The Rise & Fall & Rise of Choose Your Own Adventure Books
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Choose Your Own Adventure Books are a series of children's gamebooks where the reader assumes the role of the protagonist and makes choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome.
Choose Your Own Adventure Books were based upon a concept created by Edward Packard and were wildly popular throughout the 80's and 90's before kind of falling off the map.
Choose Your Own Adventure Books are a part of pop culture, so much so that it has led to a few lawsuits, most notably against Netflix regarding Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
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"You're walking down the hall. Turn to page 6 to take the left door"
_turns to page 6_
"You fall down a never ending pit and are never seen again. You're deader than dead"
_ffs_ - 9 year old me
It got to the point where it was “Do X, turn to page 36. Do Y, turn to page 84.” I would do X, because I had fallen into the pit enough times to remember the page number.
@@ianjohnson8419 You're not getting me THIS time bottomless hole in the ground.
@@zubbworks Turns to Page 43. "You run to the garage, choose the car on the left, and speed away from your captors. Unfortunately, its brakes were cut. Your attempts to stop the car proves unsuccessful, and your car ends up in a fiery blaze below the bridge".
If PTSD was a thing for reading books, Choose Your Own Adventure would have triggered it! :P
This is why I used my fingers as bookmarks to prior choices... "Nope, I died... Back to that last choice... Nope don't like that ending either. Ok... Go back two choices and make a different choice.... ah yes, much better." lol
@@wariolandgoldpiramid it's a figure of speech. _Jeez_ wouldn't have the same impact
My mom got me The Cave of Time and The Mystery of Chimney Rock for Christmas one year. I wasn't too excited because I didn't think books were a great gift. Then I read them. They quickly became my favorite books and I started collecting them. Decades later, I still have them and treasure them. Thank you Mama!
The cave of time was my first too!!!! It was in the library of my school.
I loved it.
I took it on a tuesday and brought it back on thursday.
My teacher was confused and thought i hated it.
Nope, on Wednesday, i did it with my older sister and she had the idea of mapping it. I was giving it back not because it was boring, but because in a day we went all possibilities.
Great story! I still have my earliest books too!
It was the treasure of the onyx dragon that got me, I picked it up read the first page "do not read sequentially", and said what the heck, but books are linear. The artwork was so well done, I started collecting right there, dinosaur island before Jurassic park. They were awesome!
Me too!!
My mom worked in a publishing clearing house (not a sweepstakes) and she would bring me loads of paperback books with the front cover ripped off (that's what they did to devalue them so the author's work couldn't be sold after the fact) and I read lots of these, and Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew (even tho I was a boy) and The Hardy Boys. These books were a precursor to 'if/then' gaming programming. I am so glad that I was reading adult fiction (Watership Down, The World According to Garp, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, tLotR, etc) when I was a first grader, when I see 25 y/os today who CAN'T read, and they never read anything that they weren't forced to read/watch the movie of...Thank You Mama!
Back in elementary school, early 80’s we were assigned a project to write a letter to somebody famous or influential. I wrote Mr. Packard. I received a letter back from him which I still have to this day. I was requesting him to write me in as a character in a story. He responded back that I was always a character in the story. Realizing now that I’m older what he meant. He did stamp the letter with a cool type of Indian elephant stamp. I had not thought about the letter or the books in a couple decades. It was nice to have this randomly pop up & brought back many years of good childhood memories. Thank you!
When a Dungeons and Dragons player was home alone in the 80's a 'choose your own adventure' book was the best companion!
They even had D & D books like CYOA
I loved them as a youngster!
Oh no, "Lone Wolf" was - that was a series where you had stats, special martial arts powers and you could carry the character over between books (this made you wildly overpowered though).
I preferred the Interplanetary Spy series.
Fighting fantasy books of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.
I'm over 40 years old and I'm not ashamed to admit I own several of these books and still read them. Space Vampire is probably my favorite.
I think my favorite was Cave of Time. I recall reading it through several times.
@@PNWAffliction that was choose your own adventure #1, written by Edward Packard. I have that one too.
Wizards Warriors and You! I found this and many books in an attic.
Holy shit, Space Vampire was my fav too!
My sister had that title in the 80s! The one CYOA books I actually know because of that.
The deaths didn't traumatize me when I was a kid. After all, the book taught me the valuable lesson that if you risk your life and get killed in the process, all you need to do is remember the page you came from and try the other choice. It's worked well for me.
He said something like that in the video. But who was traumatized?
I wasn't traumatized, but man, I do remember some of them were pretty gruesome. There was one where I was killed by gangsters and my body was chopped up and fed to sharks.
@@TheonetruewonderflyMaybe "The Lost Ninja"? I recall that one introduced me to the trope of Yakuza gangsters cutting off parts of their fingers for the first time, heh. Complete with a tense illustration of the deed about to happen.
Hahaha, I would "cheat" like that - if I did not like the result, I'd just back up and do-over, like you described.
It was the literary version of "Save Game" and "Reload Game", lol. (Back before video games replaced books)
When I was in 6th grade, we had a reading competition to see who could read the most books. There was a big debate whether my CYOA books counted since you didn’t necessarily read the “whole” book. So I had to agree to read every possible ending in order for it to count. I won by reading every CYOA book available at the time.
Interesting that they kept the first few in print, which should have been easiest to get from other sources. He showed an advertisement, but for some reason they didn't advertise in comic books I read in the 1980s. There is something to what he said for having a person in charge to handle feedback to find out what kids want next. Once they had 20, 30, 40, etc., how do you know what's good and worth keeping in print and to advertise?
