Monday 9 April 2012

Not MORE Zombie Stuff!

Background articles and films: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/cdc-zombie-warning.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/real-zombies-in-bristol.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/real-zombies_23.html

When I was a child in the 1980’s one of the favourite recreational pastimes for youths were what are known as “Fighting Fantasy” or “Choose Your Own Adventure” literature. These were books in which every scene of the story had an array more than one subsequent scene which the reader could choose from. This led to the story being more of a game than a narrative, and an interactive experience in which the reader quite literally chose their own adventure. Famous examples were Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Citadel of Chaos by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. I had assumed that with the rising sophistication of computer games since then the popularity of these books would diminish, but it doesn’t seem to have done so significantly. They’re all still in print and on sale, and new titles are being published regularly. I found an example of this the other day in a bookshop when I was shooting the films in Milton Keynes, see the photo at the top (For my film Secrets of Milton Keynes, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/secrets-of-milton-keynes.html). This is a Fighting Fantasy-type book called Can you Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier (Here’s the author’s website: http://www.maxbrallier.com/. Once again we see the theme of a Zombie outbreak or Zombie apocalypse appear in our culture at the very same time as the other strange things I discovered, see above in the background articles. And there’s more! At the time of writing, look what’s at the top of the homepage on the Fighting Fantasy website: http://www.fightingfantasygamebooks.com/; another bloody book about Zombies!