It occurred to me last month that as a survival game fan, I've never actually read the grandaddy of all survival tales: Robinson Crusoe. I love survival films (All Is Lost, Cast Away, Inside) and books (In the Heart of the Sea, Adrift), so this felt like a pretty glaring hole in my survival wisdom. I'm a smidge late to the party—the novel, one of the most widely published books in history, was written by Daniel Defoe over 300 years ago.
I didn't even know much about it other than that it's the story of a guy who gets stranded on an uninhabited island for decades. I've tried to survive on islands in at least a dozen videogames, so I thought it might be fun to see how the classic survival adventure of Robinson Crusoe stacks up against today's survival games.