We had a similar reading program at my school and the same controversy. I always read all the endings anyway though.
Prove it
I read every ending because I wanted to know all possible fates. It's like googling people you dated or had crushes on in high school to see what your fate might have been if you stayed together. I've done that and learned that I had better adventures after high school than they did.😅
Please tell me you are now the head of Alternate Reality/Time Travel research lol!!
When my daughter was born last year I started thinking about my own childhood rites of passage and bought a used copy of Gorga the Space Monster. One day she picked it up and started flipping through it so I read her a few lines. Then I googled Packard, found his website and sent him an email of thanks. This dude WROTE ME BACK. I guess he had less to do since we were all pandemic quarantined. He wrote me back twice. We had a lovely chat.
Similar thing happened to me. I ran across the author of one of my favorite Sci-Fi books on social media after he posted an advert on a writers page. I could not resist telling him I was a big fan of his work. Honestly I think he was more excited than I was about that post! He engaged me in conversation and I guess he showed that post to everyone in his family and circle gloating about it. (He was not as well known by any means, but he had good sales and this book I mentioned was talked about nationally on podcasts and such) We still talk on and off to this day. I guess authors are real people too. LOL
Look up Auguste Piccard. Look up what he did, and what he was recorded saying afterward.
heck in the books you could meet a horrible fate if it was a choose your own adventure style horror story.
So your 1 year old sat down and started reading a book? My 1 year old would've been more interested in eating it...
I did this exact same thing. I e-mailed Packard and thanked him for writing his books - I learned to read from those things, and repeated reading them so much that the pages started falling out. :)
I first discovered "The Cave of Time" in my local public library. My father had insisted we take piano lessons, and we were goign to the piano store in the local shopping mall... every week we'd get our allowance and then go to piano lessons. I would have my lesson first, because the piano store was just down the way from the Waldenbooks... every week I'd go in and buy a book... I remember that I could afford one book a week, but if I saved my change for a few weeks, every few weeks I could buy two books.
I had a massive collection of CYOA books, and when I finally grew out of them I donated them to a local charity... some kid got my pile of books for Christmas in the early 90s. I hope that kid loved them as much as I did.
Thank you for this wonderful trip down memory lane.
This was Generation X's introduction to hypertext and the reason we ran with the internet in the early days. We also often did flip-book animations in the footers.
Word (Gen X'er born in 1979 here).
And D&D the intro to JavaScript, yeah?
Brilliant answer
@@btetschner 1976er here. Loved CYOA books
@@tyvulpintaur2732 I have actually never read one before, but I am pretty sure that I would like them. It is such an interesting idea. 79'er here (we're both Gen X'ers).
The best part of those books was always trying to get myself killed. The plots to those books were never all that riveting, but the death scenes were always described very well and really stuck with me as a boy. One I remember is this-
"Before you lose consciousness, a vision of your family passes in front of you. You close your eyes to savor the image. It's the last thing you'll ever see."
That's awesome! I liked getting killed because it was unusual in a kids' book for the human protagonist to die.
"You love the death scenes because they're detailed. I love the death scenes because I crave death. We are not the same."
X3
Damn that was a good one! Gave me the chills!!!
I always loved making the "wrong" decisions.
A few years ago I decided to recollect original Choose Your Own Adventure books from local used bookstores, and have so far found and bought 57 of the original 200+ books. I don't even have any kids, but my wife and I enjoy reading them to each other as a sentimental throwback, and a fun way of deciding who gets to make certain decisions affecting us jointly. I read her a story and if she dies, I get to make the decision, and vice versa :) it has worked out pretty well! My all time favorite books include "Vampire Express," "Ghost Hunter," and "The Abominable Snowman."
Do you know the name of the one about the girl who has a pouch of magic stones? That was my favorite and the only one I remember with a female protagonist.
38 endings, 37 of which led to horrible death. Great, fun reading.
I still remember getting that very first print of "Choose Your Own Adventure: In the Cave of Time", from a Scholastic catalog in 1979, when I was in the 5th grade. It became my absolute favorite book, and from that point on, whenever I discovered a new book published, I had my parents snag it for me. I got the ENTIRE original run of Choose Your Own Adventure books, plus the subsequent year's run of Dungeons & Dragons Choose Your Own Adventure books. I still have those books in my book case here. All of them. They were ground-breaking and I'm willing to say, very integral in my getting involved in Dungeons & Dragons and role playing games in 1980. Strangely, in all these years, I've never met anyone other than myself who read these books or knew of their existence. Oh, there are some people I know today, who know about them simply because of the name had entered the common lexicon, but have never actually encountered or read them. I used to tell people all about how great these books were when I was a kid, only to receive blank stares.
Well...I still have my collection. In spanish.
By “catalog”, do you mean the four page tissue paper-like flyers they handed out monthly in schools? I LOVED those things! Before I got an allowance I could convince my parents to buy 3-4 books at a time since reading was hardly an endeavor you wanted to pooh pooh your kids from. Definitely got some of the junior and regular books from those flyers!
I had 2 of the D and D choose your own adventure. One had a blue cover and some frost giants on the cover and the other was an orange cover with I think a dragon on it. But that was 1985 or so.
I still have my choose your own adventure books as a kid, including Prisoner of Par Tharkas and a Zork Adventure. I also have a number of the Choose Your on Adventures books. I even have the entire run of all the Transformers Chose Your Adventures books as well.
