• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

'Choose Your Own Adventure' books back in the news...

Totenkindly

@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
50,193
MBTI Type
BELF
Enneagram
594
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
cool article.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/ente...ring-power-choosing-your-own-adventure/52386/

If you were a kid during the '80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us in a way that normal books did not. At key plot points, the reader got to make decisions that actually changed the course of the story....

...That doesn't mean that the era of the Choose Your Own Adventure has ended, even if it is some 30 years (egad) after the original series began. One recent example of updated Choose Your Own Adventure-type books is the "What if" series, which began in 2006. They're dubbed "Choose Your Destiny" novels by Random House and written by Liz Ruckdeschel and Sara James. "She's all yours," promises the book cover, of the character, Haley Miller, who starts off in book 1 at 15, the new girl at a New Jersey public high school, where the reader must help her forge her way. By book 8 in the series, it's "Time to send Haley off into the world. Are you ready?"...

...The same elements that drew us to CYOA books in the '80s and '90s are at work again here: The ability to live vicariously though a character (an aspect of any novel) is even more actionable than in other fiction because we actually get to make decisions for the characters—assuming the author has written those options in, of course. These decisions have repercussions, often major ones: Some point to a "fixation on death" that appears to run through the original series. There are obviously stakes here—decisions are made; consequences are had.

CYOA-esque books like the What if series and Clark's upcoming books bring us some new female-oriented plot lines about school and dating and social lives (as if informed by, say, Gossip Girl), that the old CYOA books, typically focused on adventure, fantasy, or horror—anything, really, but romance!—didn't offer. But the aspect of making a choice for your character, and seeing it through, is the same. "Whatever you decide, your night changes," says Mercado of Most Likely To. "There’s a really annoying guy in a band who wants to just tell you about his music, do you put up with him or do you see through it and go? You saw someone maybe slip a pill in someone’s drink, do you convince yourself you didn’t see it, or do you address it and be willing to take the fallout?"...

...Packard is now working on an adult novel and told the Wire he's not interested in writing more interactive books in the CYOA-genre. Over the past few years, however, he's revised, expanded, and adapted three of his orignal CYOA books for release as U-Ventures apps at the iTunes store. "Of course there's a lot you can do in this format that you can't do in a printed book," he says. "There is no limit to the number of pages, so in a scene where you are swimming, trying to get to shore, you can keep swiping pages and you only encounter more scenes of the sea. Your frustration and uncertainty mimic what you'd feel in reality. In one scene you have to make a repair on our spaceship and the computer says there will be a catastrophic failure in 20 seconds. The reader has to solve the problem in real time: The countdown of time remaining is shown on the screen. We have light and sound effects. The computer remembers where you've been, which can affect what you know and what happens when you reach a certain locale and if and when you come back to it." (Simon & Schuster have been releasing print versions of the apps since March.) ...

Loved those things. Also loved the jackson books where they had more of an RPG feel to them. And of course, these books are kind of like RPG Lite, the non-gamer version of gaming. Computer tech has advanced to the point where you could read/play these books on your cell phone while bored instead of having to buy and carry a book around.

any good memories? Opinions of what the future holds? your favorite books?
 

Qlip

Post Human Post
Joined
Jul 30, 2010
Messages
8,464
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
4w5
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
I supposed the COA's were empowering in a way.. but also the results of your choices were totally unpredictable, and also trippy. Some of those books were gateway literature to LSD. I loved them.
 

citizen cane

ornery ornithologist
Joined
Apr 30, 2010
Messages
3,854
MBTI Type
BIRD
Enneagram
631
Instinctual Variant
sp
I was quite the fan of these books as a child, though I can't recall if I ever actually owned any.
 
Joined
Jun 6, 2007
Messages
7,312
MBTI Type
INTJ
I loved those books, I think I had all of them. I remember they were sold in boxed sets of five, and I must have had at least three of those. They reminded me a little of a more primitive version of the old Infocom text-only adventure games.
 

Lux

Kraken down on piracy
Joined
Aug 6, 2009
Messages
1,458
I loved those when I was a kid. I liked that they were more adventurous and sort of dark, if they hadn't been I don't think I would have liked them as much.
 

