I grew up right when Choose Your Own Adventure started so I have a first print, first edition of Cave of Time. Not that it's worth anything or that it's in good condition (it's been beaten and read hundreds of times, I even let my kids read it as they were growing up), but it's a nice period piece for sure.
The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
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Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#72I used to love these books as a kid. I suspect they're not as popular now with all of the non-linear video game options that kids have. But in their time, these were a complete game changer in storytelling.
The visual novel genre is a huge non-Western electronic version of CYOA gamebooks. Wikipedia states "Visual novels originated in and are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006." They descend from '80s early adventure games, and not paperback CYOA, though. Similarly, in the U.S., the popular 2010s licensed titles from Telltale Games were essentially electron…
Apparently they're so popular that people who don't even know Japanese have been motivated enough to create tools for reading them which extract the text and put it into various machine translators and dictionary lookups; and more recently, someone even trained an ML model to do it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/rzhbdz/from_s...
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#73Detroit Become Human is the modern choose your own adventure.
That's probably about right. I know there's more games like that as well, I remember seeing a horror game like that on youtube that I forget the name of. Wikipedia just calls it an "adventure game". Feels like there must be a more specific name for the genre, but I don't know what it is.
Visual novel? "Walking simulator" (originally derogatory, but sometimes used descriptively now)?
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#74Archived: https://archive.ph/uSQnh
Thanks!
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#75I was always a fan of the Fighting Fantasy books - they were big in Canada and the UK, but less so in the USA. Interactive role-playing gaming in book form! And dice too!
Or the Lone Wolf series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)
If you're into this series, you'll likely love Project Aon.
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#76I used to love Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf as a kid. Hypertext (and consequently, epub, etc) is the perfect medium for this. Is there any official ebook version of the original FF books?
Joe Dever has put all of the Lone Wolf and related books online to download for free or play interactively on the website:
https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home
That's 21 Lone Wolf books and 10 in the New Order books set in the same world, including one only published at the above site.
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#77I used to love Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf as a kid. Hypertext (and consequently, epub, etc) is the perfect medium for this. Is there any official ebook version of the original FF books?
Lone Wolf was a great series. That series introduced me to fantasy more than anything else. I always thought it would make a great TTRPG. Surprised there never was a crossover between Lone Wolf and Grey Star.
All the Lone Wolf books are free to download or play online here:
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#78Loved the books as a kid and one of the first programs I wrote was a straight up port of one of the books into the computer. Lots of print and if then statements. I wasn't artistically inclined so none of the illustrations made it into the port. After a positive response from a few classmates I gave copies to, I thought about selling them but was crushed when my mother explained copyright to me. One thing I noticed a…
Yeah, how non-deterministic. I don't think I want to live in that world.
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#79CYOA books were how I independently discovered the concept of the Depth-First Search, and (because I had a finite number of fingers i.e. bookmarks i.e. active memory) the inclination to guess which branch would end in death or an already-explored node sooner so I could prune the DAG. A lot of people learn these concepts with mazes or with FPS shooter games in story mode where they're navigating an unfamiliar 2D or 3D branching space, and the narrative version is a lot more abstract, but I think about it every time I'm teaching tree search or graph search.
Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
#80I used to love these books as a kid. I suspect they're not as popular now with all of the non-linear video game options that kids have. But in their time, these were a complete game changer in storytelling.
you can find them nowadays as video games, some with just text, some with higher production values. And I've also taken part in forum-based CYOAs, where one poster writes the adventure and the other posters vote on which option to choose, which can be quite fun and can be more reactive, as sometime the players will think of solutions the author didn't think of.
It goes the other way too - there were definitely a few CYOA-style books set in the Zork! universe. Although I will say the Zork ones did let you make arguably cruel decisions.