@@bccooper2418 very lucky. I found them out too late
My dad taught me to read early in life and I found and loved these books at a young age. My aunt was actually friends with Edward Packard's wife and when I was 8 she took me out to lunch in New York City - a cool restaurant with crayons and paper tablecloths at every table so you could doodle while you waited. We were ushered to our table and sitting there was a smiling man with salt and pepper hair that I never saw before. It was Edward Packard himself! He was as nice as you might imagine....a hero who lived up to your expectations. i still have battered, dog-eared autographed copies of Cave of Time, My Name is Jonah and Chimney Rock, nearly 40 years later....
edit...."your code name is jonah"
Cool!!!
i misread that as "my dad taught me to read early life..."
I started with CYOA, and because of those books ended up reading Encyclopedia Brown and EVERY Hardy Boys book including the Case Files and any with Nancy Drew starring in them. What a foundation back in the 80’s/90’s. Thanks for this video. 🙏🏾👍🏾
You're welcome!
Are you me? Throw in 'The Great Brain' series and some Tom Swift and that's me to a t.
Also led nicely into Legends of Lone Wolf.
Holy crap we read the same books. My dad on a whim before i can remember bought like 40 hardy boys books at a garage sale. He wanted books in the house for us kids, even though he doesn't read for fun. It worked, and my brothers and myself all read a ton to this day. I also loved Encyclopedia Brown and still occasionally think about stories I read 3 decades ago.
This happened with me but I started with hardy boys then moved to CYOA and Lone Wolf. The edgy case files books were my jam! Just lmao that they started with a story about the hardy boys solving the case of a professional hitman icing Joe's girlfriend.
"Choose your own Adventure" was the best!
As a kid, I used to come home from school sometimes and find one of these on my bed. No note, no explanation, no expectations. I'd read it for the next several hours, going through each possibility until I'd gotten almost all of them. One of the best memories from a childhood that wasn't always that great.
I had a rule when I read these that when i picked a page to turn to it didn’t count until I took my last finger off the old page.
lol same here
kept going til i ran out of fingers xD
Yep! Always kept it bookmarked in case of an untimely demise.
UFO 54-40 was such a gyp though. Randomly turning to the ultimate ending. :l
This was all after you promised yourself before you start that you were gonna play it properly then died after the 2nd decision.😏
The original save-scumming.
Discovering UFO 54-40's secret is still one of the great literary joys of my childhood. Damn I felt so clever. There was also the ending where you were basically the Flash, but everything moved slow to you all the time. It makes a joke about waiting at the grocery store line for what seems like a month, but that's some No Exit grade existential nightmare fuel for an 8 year old.
Brother, you’re not kidding. The fact everyone talked so slow fed my nightmares of parallel dimension trappings for decades.
Black holes spaghettifying you for eons for science fact doesn’t help either.
I was a huge fan of the 'Lone Wolf' role playing game books by Joe Dever and wonderfully illustrated by Gary Chalk. They had a choose your own adventure style story with combat and random elements using dice or a number chart in the back of the book using a simple character sheet. I've managed to collect nearly the entire series including the world of Magnumund Companion which are awesome. It was a unique take on this genre of book series that I very much appreciated as a kid.
Ah
Good Times...
Yeah I left a similar comment on this video. I have a box full of those Lone Wolf books from the late 80's and early 90's. Lone Wolf was the best.
they were great
I still have that series. Loved them as a kid.
I had a few Fighting Fantasy books that were similar to Lone Wolf. The author went on to create Games Workshop
When I was in junior high, if kids got too noisy at lunch they would put us on a sort of “timeout” period with no talking. So without speaking, my best friend and I were reading a space adventure “Choose Your Own Adventure” after we finished eating and would gesture when we were done with a page; at the time we could both speed read. Needless to say, I guess we looked like we were enjoying ourselves and got into trouble… for reading a book… IN SCHOOL… AT LUNCH! Yeah, that happened.
I got expelled from 5th grade for reading V.C. Andrews books. They said it was incest porn.
Rather than noticing how amazing it was that I was THE ONLY ONE IN MY ENTIRE SCHOOL who would EVER read without being forced to. But instead I was made an example of a sex pervert somehow, though Andrews was only one of dozens of authors I read. So was forced to be home-schooled. By the time I was 17 I had taught myself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and became a Biblical scholar.
@@cleverlydevisedmyth you win! 😄
The "Give Yourself Goosebumps" series was another example of a CYOA copycat (the CYOA formula applied to the Goosebumps series!). Thanks for uploading!
I remember that. I had the one with the Haunted Wax Museum.
@@catcrimes80 I had that one, one about a lab monkey and one about weird peanut butter
Have been re-reading Animorphs lately and they too had CYOA books. If there was a popular book franchise there was a CYOA version of it.
I loved these books, I never owned any but I would always check them out from the school and public library.
I loved the Give Yourself Goosebumps books! I remember picking one up thinking it was just a regular gb book, then getting to the first choice and being like 'what is this?!?'
I think it was the one where you're in a forest/jungle, and there's fishmen at some point
CYOA books led me to writing my own 50 page CYOA book for an assignment in 6th grade. It was supposed to just be a short story but I asked to write a CYOA for it.
This led to me making full RPGs that played on a stack of paper with each sheet being like a screen in a game.
About 10 years ago, I made a wrestling storyline game (Quest for Gold) that was CYOA with a full editor to create your own storylines.
