Series - Find Your Fate

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Language:	English
Publishers:	Ballantine -- United States Sphere -- United Kingdom
Categories:	Complexity Level : Basic (No Game System) Format : Paperback Genre : Adventure Genre : Historical Fiction Licensed Property : Indiana Jones Licensed Property : James Bond Licensed Property : Movie / TV Tie-In Licensed Property : Novel Tie-In Product Family : Find Your Fate Target Age Group : Older Children Writing Style : First Person Writing Style : Past Tense
Translated Into:	Escoge tu propia aventura (Spanish) Escull la teva aventura (Catalan) Indi Joonzu adobenchaa geemu bukku [インディジョーンズ アドベンチャー・ゲームブック] (Japanese) Jeemuzu Bondo shiriizu [ジェームズ・ボンド・シリーズ] (Japanese) Scegli la tua avventura (Italian) Sinun suuri seikkailusi (Finnish) Vous êtes le héros (French)

This series was designed to cash in on various licenses to create gamebooks based on familiar properties. The main series started things off with several Indiana Jones adventures, and as time went by, it also added James Bond books and spawned a variety of spin-offs. The series' two Morgan Swift adventures are something of an oddity, though, being based on an obscure character who seems only to have appeared outside of these gamebooks in a handful of young adult novels; their inclusion seems to have been intended to lure more female readers to the series. In any case, the books themselves are fairly straightforward gamebooks which occasionally introduce elements of randomness by asking the reader to guess a number or turn the page based on the current day of the week. A handful of the Indiana Jones adventures were reprinted in 1994 with new covers by uncredited artists.

Gamebooks

1. Indiana Jones and the Curse of Horror Island
2. Indiana Jones and the Lost Treasure of Sheba
3. Indiana Jones and the Giants of the Silver Tower
4. Indiana Jones and the Eye of the Fates
5. Indiana Jones and the Cup of the Vampire
6. Indiana Jones and the Legion of Death
7. Indiana Jones and the Cult of the Mummy's Crypt
8. Indiana Jones and the Dragon of Vengeance
9. Indiana Jones and the Gold of Genghis Khan
10. Morgan Swift and the Kidnapped Goddess
11. James Bond in Win, Place, or Die
12. James Bond in Strike It Deadly
13. James Bond in Programmed for Danger
14. James Bond in Barracuda Run
15. Morgan Swift and the Treasure of Crocodile Key
16. Indiana Jones and the Ape Slaves of Howling Island
17. Indiana Jones and the Mask of the Elephant

User Comments

When I started buying up the James Bond Find Your Fate books, I didn't think to take into consideration how they were probably being written to help promote the then-new Bond movie, and which movie that might be.

I kind of wish I had.

Because that movie was A View to a Kill, Roger Moore's last performance before retiring from the role, and the last one that Victory Games' excellent RPG based on the series adapted before folding, which is still a particularly bitter pill to swallow for me. Being that I'm one of the rare people who thinks the Timothy Dalton films that followed were actually pretty fun.

But anyway, they spread the major events of the movie across the different books, splitting it into smaller bites that were presumably easier for young readers to digest.

Part of me wonders if it might not have made more sense to make a point of adapting the books into an ongoing series to replicate the film for younger readers, instead of making them self-contained bits of the original. To allow younger readers who wouldn't be allowed to see the film because of the violence and asking questions about what James and May Day are doing when they get naked and climb in bed together, to experience a gentler version of A View to a Kill. Also to make the books seem more collectible that way. As a kid, I probably would've been eager to read the next book if I got to the optimum ending and then saw, "But what was Max Zorin really up to? Find out in book 12, Strike it Deadly!"

It's what got me into Lone Wolf.

--Fireguard

The Find Your Fate gamebooks were written to capitalize on a few popular film franchises in the 80s, notably Indiana Jones and James Bond.

The Indiana Jones formula was quite clear even after the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy traveling around the world, looking for artifacts with lots of fighting and a bit of magic thrown in. In these books, you are given the role of Indy's nameless pre-teen cousin (who doesn't seem to go to school), who accompanies Indy often, oddly, making choices for the adult Indy. It feels a lot like the role of Short Round from Temple of Doom. Gamebooks often seemed afraid to let the reader play adult characters, I guess thinking the readers would relate more to characters closer to their own age.

The covers of the Indy books have fantastic artwork.

The James Bond books avoid this mistake by having you actually play James Bond (rather than a teenaged sidekick). But of course a watered down version (no sex scenes, kids). The books coincided with the film A View to a Kill, and are clearly intended to help market that film.

Haven't read the Morgan Swift books, but they look like a female Indy stand in.

--Kveto