I remember as a child reading these types of books in school. I loved them and one of my teachers had us do a book report on a book in the "choose your own adventure" genre. It was interested how one idea, a setting and a protagonist can do in one of these books. I remember reading an endless quest book called "Mountains of Mirrors" and it was a book I would constantly read and read over and over again. I saw this was a trend in the 80s/90s and it died off pretty quickly. What is funny is i had found youtube videos having this type of method of story telling with annotations linking to a section of the story (food for thought). Why are there not as many books like this anymore? I could see this being perfect for an author who has multiple ideas to telling the story or even having the multiple universe effect. Imagine Harry Potter books being like this where you can tell the story in 10+ different ways leading to a similar ending? (only example I can give now) Thinking about it sounds dated and annoying flipping through pages to the next scene or having to become disinterested in one storyline and tracing back to another.
Probably because it's difficult to write all the possible options. When I was a little kid in primary school in 2000-5 I remember reading them and some of the Goosebumps ones, which also had this element.
They were replaced by story-driven video games,. And not a moment too soon. Those choose-your-own-adventure books were terrible.
I used to love those books too, my favorite were the Historical ones, like one about the Titanic. You can still check them out at the library like most books, but I've noticed a few companies are still trying their hand at making choose-your-own-adventure books. When I look back I do see that they weren't the best written books out there, but when I was younger I didn't really care about that. I loved reading just about anything that kept my interest! I think what made them popular was that the reader was the character. You'd think they would be popular still...*sigh* it's a different day and age.
There was a huge wave of interactive fiction for ya books in the 80's there's some listed on Cliquey Pizza 2 a website dedicated to retro 80's children's books mainly the romantic ones , there's also a huge list on Damian's Gamebook webpage. Like all series fiction they were flimsy , entertaining but not enlightening reads.
Those were the days of DD and the 8bit-16bit era and the 5mb Apple computers. What about now? Would famous books succeed if they released an adventure that stood out on it's own?
I remember those books, I had a few Arthurian ones, and in my favorite you were Napoleon Bonaparte. It is indeed hard to imagine how they could be marketed in today's world of online gaming. I remember reading about books consisting of loose pages you'd shake in a box to change the order of the story, probably some wild experiment by a dadaist.. I doubt this made for first-choice literature, but if any one has information on where to find one of those, I'm curious.
For the amount of kids that adored those books growing up, they couldn't have been that horrible. They are a staple of my generation. You didn't get through elementary school without reading more than one of them. Then going back and changing your choices so you could read it all again with a different ending.
The Chosen Your own Adventure books are now back in print. With both beginning and advanced reader versions. . They are terrible, but so vastly entertaining. - Darkkin
