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.)

In 2022 the New Yorker wrote up the CYOA franchise, early history and later existence, in a story that is a choose your own adventure itself: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-a...

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.

The mystery of the Highland Crest is one of my favorite books ever! It gave me another perspective on the medium when I was younger

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:

* Marcel Groenewege: Schaduwkraai

* Jack Heath - 300 minuten

* Tim Collins - Verraders in de ruimte

* Dustin Brady, Het geheim van spookeiland.

> 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!

OK the line from his mom equating the bends with diarrhea really made me chuckle. Sounded like something my mom would have said.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)

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.