I used to love these books as a kid. I got really proficient at using multiple fingers to manage all my "Save States" while I was going through the adventure.
As an adult I spent a lot of time thinking about how I seem to have the same rough success ratio at making life decisions as I did when I was a child reading choose-your-own-adventure books.
I've begun a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story that's more a philosophical argument (or art?). There are a lot of paths through the story but they all converge to the same ending.
It's something I have believed and have especially reflected on when my mother died a couple years ago. I have wondered for some time whether she could have been happier had "x" happened instead of "y".
She had such a bad childhood that I contemplated what it would be like to clone her and raised her as my daughter. How different might her life be if she had a healthy, happy family.
But I keep coming to the conclusion that she was an inherently unhappy person and, that while plenty of life-events may have made things worse for her, in the end I think perhaps she was "fated" to be unhappy after all.
So the idea was a "Choose your own adventure" where you more or less end up in the same place regardless. Maybe a bit wealthier, maybe with 2 instead of 3 kids — but the fundamentals were already "cast".
(And anyway, upon further reflection I came to see how much my oldest daughter is more or less my mom. We raised her as best we can and yet shades of my mom's "genetics" are clearly there.)
The ending the sticks with me the most is Inside UFO 54-40. There's a specific ending you cannot reach by following the instructions. You have to "hack" the book and turn to the page directly.
here's the PDF of the cave, you can choose to download it or if you're a masochist and want carpeltunnelsyndrome you can use the flipping ui here. https://pubhtml5.com/obber/cznb/
I adored these books when I was a kid, and a few of us friends re-invented them in college in the 1990's as email chains. You'd write a few introductory paragraphs and a choice, and then email it to a few friends. You'd then end up writing multiple paths as you went, depending upon what your friends chose. The first one I wrote started as just a scruffy little dog who escaped his backyard. He ended up going on all kinds of wild alternate adventures, and did, unfortunately, end up dying quite a few times.
I absolutely adored these books as a kid! Spend every dime of bookfair money on them every year and used to beg my parents to take me to the library to check out others.
I love the framing of them in this article as the gateway drug to interactive entertainment.
In ninth grade in the town I grew up in, there were two junior high schools that traded off computers each semester. With a "newsletter" including printed programs.
The first text adventure I encountered was a future friend's multiple choice adventure, starting in a cave, called "The Cave".
With that as inspiration, began years of my own text adventures, from multiple-choice to broad grammars and vocabularies. "Command English" is what I called my grammar. The first starting at the entrance of a cave. Later versions, almost always involving caves. And mazes.
In high school I worked on a massive adventure called "The Wanderer", with all of my innovations. With an important cave that had to be rapelled down to from a cliff edge. Until the day I was working on it after school, and saved my latest version to disk before going home. At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.
My enthusiasm for creating adventures suffered a fatal blow.
> At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.
Wow, that sucks!
When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.
Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....
As this is a case of perfect timing, I'd like to enlist your help: My 8 year old son loves these right now, we speak dutch (Nederlands) at home. Do you have suggestions? Are the old Choose your own adventures available translated? Thanks
I already have a few from the library - one title for each series:
Not quite what you wanted, but the Lone Wolf ones are (legally) available online [1]. You may be able to read the downloads, or even the online play versions, with Dutch translations.
> They liked to be told a bedtime story, but Packard was usually so exhausted that he had trouble coming up with one. So, he slyly enlisted his daughters’ help with the creative process. He would feed them a little bit of a story in which they were the stars, then ask them what they wanted to do next. Their answers would jog his tired imagination, and he would be off and running once again.
This is interesting because, without knowing this was the birth of CYOA, I actually arrived at this solution with my daughter. Actually, even better: it was her idea. Bedtime stories are better if she's an active participant and the main character of the story, with me controlling all NPCs. It can be exhausting: re-telling a story can be done on autopilot (the only risk is falling asleep) but creating an adventure on the fly is both very rewarding and extremely energy draining.
Boy, will we have a lot of fun when she's a bit older and I introduce her to roleplaying games!
This brought back fond memories of contorting my fingers as bookmarks so that I could keep track of my last N moves, giving me an “undo” stack of however many previous steps I could!
My summer camps were spent buried in the Lone Wolf book series. The smell of the books. Keeping all my fingers at all the choice points so I could cheat my way back to the book end.
Around 1991 I remember having a book that was a cross between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D. It was about the same physical size, but it was a full (albeit small) D&D campaign. There was a character sheet at the back of the book you could copy, and then as you went through the game you would roll for yourself and for your foes, tracking hits and HP on your sheet until you won all the loot or you died.
I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).
Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?
My sister recently got an "escape room book", which seems to be an attempt to put the escape room experience into puzzle book format. I guess it's also a kind of spiritual successor to these types of books.
