Photon 1: For the Glory by David Peters

Photon 1: For the Glory
by David Peters (Peter David)
1987 Berkley/Pacer

Photon was Lazer Tag before Lazer Tag.  There were franchises of arenas



And home units



And a TV show



The TV show had two set of novelizations: a six issue series for younger readers, and a single installment of a young adult version.

Peter David (of Incredible Hulk, X-Factor, and many Star Trek novelizations) wrote the kid's series.  The Photon arenas are secretly used to recruit the universe's greatest players to become Photon Warriors.  There are also warriors of darkness, and they go to planets and whoever shoots a crystal first determines of the planet becomes good or evil.

For the first novel, instead of going to another planet, our warriors travel through time to stop Hitler from being recruited by the forces of evil.  The bad guys bully their way into Hitler's inner circle, while the good guys join with resistance forces.

Since this is for kids, nobody gets killed.  The photon guns shoot rifles out of soldiers' hands and such.  The bad guys are defeated by being shot in their breastplates, like the game, which sends them back to their original time.

There's a running moral about remembering history and paying attention to your elders - the lead has problems remember where D-Day was, though he know at least two verses of "Der Fuhrer's Face".

Definitely a kid's book - short sentences, simple words, and the narrator stops to explain things now and then.  Some attempts at humor and pop culture references David would be better at later in his career.

Paperback from Amazon