Press

Press contact: support@choiceofgames.com

Choice of Games was founded by Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse in 2009. They produce text-based interactive novels for mobile platforms and the web, combining the delicious freedom of the 1980s’ “Choose Your Own Adventure” books with the depth and scope of a bestselling novel.

In addition to developing their own games in-house, Choice of Games has created an easy-to-use programming language for writing text-based games, ChoiceScript, and publishes games written by other designers.

Press Releases

Date

Subject
December 22nd, 2010 Interactive Fiction Roars Back to Life on Kindle
December 1st, 2010 Your Choice of Four New Gamebooks for Palm webOS
August 30th, 2010 Choice of Games Releases “Choice of the Vampire”
August 24th, 2010 Choice of Games Releases “Choice of Romance”

Screenshots

Quotables

Speaker

Topic

Quotation
Jason Stevan Hill Vampire “Choice of the Vampire breaks new ground for Choice of Games, embracing the mature themes proper to the genre. What’s more, victory is much more uncertain. At best you have poignancy. The tragedy and horror central to the vampire myth doesn’t allow for any other sort of ending.”
Heather Albano Romance “The player reaction to the romance subplot of Broadsides demonstrated that there was room in the Choice of Games stable for something that relied more heavily on personal interactions and less heavily on hitting things with swords or crunching them with your dragon teeth. In Choice of Romance, you play a young courtier who has caught the monarch’s eye, and the game is designed to feel like something partway between a Tudor court intrigue and a drawing-room comedy of manners.”
Adam Strong-Morse Broadsides “We wanted to avoid embracing the sexism of both history and of the source materials we draw on [for Choice of Broadsides], but at the same time, we concluded that having a mixed-sexed Royal Navy would be both too complicated to implement and would also make the Jane Austen inspired bits of the game very strange. So instead, we let the player choose the sex of the protagonist, and then that choice defines whether the gameworld is patriarchal or has all gender roles reversed in a matriarchal society.”
Heather Albano Broadsides “Choice of Broadsides is designed to let the player feel like the protagonist of a Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin novel. The heaving waves, the clash of steel, the opportunities for honor and treasure and fame, the danger of storms and mutiny and enemy fleets…”
Adam Strong-Morse Games “Our target should be to offer every option that a reasonable player, playing within the norms of the setting/genre, would want to pick. We should then try to make all of those options play out in a way that is cool–perhaps not victorious, but cool. We can’t cover every option, of course, and we have to constrain which choices we offer at all–in “Choice of Broadsides,” you can’t choose to be a cavalry officer instead, even though that would (within a certain broad understanding of the genre) be a perfectly reasonable option. We just don’t present the choice at all. But if someone could, playing reasonably, want to pick an option, we should make that possible. Whenever a player says, “I wanted to do X, but the options wouldn’t let me,” we’ve failed a little. We’ve gone beyond the parts of the authorial role that we need to retain–what happens when you do X? What sorts of choices are possible at all? and gone into the parts of authorship that are better given to the player–what’s this character like? What will the protagonist do when faced with a tough choice. I think that shares the role of author most effectively.”
Heather Albano Games “A core tenet of the Choice of Games philosophy is to make all our players feel as “at home” as possible. There are enough games out there where the player has no choice but to play a male protagonist. There are enough women who have been turned off roleplaying games as a result. There are, similarly, enough games where the only romantic opportunities are with the opposite sex. Enough other people are perpetuating those stereotypes; we’d like to do better than that.”