As a kid, choose your own adventure made me so mad because the covers are super appealing, but by the time they emerged I was a huge sci-fi fan and had burnt through everything the big three had written and was super excited when I picked up my first CYOA book. I didnt know what it was. When I hit the first crossroads I was like, what the is this??!! I wanted a well crafted story. Not a gamification of the style of sci-fi I’d come to know and love. I went back a few times because I really wanted to like them. But there was no way. I still remember the book was Inside UFO 54-40.
Almost every branch of every story in Choose Your Own Adventure books ended with bold, centered text that said:
THE END
But there was one story I vaguely recall where if you made the "wrong" choice, you fell into a bottomless pit (the books were always in the second person) and you kept falling and falling, forever, and the text said:
THERE IS NO END
I still remember the chills I got reading this. I wonder how kids these days get their introduction to existential horror?
> I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea.
It would be so, so much worse if the bends were when dissolved diarrhea came out of solution and formed diarrhea bubbles in your blood.
I'm 56. I first discovered these in maybe 1980 or 81? These books were foundational to my sense of creativity, and expectations of entertainment. I had discovered D&D the year prior, and this was fuel to the fire. To this day, when I'm bored, I create my own adventure, and don't rely on computers, film, books, etc... these books taught me how to become self-sufficient and self-entertaining. Funny, the same year I also discovered Douglas Adams and I think Gary Numan's Cars was still on KC Kasem's top 20. 1979-1982: genesis of identity.
Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.
Loved these as a kid, I think I had most but not all of them. The Choice of Games mentioned in TFA are often a lot bigger and more complex than those books, but worth looking into for fans. Delight Games is a lesser known company with a slightly different style of them.
I miss the old late 1980’s/early 1990’s choose your own adventure phone games. They had an early 1940’s radio show vibe to them with sound effects and voice actors. The felt like old laser disk arcade games too. No one seems to remember them and I can’t find them online.
49 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 70.0 ms ] threadAs an adult I spent a lot of time thinking about how I seem to have the same rough success ratio at making life decisions as I did when I was a child reading choose-your-own-adventure books.
It's something I have believed and have especially reflected on when my mother died a couple years ago. I have wondered for some time whether she could have been happier had "x" happened instead of "y".
She had such a bad childhood that I contemplated what it would be like to clone her and raised her as my daughter. How different might her life be if she had a healthy, happy family.
But I keep coming to the conclusion that she was an inherently unhappy person and, that while plenty of life-events may have made things worse for her, in the end I think perhaps she was "fated" to be unhappy after all.
So the idea was a "Choose your own adventure" where you more or less end up in the same place regardless. Maybe a bit wealthier, maybe with 2 instead of 3 kids — but the fundamentals were already "cast".
(And anyway, upon further reflection I came to see how much my oldest daughter is more or less my mom. We raised her as best we can and yet shades of my mom's "genetics" are clearly there.)
I love the framing of them in this article as the gateway drug to interactive entertainment.
The first text adventure I encountered was a future friend's multiple choice adventure, starting in a cave, called "The Cave".
With that as inspiration, began years of my own text adventures, from multiple-choice to broad grammars and vocabularies. "Command English" is what I called my grammar. The first starting at the entrance of a cave. Later versions, almost always involving caves. And mazes.
In high school I worked on a massive adventure called "The Wanderer", with all of my innovations. With an important cave that had to be rapelled down to from a cliff edge. Until the day I was working on it after school, and saved my latest version to disk before going home. At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.
My enthusiasm for creating adventures suffered a fatal blow.
Wow, that sucks!
When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.
Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....
I already have a few from the library - one title for each series:
* Marcel Groenewege: Schaduwkraai
* Jack Heath - 300 minuten
* Tim Collins - Verraders in de ruimte
* Dustin Brady, Het geheim van spookeiland.
[1] https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books
This is interesting because, without knowing this was the birth of CYOA, I actually arrived at this solution with my daughter. Actually, even better: it was her idea. Bedtime stories are better if she's an active participant and the main character of the story, with me controlling all NPCs. It can be exhausting: re-telling a story can be done on autopilot (the only risk is falling asleep) but creating an adventure on the fly is both very rewarding and extremely energy draining.
Boy, will we have a lot of fun when she's a bit older and I introduce her to roleplaying games!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)
I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).
Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?
#5 The Mystery of Chimney Rock, page 60: https://archive.org/details/mysteryofchimney00pack/page/60
It would be so, so much worse if the bends were when dissolved diarrhea came out of solution and formed diarrhea bubbles in your blood.
I'm 56. I first discovered these in maybe 1980 or 81? These books were foundational to my sense of creativity, and expectations of entertainment. I had discovered D&D the year prior, and this was fuel to the fire. To this day, when I'm bored, I create my own adventure, and don't rely on computers, film, books, etc... these books taught me how to become self-sufficient and self-entertaining. Funny, the same year I also discovered Douglas Adams and I think Gary Numan's Cars was still on KC Kasem's top 20. 1979-1982: genesis of identity.
Also, this was the last good incarnation of the trope I'd seen in a while: https://www.cracked.com/blog/choose-your-own-adventure-on-dr...
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Packard_(writer)