Just seeing those book covers hits me with nostalgia. I loved these when I was a kid.
I recognised some of those covers too. Crazy!
I was lucky to get in on it soon after CYOA first came out; Mystery of Chimney Rock (1980) was my favorite. I read the first 11 published by 1981, so missed 1982's Inside UFO 54-40 with the cheating page he mentioned in this video.
I didn't like reading as a child so the Choose your Own Adventure books were the only books I ordered due to the engagement. Some of the endings were very morbid and it got me thinking a lot about why did my character have to die? I was a big fan of these books until the NES came along.
The books were like video games.. in paper form!
I think the NES came at a time when I was transitioning from books to pop culture and my last book was probably You are a Superstar in ‘89.
I don’t recognize any title beyond that in the list.
It is impossible to describe how those books really felt interactive back in the early 80's. The world had very few choices, but video games and these books had endless choices with epic consequences.
I remember getting ahold of one of these Choose Your Own Adventure books in the mid 1990s. I was so impressed with the concept I wrote my own story complete with multiple choices. The only problem was when I read it, I knew all what the outcomes of the choices were.
Should have let some other people (friends and family) play them.
@@wariolandgoldpiramid I did but it just sucked that I could not enjoy them with the benefit of not knowing the outcomes of the choices.
I did exactly the same thing.
I remember two stories I wrote, one was a generic submarine adventure, and another where I lived in a lighthouse with a robot! 🇬🇧🤖🤔
Nearly 40 years later I am now working on a music video, and guess what, it centres around a robot... and a lighthouse!
I truly wonder in 40 years time, will the generation that are gaming today perhaps instead of reading/writing, will their imagination be regarded as better nurtured than ours or will it be starved on account of them not having to for example... Make all the noises and music in their heads?
Anyway, compliments of the season to you.
What was your story about? 🌲👍
@@nigelcarren My story was about an adventure seeking woman who finds her way into a mysterious castle only to discover it is home to a vampire! She attempts to collect evidence of his existence while avoiding being seen by him and captured which would lead to her getting turned into one of his brides.
@@1977TA damn! Sounds good! You should have tried to get it published
A big part of my childhood, in the UK we had Fighting Fantasy. The first one was even a board game.
Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need.
I was slightly disappointed that FF books weren't mentioned.
Back in the 2000s, I worked for the computer games company Eidos, where Ian Livingstone was one of the directors!
@@allenelliott5647 CYOA was dead to me after I discovered Fighting Fantasy! I was also disappointed it was not mentioned.
I’ll add to the Fighting Fantasy non mention disappointment. Still got a load of them and trying to persuade my kids to read them. House of Hell would give you nightmares though
Here's an interesting fact: Back in the 80's, the first Final Fantasy game was originally to be called Fighting Fantasy, but Square (later Square Enix) had to change it because Jackson and Livingstone owned the trademark on Fighting Fantasy.
Ironically, Ian Livingstone would later go into computer games, including several based on the FF books, and his company was later bought out by none other than Square Enix. So technically, Square Enix now own the rights to the name they wanted to use for Final fantasy in the first place.
You can't make this stuff up!
These books changed my life. In 4th grade (1983)I found them in the library after hearing about them from some other kid. I checked out “3rd planet from Altair”, which was in line with my interest in space / astronomy. I loved it, and started going to the library to check out more of them. I loved them so much that I would go to the library just to see if they had any new ones. Often. If there were no CYOA, I would read another “choose” series. If there were none of those, I read something else. My family didn’t have enough money to buy paperback books for $2.95. But I could use the library and I did. Big time. School work became trivially way for me. My Grades went to straight A’s. The only problem was that school was so easy that I was bored and wanted to read CYOA when I finished my work. My 4th grade teacher, who was pretty awful, got so frustrated with me sneaking those books to read in class that she called me a “retard” in front of the class. My momand I went to the school for a meeting with the principal and teacher. I was terrified because I thought I was in big trouble. Instead my mom tore into the teacher like I had never seen and told the principal that if she ever heard of any teacher saying that to a child again she would take it to the school board. And that’s how I learned how to stand up to authority when necessary.
I'm delighted to hear that you were able to find "3rd planet from Altair" at your public library. I was buying books in a library in the 80's and, while some libraries chose not to buy popular paperbacks, I bought all I could, including all of the CYOA books. They were so popular, I made a "While you wait..." list to push other books while kids waited for the popular paperbacks they wanted to come back to the library.
*realizing you made a choice* “I didn’t take my hand off the page so it doesn’t count!”
I remember having this in school that had to do with historical events. Great video!
The equivalent of save-scumming in an adventure game on the computer!
Sierra even made a puzzle in Space Quest 1 that expects you to be save-scumming: using a slot-machine to get more money. Save after each win, load after Roger gets fried. The VGA remake adds an in-game item to mess with the machine as an alternative.
"The best part is not knowing if you're going to die or not!"
So, just like life.
I think in life, everybody knows they're going to die, don't they?
It depends on how you look at it
@@Michael-gs7so takes a while to sink in for many
The problem with them was that they didn't let the story go for long enough to actually enjoy and live with the choices for more than a few minutes. One wrong choice and the story is over, sometimes in less than five minutes.
Well, one author tried to write a fantasy world adventure, but didn't understand how these books worked, so all the choices led to only 4 endings! I'm guessing he/she didn't really want to write such a book.
For a series of children’s books, some of the fates/unhappy endings they chose were rather grizzly and traumatizing.