SilkRoad

Lay the coin on my tongue
Joined
May 26, 2009
Messages
3,932
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
6w5
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
Another "I loved these as a kid!" I still remember The Cave of Time, which was the very first one ever and was totally classic. My brother and I were actually more into serious-ish literature but we totally loved these books. The earlier they were, the more classic, by and large. I also remember Balloon Across the Sahara, and some space/alien ones. Then my brother and I wrote one called You Are Robin Hood, but that's another story...
 
Joined
Jun 6, 2007
Messages
7,312
MBTI Type
INTJ
I loved those when I was a kid. I liked that they were more adventurous and sort of dark, if they hadn't been I don't think I would have liked them as much.

Me too...I guess it was pretty dark that you could actually die in a book intended for people who are 10-14 years old. And die pretty gruesomely, too.

Another "I loved these as a kid!" I still remember The Cave of Time, which was the very first one ever and was totally classic. My brother and I were actually more into serious-ish literature but we totally loved these books. The earlier they were, the more classic, by and large. I also remember Balloon Across the Sahara, and some space/alien ones. Then my brother and I wrote one called You Are Robin Hood, but that's another story...

I would not have been able to remember any of the titles if my life depended on it, but as soon as I read this I remembered both those books. Balloon Across the Sahara was especially dark if I remember correctly. Something about being stranded in the desert to die slowly was pretty creepy.
 

kelric

Feline Member
Joined
Sep 8, 2007
Messages
2,169
MBTI Type
INtP
I used to love these too -- at one point I think I had all of them -- which was 15 or so at the time. For a kid, they had this gritty, almost sinister tone to them. The consequences of the choices didn't always make a lot of sense, but the idea of a story without an inevitable ending was what drew me in.

And yeah -- they did have some fairly gruesome-for-a-kid endings.
 

Totenkindly

@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
50,193
MBTI Type
BELF
Enneagram
594
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
Another "I loved these as a kid!" I still remember The Cave of Time, which was the very first one ever and was totally classic. My brother and I were actually more into serious-ish literature but we totally loved these books. The earlier they were, the more classic, by and large. I also remember Balloon Across the Sahara, and some space/alien ones. Then my brother and I wrote one called You Are Robin Hood, but that's another story...

yeah, I remember Cave of Time too.

I tended to like the Ian Livingstone books better and had the first 15-20 of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy

Here's the cover of Book #1, the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, as it was published in the US in 1982. It's had various covers, but the original US run all had similar covers to this one. Russ Nicholson, a british artist also famous for his illustrations for D&D's Fiend Folio, did the somewhat creepy internal art. And there were some pretty gruesome endings when you didn't succeed / picked the wrong path.

warlock.jpg


http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/07/retrospective-warlock-of-firetop.html

And then there was jackson's Sorcery series....
da86816536788b7516c660c64f1b4c9d.jpg
 

Spamtar

Ghost Monkey Soul
Joined
Sep 1, 2009
Messages
4,468
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w4
For the most part I was intrigued by these books as a kid. Especially the Fighting Fantasy series that incorporated dice but didn't require other live players like D&D (the ones by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone) The 5 part epic was my fave that unlike any other choose your own adventure book that I was aware of combined 5 books into one (one of them being a spell-book where you were to memorize spell names that because of use during the series). This was the first one of those in the Sorcery/Fighting Fantasy series. http://fightingfantasy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=9 . (Google it and it looks like PDFs are available).

Fond memories for an introvert. The illustrations were also trippy.
Tony%2Bcat09.jpg
 

Spamtar

Ghost Monkey Soul
Joined
Sep 1, 2009
Messages
4,468
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w4
I tended to like the Ian Livingstone books better and had the first 15-20 of them.

Hmm I tended to prefer the Steve Jackson or Jackson/Livingstone partnership books mush more.
 

Totenkindly

@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
50,193
MBTI Type
BELF
Enneagram
594
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
Hmm I tended to prefer the Steve Jackson or Jackson/Livingstone partnership books mush more.

Hmmm, I guess I came across too literally -- I mean the entire series, I just couldn't remember if Jackson wrote the first one. But he did cowrite it with Livingstone -- see above.


