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Choose your own adventure?

Kantarii

Kantarii

I'm Not A Bitch!
Joined
May 9, 2016
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One of my earliest memories of a book series I read growing up was the "Choose your own adventure books" series by Edward Packard. For the life of me, I can't recall all the names of the books released ( thank God for the Internet).

The book series was written in second person and challenged the reader to make decisions that affected the outcome of the story. Now, I do remember it was supposed to be a children's book series, but I remember some pretty horrific endings that could happen from making bad decisions throughout the book.

Two books standout in my aging memory: "The Cave of Time" and " Deadwood City". Has anyone ever read anything else from the "Choose your own adventure" series or even remember it?
 
I remember dungeons and dragons had a series of those. I know I had a few, but can't recall titles.
 
I had one of the old ENDLESS QUEST books. "Villains of Volturnus," which was a tie-in with an old and long-forgotten RPG called Star Frontiers. The protagonist is an androgynous kid named Kyiki and I remember getting them killed by some alien beastie called a Quickdeath and that's mostly it. Long time ago now.
 
Kantarii said:
One of my earliest memories of a book series I read growing up was the "Choose your own adventure books" series by Edward Packard. For the life of me, I can't recall all the names of the books released ( thank God for the Internet).

The book series was written in second person and challenged the reader to make decisions that affected the outcome of the story. Now, I do remember it was supposed to be a children's book series, but I remember some pretty horrific endings that could happen from making bad decisions throughout the book.

Two books standout in my aging memory: "The Cave of Time" and " Deadwood City". Has anyone ever read anything else from the "Choose your own adventure" series or even remember it?
Click to expand...

Absolutely! I had a bunch of them, but my favorite was "The Magic of the Unicorn". It was the first one I read where the main character of 'you' was explicitly written and illustrated as a girl instead of a boy. That might be why I remember it better than some of the others. The other one I really enjoyed was "Third Planet From Altair" for its space exploration theme. Being a huge Star Trek/Star Wars geek, I loved anything space-related. I don't think I have any of my CYOA books now though.

When I got older, I got into the Fighting Fantasy and GrailQuest series of game books. They were like CYOA, only with extra rules for fighting monsters, finding secret doors, and other stuff. Basically like D&D adventures you could run with yourself as the protagonist. Still have a good-sized collection of those. :)
 
Areala-chan said:
Absolutely! I had a bunch of them, but my favorite was "The Magic of the Unicorn". It was the first one I read where the main character of 'you' was explicitly written and illustrated as a girl instead of a boy. That might be why I remember it better than some of the others. The other one I really enjoyed was "Third Planet From Altair" for its space exploration theme. Being a huge Star Trek/Star Wars geek, I loved anything space-related. I don't think I have any of my CYOA books now though.

When I got older, I got into the Fighting Fantasy and GrailQuest series of game books. They were like CYOA, only with extra rules for fighting monsters, finding secret doors, and other stuff. Basically like D&D adventures you could run with yourself as the protagonist. Still have a good-sized collection of those. :)
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I remember when they made Ian Livingstone's fighting fantasy stuff into a video game called Deathtrap Dungeon. I must have played that damn game for weeks on end. Between that game, the first Tomb Raider, and Nightmare Creatures 1 I was in hog heaven. I believe the year was 1997/98 and thought 🙀"wow, they've really come along way since Pacman as a game.:)👠👠👠Kant
Anyway, Deathtrap Dungeon got bad reviews, but I fell in love with the hack and slash game ... Guess that's why I loved God of War so much when it debuted😎
 
The Badlands of Hark. Died so many times trying to get through. Might not have been an official Choose Your Own Adventure but it worked the same way. Only book I have read more times is Animal Farm.
 
Kantarii said:
... I believe the year was 1997/98 ...
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The "Choose Your Own Adventure" format has been around for a long time. I remember checking out a hard-bound book of that format from the local library in the late 50s/early 60s. I don't remember much more than it was a fantasy and I read it a dozen times to figure out all the possible endings.

I also check out a couple of math tutorials in that same time period that used the same sort of format with multiple choice questions that led to further explanation or the next problem/concept.
 
I remember reading the D&D ones, don't remember what they were about. I do remember playing Star Frontiers a lot lol.
 