That’s why I remember and loved them a lot as a kid!
They were the print versions of the deaths in King's Quest.
LOL! The reason I swore to never read one again after running across that. I didnt have the stomach for it.
I had a Jurassic Park ripoff that was so hard. I don't think I ever "beat it." I remember pretty clearly one of the endings was, after stealing a boat, you get machine-gunned by a helicopter.
I had one which had you as a paranormal investigator, and it had severed heads, disembowelment and other grewsome things. It was great.
That is sometimes called the Horrible Histories paradox. Kids love the gruesome and gnarly stuff, how can we use this in education? Then the pearl clutching moral minority come for you (see D&D Satanic Panic and similar tales).
Imagine not cheating at Choose Your Own Adventure
I actually didnt cheat at these type of books, guess i was too honest
I didn’t cheat either, back then I had the patience to start from the beginning after each ending. Cheating was to me like spoiling the book.
God no. I could never restart.
One of the books 54-40 (some space adventure REQUIRED you to cheat to get the best ending. Page 100-104 refer to Utopia, the goal of the story. No page led to page 100.
@@collymorpheous8575 that's true, after (more of less) a couple of dozens of reading through the book UFO 54-40 I thought about searching for the mentioned Utopia "manually" and I found it. But I don't think of that as cheating, as people say nowadays, it was a Feature. A very cool one.
I still read these books from time to time, and I'm 46! Sure, it's not great "literature" or anything, but no other books get me involved in this particular way. I like to treat the story like a real life or death situation that is actually happening to me and it's thrilling to find out if I would've survived or not. Silly, maybe, but an absolutely fun diversion.
Race Forever blew my mind as a kid. One of the endings time loops back to the beginning so you literally race forever
I loved that book!
That book was where I learned about flash floods. Demonstrated the concept and danger very well. And they thought all those grisly endings weren't good for kids.
There was one CYOA book that had a page about getting to Ultima that was not listed as an option on any other page. You literally had to come across the page by leafing through all the pages in the book. And the page starts with something like "you didn't make any choice or decision but here you are"
Ugh... never mind... the YT video brought it up!!!! I wrote this before he had gotten there!
I've always been a gearhead since my old man would take me to the races at a young age, so when I saw Race Forever on the shelf, I knew I had to read it. That was the first time I'd ever heard of a Lancia or a Saab. This book knew it's cars, geography and history.
There was also fighting fantasy game books that shared this format but also allowed you to roll dice to determine the outcome.
Deathtrap Dungeon and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain are two of the ones I remember.
I was disappointed that these were not even mentioned. There was another series called Duel Masters where you got two books and you and a friend read each book and could find each other and battle. I believe FF also dabbled in this a bit as well.
Warlock Of Firetop Mountain was the first I owned (via one of those school-based book order schemes) and I collected half-a-dozen within a few years. I preferred them to Choose Your Own Adventure but admit I skipped the dice-rolling part so I could easily read them in bed. I simply assumed victory in each encounter. Imagine my shock to discover that a few decisions would lead to certain death! I think the vampire in the first book is an example of that.
Loved those titles.
@@originaluddite My first was "Demons of the Deep" which I absolutely loved. I did the whole dice rolling thing, but my friend didn't. One thing I never fully understood was that some combat said "you can only defend" or something, then say "if you win, go to page XX" and I would say "how can I win if i can only defend?"
I must have missed something, and would need to re-look at it again.
I liked these stories a lot, some were really cool, like the Robot Commando, and some were freaking hard, like Creature of Havoc and House of Hell.
I mapped out _Deathtrap Dungeon,_ but almost never got the dice rolls to succeed. Then it turns out you needed to find certain jewels. So I gave up. There's a monster in _Warlock..._ that you can't beat if you have low stats, so not using the dice is a good option.
Edward Packard is still writing. I contacted him and thanked him for the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. He was appreciative. There are some 4th wall moments in the books where Edward Packard himself appears such as a drawing of him. I beg to differ with your use of the term "copycat books". ; Lone Wolf by Joe Dever was a very different story and game system. By the Way Project Aon was given permission to put the Lone Wolf books online for anyone to read. You can download the Kai Lord adventures!
Lone Wolf by Joe Dever -- those are some of the best. KAI MASTERS!
My mother used to take us to the nearest library once a week during summer vacation, to pick up some books and buy some ice cream at the nearby shop. I read *so many* CYOA books during those summers. I loved them, and they seeded my later foray into Dungeons & Dragons, which has lasted to this day. But I sometimes miss those old kids' books.
Same here. The ones by Packard and Montgomery especially had a certain charm and style to them that is hard to replicate.
I remember buying new notebooks and attempting to write my own #ChooseYourOwnAdventure stories... numbering every page of the notebook first, and finding weird 'glee' in calculating how many pages I wanted to make them turn/in which direction--and even trying to write one of those endless-loop endings. It was a fun exercise.
These books were powerful imaginative tools, honestly. I'd been hoping somebody would do a video dedicated specifically to this concept.
Well done #ToyGalaxy. This was fantastic :)
Very imaginative. I wasn't creative enough to do that, though I did try to make a little text adventure game in Pascal for my final project.
I remember I had a Star Trek licensed one - not sure if it was an official Choose Your Own Adventure or not - where you're a new ensign interacting with the main characters. At one juncture, the transporter is malfunctioning, and one of your choices is to just jump into the beam to show everyone it's safe.
