Choose Your Own Adventure Books
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In the late 70s/early 80s, the world became interactive. Pong wasn’t amazing because of its graphics. It was amazing because it turned your television — something that had been a passive piece of electronics for 40+ years — into an interactive gaming experience. Home computers were these magical things you could type words into and make things happen. Not to be left you, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books allowed kids to literally control the story they were reading.
I have two bookshelves in my home office. One is filled with books, both fiction and nonfiction, that I’ve read before and will read again. The other, smaller set of shelves contains books from my childhood — books I read and loved and should probably let go and probably never will. These Choose Your Own Adventure books from my childhood are some of the books on those shelves.
Choose Your Own Adventure books were invented by Edward Packard, who came up with the idea back in 1970, originally publishing them under the name “Adventures of You.” It wasn’t until the books were picked up by Bantam Books in the early 80s that they really took off. When I was in grade school it seemed like a new adventure was released weekly. One week you could be abducted by aliens and the next week you might be traveling through time or running from a Yeti. Every adventure was an exciting adventure.
f you’ve never read a CYOA, the books all followed a similar format. After explaining who you were (the books were always written in second person), choices would be presented to the reader. Depending on the choice you made you would be instructed to turn to a specific page in the book. You hear a roar coming from deep within the Yeti’s cave. If you would like to continue exploring the cave, turn to page 17. If you would like to run for your life, turn to page 20.
Every book had multiple endings — some were happy, and some were… not so happy. Experienced CYOA readers learned to keep their thumb inside a branching page so that they could flip back to change their mind. If that Yeti got the better of you for sticking around in his cave too long, it might be a good idea to go back and make the other choice!
After the success of CYOA, many copycats came long. There were “Which Way” books, and Scholastic had their own “Twistaplot” line. Eventually there were even Dungeons and Dragons books and ones featuring movie characters like Indiana Jones. In the 80s we didn’t differentiate between the different brands. It’s a bit like going into a restaurant, ordering a “coke”, and then getting a Dr. Pepper. Twistaplots and Which-Way books were all Choose Your Own Adventure books in our eyes.
By the late 80s even Nintendo got in on the action. Finally, kids could read books about Mario and and Luigi during the day before going home and, you know, actually playing NES. One of the books a friend of mine had was the Koopa Capers, starring the Super Mario Bros. If you would like to read the book and play it for yourself, I found a copy of it on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/nintendo-adventure-book-04-koopa-capers/mode/2up
Today there are websites and even programming languages (see: Twine) dedicated to creating online versions of CYOA-style games, but for me, the best adventures will always be on paper; the best graphics, in the mind.