The Way of the Tiger, a classic 1980s game book and the first in the popular choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) series, will get a new lease of life under a different name next year thanks to the VeChain blockchain. The man behind the series has decided to bring the popular samurai sword-packing game into the 21st century by utilizing the technological advances of blockchain to take a generation of thirty-somethings back to their childhood days.
Who Needs iPhones?
To 80s kids, the CYOA series of books was about as exciting as it got for those who didn’t have ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 computers. Each book followed a general storyline with each chapter giving the reader a choice to make – for example to enter the cave or the forest, with your choices determining the course you take and your ultimate fate. The series represented the advent of ‘interactive’ books, with The Way of the Tiger becoming an instant was a bestselling classic.
The book, written by award-winning author Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, is set in the fantasy world of Orb where the reader takes on the role of a young ninja on a quest to avenge the death of his foster father and recover stolen scrolls. The book, renamed Arena of Death, will pit player against player in fantasy card battles, with the same characters, skills and magic found in the original series. Individuals from Eidos, Fable and Microsoft have been tasked with bringing the game up to date using collectible cards in non-fungible token (NFT) format, with the VeChain platform hosting it.
NFTs Taking Blockchain by Storm
Following Netflix’s decision to revive the CYOA format with the interactive movie Bandersnatch earlier in the year, Thompson said that it “felt like the right time” to bring back the series, adding that the beauty of using blockchain and NFTs was in “knowing if you owned a card, it really does belong to you.” NFTs have suddenly become a hot topic on the blockchain circuit, with Formula 1 recently holding an auction for collectible cards and Gemini acquiring an NFT exchange, Nifty Gateway.