You end up beamed into a rock. Even had a drawing of a rock with hair on it. * chef's kiss *
Joe Dever's Lone Wolf books were my gateway to TTRPGs as a kid!
I remember the lone wolf books, they were great. Do you remember the Fighting Fantasy books like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain?
I read all of the Lonewolf Series that was available in the US. One of my favorite series.
Same, and is in fact the reason I use "Lonewolf" as part of my username.
@@RomLoneWolf23 Joe Dever would be proud.
Gawd I luved Lone wolf (loup solitaire for frenchies like me lol) Also loved the shinobi series ^^ super ninja shite. Also remember one that was like a duo book.... in one you played a magician and the other was a barbarian... you could play with a friend and both books had duo events ! It was great.... cant remember the name tho T_T
The "Twist-a-Plot" series was glossed over in the list of knockoff series, but it had an author who later became famous in his own right...R.L. Stine, who went on to write the Goosebumps series.
It blew me away that "Twist-a-Plot" and R.L. Stine weren't brought up, especially since there were a string of "Choose your own adventure" Goosebumps books. They were actually some of my favorites.
I still remember to this day- you train for years in the art of ninja, you adapt to living in the darkness. You now have amazing night vision. You hide in the room ready to jump when, the light is turned on and you fall blindly out of a window to your death.
Those were some of my FAVORITE books to read! Thanks for making this informative video! I enjoyed learning about their origins & the journey they went thru over the years! 🤓
I’ve got such happy memories of reading these type of books as a pre-teen / teenager - especially the Fighting Fantasy series that was everywhere in the UK in the early 80’s 😊👍
UK here too and the Jackson/Livngstone series were the ones I had. A lot of them.
I read many of those books in the 00s! My friend's dad had some and I got really into them, so bought some of my own. Really good memories.
I still have a special FF pack somewhere (in my loft I suspect) that contained a pad of score sheets, a couple of dice, pencils and iron on t-shirt transfer
I remember discovering "Choose Your Own Adventure" as a kid in a public library; since they'd be checked out, I never knew it was like a big series, all I knew was there was always 2 or 3 on the shelf at a time. Then one day, for some reason, a lady my mom worked for had given her a whole box of books to give to me, and in it were like 30 CYOA books... that was one of the greatest days of my childhood ever :D
One of the best books I remember is, "Mountain of Mirrors" by Rose Estes. It was a perfect and brief D&D adventure without rolling the dice.
Toy Galaxy is the channel I didn’t know I needed and Choose your own Adventure is the book series that I couldn’t live without. I devoured these books and own a few today. My two favorites were Vampire Express and Curse of Batterslea Hall. Great memories of riding to the library getting those books (and others) and spending a stormy summer afternoon dodging ghosts and the undead. Thanks, Dan, for an amazing show. I always look forward to each episode. This one was a real treat!
>Vampire Express
Might be the best one of the bunch, honestly. The writing is so vivid and spooky. Love that thing.
@@NucleaRaptor I agree! Very atmospheric! I still enjoy it.
These were the starter kit for the Lone Wolf books, the grittier version of Choose Your Own Adventure with an epic story line.
Love lone wolf. It's amazing
I loved this series as a kid and I still have several of my original books. Many great memories there…
I'm lamenting the lost of my CYOA books but I at least still have most of the knock-offs: the GI Joes, the Indiana Jones, the James Bond View to A Kills, the Fighting Fantasies...
Whoa, MJR in the house! Loved the AIC video 🤘😎
@@Gappasaurus I love EVERY MJR video, but yeah, the AIC vid was awesome.
I forgot all about the flies in the spine of the jewel case on Jar of Flies.
You should check out some of the new entries in the gamebook market like: Castles of Imagination by John M. Withers IV. Available on Amazon.
I remember a similar series called The legend of Skyfall
I still remember when we used to be able to bring a book for the teacher to read to the class. I brought a Choose Your Own Adventure book. But she didn’t get it and just read it straight through, even reading the instructions. She got confused when the story jumped around and put it down.
I had a teacher who read one to us and would pause to let us choose what to do next.
Your teacher sounds like robot space alien wearing a human suit. You were lucky to have escaped with your life.
@@beatrixwickson8477 😆 At least she didn't eat us. I'll consider that a win.
@@beatrixwickson8477 Funny you say that. That was also a book I read when I was a kid along with the choose your own adventure books. "My teacher is an alien."
@@Gatorade69 that series rocked
I used to buy these books when my elementary school had Scholastic book fair days (1982). I didn't know what it was, the cover looked cool. I brought the first book home when I was 6 and my mom went through the stack of books I bought (she wouldn't give me money for Mother's day plant sales, but I got $20 for book fair day--she loves reading). She was excited when she found the CYOA books and explained to me what they were and how to read them. It was so much fun! She bought more whenever she went to the book store (every weekend). I gotta get a few and read them agan.
My favorite version of this was Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series. An adventure RPG with combat and persistent growth of skills and equipment that carried over to later books.
EDIT - oh lol they got a shout out.
My brother still have the complete series! (We’re in our 40’s lol! )
@@flintsvariety811 I still have my Legends of Lone Wolf. I no longer have the game books.
You folks know there was a full-blown TTRPG for the gamebooks' setting from Mongoose Publishing back around 2005, right? Used the d20 open game license engine D&D 3.0 & 3.5 was using, had quite a few supplements and a miniatures line. Kind of hard to come by these days but fans of the gamebooks would probably get a kick out of them.
