularly popular.

The plots are somewhat basic, as I feel the below image sums up, but nevertheless they are quite a lot of fun, although the last book has some rather tenuous links to the franchise, with the only links to the show being a) Ben and Amy are visiting their Uncle Perse, who designs puzzles for the show, and b) a single cameo on the last page from Mr O'Brien. A cynic might wonder if it was co-opted for the range midway through writing.

Are we to infer that Sue, Baz and Jane were actually more interested in The Word?

The Crystal Maze Bibliography Discrepancy #2: The same Wikipedia list mentioned earlier also refers to something called the "Crystal Maze Mystery Pack", released in early 1994. A bit of poking around strongly indicates that this was a collected set of all four Puzzle Adventures, but again, any further information would be welcomed.

But later in 1994 (well, the 1993 Christmas special was when the handover happened, but that's not as good a segue) Richard O'Brien departed The Crystal Maze, leaving the final two series to be helmed by Ed Tudor-Pole -- a man generally considered to have done a good job, but one that was simply made impossible by who he had to follow. And Channel 4 Books perhaps realised they had lost a selling point with O'Brien, since Tudor-Pole was not afforded the same level of prominence for the 1994 and 1995 Crystal Maze Puzzle Books, which feature various production stills of contestants on their covers instead, and unlike the other books the host doesn't have a role in them. Internally they feature much the same sort of puzzles from the Mysteries (the puzzles were once again compiled by Peter Arnold), but with no overarching story or structure, just sorted according to zones (and featuring a Crystal Dome puzzle at the end of each section). They're not at all bad or even lacking in ambition -- there's still a wide range of puzzles and they're nicely illustrated -- but they are a bit more straightforward 'quiz book' rather than translating The Crystal Maze to print.