Reviews

Date

Game

Website

Quotations
July 23rd, 2011 Affairs Gods, Witches, Space and Stars “Every decision the game asks you to make has consequences for multiple levels of politics at the same time. No one decision affects just you… [I]t’s like a microcosm of How Intrigue Plots are Done Right.”
March 16th, 2011 Dragon Character Arcade “Finally, proof that the text-based genre is not dead…”
February 25th, 2011 Choice of Games Geek Mom
February 23th, 2011 Dragon Time Well Wasted That’s right. This game has a f*cking disdain meter. Seriously. It actually keeps track of how much you don’t give a sh!t about puny humans and their laughable ways. Racking up those disdain points gave me way more joy than a 20-minute long multiple choice adventure game has any right to, and for that I raise my leathery wing to it in a salute.
February 4th, 2011 Romance Mobile Appmerica
February 1st, 2011 Romance Appolicious
January 30th, 2011 Broadsides Old Salt Blog What makes “Choice of Broadsides” fun is that is contains virtually every cliche in Georgian naval fiction.
January 25th, 2011 Choice of Games Kindle User
January 20th, 2011 Broadsides Your Critic is in Another Castle Something deep in me socialized such that even in a completely fictional situation with no actual consequences, when surrounded by other women I strove to act diplomatically and to maintain as much harmony as possible in the unit, while assuming this would serve my self-interest in the long run. As a man surrounded by men, I was able to flip the switch to, “I’m getting mine, fuck y’all.”
January 16th, 2011 Choice of Games Android Dreams
January 14th, 2011 Choice of Games Booksprung
January 11th, 2011 Broadsides Broadsides
January 4th, 2011 Choice of Games Emily Short
December 30th, 2010 Vampire Bite This!
December 22nd, 2010 Choice of Games Gamasutra
December 22nd, 2010 Broadsides Game Pron
December 19th, 2010 Broadsides Find eBook Readers If you like gamebooks, you’ll love Choice of Broadsides. Its unique approach to interactive fiction allows larger, deeper, and richer stories than traditional gamebooks.
December 6th, 2010 Dragon Borderhouse
December 6th, 2010 Dragon Rock, Paper Shotgun Hidden under this free browser game’s superficially shallow, box-ticking presentation is a smart roleplayer-lite.
October 14th, 2010 Popcorn AppSafari
October 7th, 2010 Vampire AppSafari All in all, it was a pleasure to read about vampires with a little bite for a change, instead of toothless teenage fantasies, so if you’re the type who could use a little dark and dangerous text adventure fun, Choice of the Vampire should be right up your alley.
October 5th, 2010 Vampire RoboAwesome
October 3rd, 2010 Vampire MobyGames Certain elements of the story veer into Choice of Romance territory, these vampires caught up in soap operatic machinations to rival Anne Rice’s best.
October 1st, 2010 Romance Moby Games
September 30th, 2010 Romance AppSafari A wonderfully fascinating and addictive experience that will leave you playing it over and over again as you attempt to discover each new ending.
September 20th, 2010 Vampire In the Company of Grues
September 17th, 2010 Romance Simpson’s Paradox “Choice of Romance was very open-ended, and while I felt that my actions had consequences, I didn’t feel like the game was out to trick me or punish me for a wrong choice. You’re able to pursue the king, a wealthy older lord, and a young rebel, and dive into politics, make subtle changes or steer clear of the whole thing, for several satisfying endings.”
September 16th, 2010 Choice of Games In the Company of Grues
September 9th, 2010 Choice of Games Epic Randomness
September 2nd, 2010 Romance Jezebel
September 1st, 2010 Vampire 148 Apps “While it might look simple on the surface, a deeper look reveals Choice of the Vampire to be a historically grounded, complex “game” that blends RPG elements with excellent storytelling. You won’t find Twilight-esque vampires here: this is New Orleans, circa 1814, and you character is exactly what you make of him…or her.”
August 31st, 2010 Romance Ferretbrain “Suddenly we realised how clever the game had been. Without telling you anything more than that you were a noblewoman (or nobleman) going to court to find an advantageous marriage, the game had put you into the shoes of one of the most famous women in English history without even realising what you were doing…”
August 28th, 2010 Vampire Jay Is Games “Whether you rise from obscurity to become a terror in vampire Society, or find yourself unable to resist the comforts and emotions of mortals, Choice of the Vampire is an exceptionally ambitious and well made adventure that shouldn’t be missed by any fan of text games.”
August 23rd, 2010 Romance Gay Gamer
August 23rd, 2010 Romance Dealspwn
August 20th, 2010 Romance Jay Is Games “Despite following a certain story, the narrative affords you a lot of freedom. You’re still only choosing a response or action from a set list, but they’re generally varied enough to give you a sense of character development as you choose. The game even gives you the option early on in setting your preference for men or women regardless of your gender, which makes the game accessible and more immersive for everyone. For a game with the word “romance” right there in the title, it’s nice to see one that is open to all types of love.”
August 20th, 2010 Romance Hack Education
August 4th, 2010 Broadsides The Guardian “I played [Choice of Broadsides] as a woman, putting me in the deliciously mind-bending position of agreeing that allowing delicate young men to join the Navy is a disgusting idea, and becoming part of a ship crewed entirely by women. It’s hilarious, but an innovative and fascinating way of tackling gender – I’ll be eagerly awaiting the company’s next game.”
July 26th, 2010 Broadsides Deux Ex Machinatio
July 14th, 2010 Broadsides Metafilter
July 8th, 2010 Dragon 148 Apps “The game is an old-fashioned, text-based RPG in which you pick from multiple-choice answers and follow branching paths through Choice of the Dragon’s loose plot. Simple? Yes. Boring? Never.”
July 2nd, 2010 Broadsides Play This Thing
June 22nd, 2010 Broadsides Ferret Brain
June 17th, 2010 Choice of Games Hack Education
June 15th, 2010 Broadsides IndieRPGs
June 1st, 2010 Broadsides Simpson’s Paradox
May 11th, 2010 Broadsides Secret Identity (Podcast)
May 10th, 2010 Broadsides Border House
April 20th, 2010 Broadsides Game Set Watch
April 9th, 2010 Broadsides Android and Me
April 7th, 2010 Broadsides Moby Games
April 5th, 2010 Broadsides Dealspwn
April 4th, 2010 Dragon Moby Games
April 2nd, 2010 Broadsides Jay Is Games “Surprisingly deep and well written, Choice of Broadsides is an ambitious adventure with a lot of twists and turns that should provide a lot of meat for fans of text RPGs to sink their teeth into.”
April 1st, 2010 Dragon App Safari
February 9th, 2010 Dragon Jay Is Games
February 1st, 2010 Dragon Metafilter
January 23rd, 2010 Dragon Acid for Blood
January 20th, 2010 Dragon Gay Gamer
January 15th, 2010 Dragon Apple Gazette
January 11th, 2010 Dragon io9 “The best part of the game, however, is the narrative voice crafted by designers Dan Fabulich and Adam Strong-Morse. It’s a perfect blend of Monty Python humor and RPG geekery.”
January 11th, 2010 Dragon Giant Monsters Attack!
January 10th, 2010 Dragon Beeps & Boops “Based on the strength of their first project, I think the folks at choiceofgames.com are worth keeping an eye on. They’re directly tackling one of the biggest issues in game development and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some striking developments in the upcoming months.”
January 7th, 2010 Dragon Examiner