Don't forget Grey Star The Wizard too.
@@richmcgee434they also released lone wolf books in an app called lone wolf saga. That's actually how I found out about it. I love it.
I got rid of most of my collection, but I still hold onto my favorite 3: "Cave of Time", "Forbidden Castle", and "Mystery of Chimney Rock" -- the best one of all IMHO.
I loved _Mystery of Chimney Rock,_ that was the first I owned. Other kids had _the Cave of Time_ and _Journey Under the Sea_ so I borrowed theirs before getting my own copies after getting my second book _By Balloon to the Sahara._
As a child I thought reading was boring and refused to sit and read any book simply for enjoyment. When I stumbled across Choose Your Own Adventure books it was the first time I genuinely enjoyed reading and would scramble to read as much as I can. That started me on my path to reading for enjoyment.
Sadly, other than CYOA in 4th grade, I didn't read anything else for enjoyment until superhero comic books in 6th grade. I did read a couple book adaptations of movies, before VCR tapes in 7th-8th grade (I really wanted Return of the Jedi, but my parents wouldn't buy that book). I don't remember reading much on my own that wasn't part of an assignment for school, until I discovered sci-fi in 9th grade.
I read literally every single one of the original series. Growing up in the bay area in the 80s, my library would trade books with all the other libraries around and I would special order each one, keeping tabs until I read every single one.
"gotta read 'em all" is a much better motto to have had, than "gotta catch 'em all" is as a commercial jingle to have been had by... If you get my meaning
@I decide your pronouns, not you. "literally" is abused when used as an emphasis word
It really means "as per intent of the writer" and is kind of an intent to illegitimately invoke law
Is this what you mean? Are we 'on the same page?'
(O bon Chevalier avec in nom questionnable!)
I’m 50 now and remember these fondly. They were fought over when I was in elementary school. I’m tempted to go back and revisit them. 😊
Oh, please do! And consider checking out their new ones ;)
I'm 50 as well. There were only 11 published by 1981 and I got them all. And 1982 wasn't a good year, so didn't go looking for more.
I still remember my first Choose Your Own Adventure book. Through the Black Hole by Edward Packard. I remember trying to read through it like a normal book, going from page 1 to page 2, to page 3 and so on. I very quickly realized something was wrong as the flow of the story made no sense. Even between facing pages there was a discontinuity. The page on the left reads like, "Oh, you are boarding the starship, it looks really fancy". And the page on the right suddenly jumped into "There is a major malfunction and you have lost all control". At first I thought it was a misprint, the pages were printed out of order. Then I realized the text at the bottom of the page was important. "If you want to do W, go to page X. If you want to do Y, go to page Z". So I started over and started that, and it was a far more enjoyable read. Before quick saves became a thing in games, I was using the low tech version of that in these books. My finger. When I had to make a choice, I would place my finger between the pages at the last choice I had to make, and move on to the next page. If that involved death, I would "reload" back to the last choice and go for the other(I also did this for success endings in some cases), trying to extend the story as long as possible until I had reached a point where both choices ended the story. Those books were my gateway drug into video games. Now you can choose your own adventure on the Television screen?! What?!
16:06 Fun little tidbit, Nintendo had to put out an ad campaign to request people stop calling all video game consoles a "Nintendo" for this very reason. If all video game consoles became known as a "Nintendo", they would have lost the ability to hold their trademark of the name(even though it was literally the name of the company and not the name of the consoles made by the company, the NES is technically just an Entertainment System made by Nintendo).
Before I clicked "Read more" I thought you were going to say you gave up on it, because it didn't make sense! Because there's always someone that doesn't get something. I don't think I did it at the time, but a few years back got ahold of some of these, and "mapped" them out, using the page numbers to make sure I didn't miss anything.
My favorite ones were the RL Stine "Give Yourself Goosebumps: Reader Beware You Choose The Scare!" Books. I also loved his regular Goosebumps books as well, and both are a big reason I am a horror novelist.
Pretty sure RL Stine actually wrote a couple of early Choose Your Own Adventure books before Goosebumps took off.
Give yourself goosebumps was soo cool because typically you would gain a "weapon" or gimmick in the plot as part of the story. Tick-tock You're Dead gave you the "chronometer". "Deep in the jungle of Doom" gave you Fishman hybrid powers...BUT one of the ending was you turning completely into a fish, so watch out! Fun series!
@@owenturley6214 yep RL Stine wrote some Choose Your Own Adventures under different pseudonyms while he was trying to get Goosebumps going.
@@RatelHBadger really? Which one's?
I've got the first twenty five in that series.
Choose Your Own Adventure books were a key part of my learning to love reading. Seeing the covers in this video makes me want to seek them all out and reread them all over again. Thanks for keeping me young Toy Galaxy. ❤️
WAR WITH THE EVIL POWER MASTER is the most metal title for anything.
They made it into the second co-op board game. It's supposed to be better and more replayable than the first one, House of Danger, but I didn't get it when it came out so am waiting for a re-release.
I loved these. I also really liked the Wizards Warriors and You books where you had to choose between being a Wizard or Warrior and then pick a certain number of weapons or spells. Some of your choices were dependent upon your inventory, so it added an element of strategy.
I also remember reading a couple of the Indiana Jones Find Your Fate series.
So much fun!
I think one I read from the Wizards, Warriors & You books also had simple game mechanics for fighting battles. If I am remembering correctly, it involved coin flipping to determine the outcome of attacks or something.