Those ENDLESS QUEST books are actually available for free to read online now. Huh.
 
Kantarii said:
I remember when they made Ian Livingstone's fighting fantasy stuff into a video game called Deathtrap Dungeon. I must have played that damn game for weeks on end. Between that game, the first Tomb Raider, and Nightmare Creatures 1 I was in hog heaven. I believe the year was 1997/98 and thought 🙀"wow, they've really come along way since Pacman as a game.:)👠👠👠Kant
Anyway, Deathtrap Dungeon got bad reviews, but I fell in love with the hack and slash game ... Guess that's why I loved God of War so much when it debuted😎
Click to expand...

I still have Deathtrap Dungeon, it took me a long time to get through it to yes it got bad reviews but I still liked it. The first Tomb Raider is still one of my favorite games.
 
I read several of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I think I read the ones for younger readers. I had several in my classroom at one time, but the kids liked them and tended to take them home and never return them. I might have one or two left around here somewhere.
 
I definitely had Cave of Time and several others. I used to try to hold my place at the branch points so I could read one ending and then go back and follow the other option. Sometimes different branches would even reconverge to the same page.
 
PervOtaku said:
I definitely had Cave of Time and several others. I used to try to hold my place at the branch points so I could read one ending and then go back and follow the other option. Sometimes different branches would even reconverge to the same page.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, I used to read with every finger of one hand holding a page to go back to.

I have an adult (not euphemism for porn) CYOA book where the author clearly understood that people read them that way. The different branches of the story don't meet, but they interact; there are bits where one timeline starts leaking into the other. (Kim Newman, Life's Lottery.)
 
My company used to write training manuals in the Choose Your Own Adventure format. I wrote a couple myself.

The idea was to demonstrate steps to a quality solution of a problem. If you made the wrong decision the manual sent you back a few pages with an explanation of WHY that solution was wrong.

I wrote something like it for Lit:

https://www.literotica.com/s/literotica-the-penalties
 
I had to look it up, but it is interesting to know Edward Packard started all the interactive 2nd person fantasy stuff brought up:) 👠👠👠Kant💋
 
Bramblethorn said:
Oh yeah, I used to read with every finger of one hand holding a page to go back to.

I have an adult (not euphemism for porn) CYOA book where the author clearly understood that people read them that way. The different branches of the story don't meet, but they interact; there are bits where one timeline starts leaking into the other. (Kim Newman, Life's Lottery.)
Click to expand...

I thought I was the only one that read those books that way... Haha. I also thought there was some secret formula to read the whole book without dying👠👠👠Kant

Of course, what can we expect to think since I was about 7/8 years old reading them for the first time:)
 
Bramblethorn said:
Oh yeah, I used to read with every finger of one hand holding a page to go back to.
Click to expand...

Haha! I did this too. Those books are super fun. Those are probably what drove me on my love of roleplaying games, and later, video rpgs like the kind Bioware makes. What drove me crazy was if I happened to see a page that really intrigued me, I'd have to read backwards and search to find out how to get there. I swear, some of the books were broken and you couldn't really get to a couple of those pages.
 
always enjoyed the choose your own adventure books. I got nearly all the fighting fantasy (jackson + livingstone) books (cannot finish deathtrap dungeon or city of thieves), some about ninja's and also the Lone Wolf series about Kai + Sommerlund.
 
CYOA-type stuff seemed so contrived to me. I remember trying a couple books and quickly being bored. Later I wrote some games based on the concept and yes, they were contrived and boring. I tried a shaved-down reader's-choice structure in Jenny Be Fair 02 and it didn't go over well. Sigh...
 
OliviaM said:
Haha! I did this too. Those books are super fun. Those are probably what drove me on my love of roleplaying games, and later, video rpgs like the kind Bioware makes. What drove me crazy was if I happened to see a page that really intrigued me, I'd have to read backwards and search to find out how to get there. I swear, some of the books were broken and you couldn't really get to a couple of those pages.
Click to expand...

I think Life's Lottery had one or two pages that were intentionally that way - "hello, nice to meet you, I'm the sinister figure who exists across all possible realities".
 
Does anyone know of an author that currently does this type of second person writing and publishes the stories? 👠👠👠Kant
 
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