For the most part I was intrigued by these books as a kid. Especially the Fighting Fantasy series that incorporated dice but didn't require other live players like D&D (the ones by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone) The 5 part epic was my fave that unlike any other choose your own adventure book that I was aware of combined 5 books into one (one of them being a spell-book where you were to memorize spell names that because of use during the series).

yeah, that!!! Wasn't the spellbook cool, esp being required to recall the spell names?

I posted the front cover of the US version of Book #1 above, I think I still have them in a box in the basement somewhere.

The art rocks. (In fact, the old AD&D b&w art by similar artists either really sucked or was really awesome... esp the eerie stuff. The only thing more fascinating/macabre to me has been Harry Clarke's pen illustrations.)
 

Xenon

(blankpages)
Joined
Oct 5, 2009
Messages
832
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5
My favourite books of this type were a series of nature books called "Survival." In each book, you would make the choices of an animal in the wild (they had deer, mouse, otter, squirrel and some others). They had covers like this:

1226021-L.jpg


There were many choices that ended in death, and I think there was only one choice path that resulted in a "happy ending" for each animal.

My whole fourth grade class loved them, and there would be a lot of competition to read them during independent reading time. At one point the whole class got a talking-to because kids lucky enough to get their hands on one would hoard them in their desks and trade them amongst themselves rather than returning them to the common shelf.

If I came across one even now in a used bookstore or something, I'd get it.
 

Spamtar

Ghost Monkey Soul
Joined
Sep 1, 2009
Messages
4,468
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w4
Hmmm, I guess I came across too literally -- I mean the entire series, I just couldn't remember if Jackson wrote the first one. But he did cowrite it with Livingstone -- see above..

I thing we generally agree that we liked the series. I was only noting that of the Jackson/Livingstone team my recollection was that Livingstone did some solo ones which were still pretty good but not as consistently good as Jackson's and the Jackson/Livingstone team.

I would keep good care of those books of yours if they are in good condition because I suspect that they will shoot up in value like some collector comic books in the next ten to twenty years.
 

Spamtar

Ghost Monkey Soul
Joined
Sep 1, 2009
Messages
4,468
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w4
My favorite books of this type were a series of nature books called "Survival." In each book, you would make the choices of an animal in the wild (they had deer, mouse, otter, squirrel and some others).

I am not familiar with that exact series but I remember as a young kid reading one of the Choose Your Own Adventure type books and being an animal protagonist and getting a kick out of it.
 

Such Irony

Honor Thy Inferior
Joined
Jul 23, 2010
Messages
5,059
MBTI Type
INtp
Enneagram
5w6
Instinctual Variant
sp/so
I loved CYOA books as a kid. My library has still has them in stock and kids are still requesting them.
 

Totenkindly

@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
50,193
MBTI Type
BELF
Enneagram
594
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
[MENTION=325]EffEmDoubleyou[/MENTION]: rofl, that's rich!

Now I've got an idea for another one: "....so You've Got Cancer."

... actually not unprecedented. One of the first Marvel comics graphic novels (in the large flat format, vs the smaller book size they use today) was "The Death of Captain Marvel" from cancer.
 

Spamtar

Ghost Monkey Soul
Joined
Sep 1, 2009
Messages
4,468
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w4
One of the things about CYOA type books were that often the results (especially the result of death) was rather arbitrary. Adding to the perplexities of preteen/teen angst.

"You are in a hallway there are two doors.

The door on the right has a blue diamond shape over the top, the door on the left has a green crescent.

Which door do you choose?

If you choose the right door (blue diamond) turn to page 66

If you choose the left door (green crescent) turn to page 198

If you decide to wait in the hallway for your recently lost blink lynx, turn to page 99."

(after a moments thought with no clues noted as to which symbol to choose you take a guess of the left door and turn to page 198)

1232618462i1MPnu.jpg


"You enter the door with the green crescent and it immediately shuts behind you locked. Suddenly an interdementional nightmare hound jumps at your throat, clenching your throat until all oxygen is cut off and what was once your life...fades all around you.

Your adventure is now over."
 

miss fortune

not to be trusted
Joined
Oct 4, 2007
Messages
20,589
Enneagram
827
Instinctual Variant
sp/so
I discovered a copy of "daredevil park" at my parents' house last weekend that I must have stolen from the library, so great timing on the thread... I reread it :ninja:

I always chose the ones with names like scooby doo movies... I always saw how many ways I could die :doh:
 
Top