An inventory in a gamebook sounds fun as it means you had to explore around to find the items, and so the looping or multiple paths to a point matters. However, rolling dice for stats and to defeat monsters or traps can be pretty rough, and is probably why I haven't beaten _Deathtrap Dungeon._ I suppose if you cheat and just keep rolling until you win, then you can make it to the end, but I didn't want to do that.
4:41 As regards law puns the Onion is still reigning champion with "Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On Technicality"
That is awful. And is therefore the perfect pun.
It was the Choose Your Own Adventure books that got me into the Fighting Fantasy books, which I love.
Still have a few of those. My copy of Warlock of Firetop Mountain is pretty worn out lol
Fighting Fantasy first for me. I only found out about "Choose Your Own Adventure" later.
missed my own personal favorite series: Sorcery! By Steve Jackson The series featured a neat spell system that required you to memorize spell names and collect spell components, as well as keeping a notecard with your character's items, to proceed through a several book adventure, that could be played as each adventure separately, or all three in a row with a continuing character
I still have my original set of 4 Sorcery books plus the spellbook on my bookshelves.
Sorcery! was awesome.
I had a massive collection of most if the fighting fantasy books by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, they were great and I remember when I was younger I used to just look through the books and just enjoy the artwork.
Yes!!
The library had only 3 book but never the fourth. I came across Sorcery as game on Appstore, still has format but doesn't require separate dice.
I only had two: You Are A Monster and You Are A Millionaire. I still have them.
I just wish I had more.
Thank you for the upload.
I was a big fan of the "Lone wolf" series. Very similar in format, those kind of game/books were so awesome and helped me to learn to enjoy reading.
Lone wolf was my introduction to the genre.
Oh man, I wish I hadn't sold my Lone Wolf books now.
Lone Wolf books are great!
Joe Dever died a few years ago before being able to finish the 32 book series - the last book he wrote was #29. His son has taken on the task to produce the last 3 books. At time of writing there is just one more to be published.
Still have my collection of Lone Wolf.
In the UK there was a series called Fighting Fantasy that began in 1983 and that's still going today, through reprints and new books. Some of the books even became video games like Deathtrap Dungeon and the Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
I came here to mention this series as well. I was a huge fan of it. I also loved Steve Jackson’s Sorcery series.
Seconded. I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned considering it's fame now and present reinvention via mobile app (although there was a short-lived attempt for iOS from 2011 to 2012). I also share the love SJ's Sorcery series - Ian's books led to more deaths and Steve gave the reader more of a chance (unless you're unprepared for the tower prison in CotK!) but they were no less fun (and only really noticable in hindsight).
I won Warlock of Firetop Mountain, but your stats have to be good to beat one of the monsters. But I couldn't win Deathtrap Dungeon, even mapping out the paths to get some of the jewels.
Loved them as a kid, gave them to my niece a few years ago she loves them so much she takes them to school to show her friends every day.
Most of the CYOA titles from the mid-80's were pretty tame, so I wasn't prepared for "The Horror of High Ridge" by Julius Goodman. The gore & suspense freaked me out, but despite the drastic shift in intensity levels, I loved that book, and read the hell out of it.
The fighting fantasy title House of Hell did the same thing to an unsuspecting kid me.
"Attack of the Mutant Spider Ants" was pretty juicy, too.
@I decide your pronouns, not you. Yeah, I'm shocked that the series editors ever approved it for publication, but I'm glad they did. It's just bizarre that a line of G-rated books for children suddenly decided to take a hard left into R-rated territory. I guess they felt that kids of the 80's could do with some lightly traumatizing imagery, to make us a bit more interesting.
I remember being introduced to goosebumps choose your own adventure books as a kid and having my mine blown. I literally thought it was pioneering reading technology 🤣😂
I still have my copy of The Mystery of Chimney Rock. I liked the dark/scary aspect, instead of the usual no one dying or being locked away in a house forever preteen books.
I loved Wizards, Warriors and You, which were Choose Your Own Adventure type books with a little game play. As the warrior, you could only bring certain weapons with you.
Thankfully now we have "Delight Games" that has been carrying the mantle for a long time.
Some of those were written by some guy named R.L.Stine. Whatever happened to that guy?
Honestly, one of the best things about being a kid at the time.
That, and Saturday morning cartoons!
How old are you?
@@MrKevinEaddy Forty-four.
Awesome video, guys! Thanks so much for taking a chance and choosing this option! I went and looked at my collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books right after watching this vid. Have a few I don't even remember reading. Fun times.
We did a choose your own adventure book for my book club. I died after my first choice
These books helped me learn to read, they changed kids lives, thankyou CYOA.
And now Telltale games makes very popular games using this blueprint
Also, Lone Wolf was a fantastic series because the lore is incredibly deep and coherent. And it's still ongoing, they just published a new one!
I loved these as a child. An avid reader, I devoured every book I could comprehend. These came along and really opened that "theater of the mind".
Same-it turned me on to old time radio which turned me on to classic black and white movies.
It also opened up new genres to explore like based on true stories, mysteries, history, and even light horror/suspense.
Sci-fi and Adventure were already staples of my childhood. 😅
@@neosquirrel That's awesome!!
I LOVE these books and I believe those are what got me reading at all as I was venturing into my teenage years. As a French-Canadian I discovered these books under the collection name 'Livres dont vous êtes le héros" and even if not all series in that collection were appealing to me , I definitely enjoyed the ones I red. Thanks for this walk down memory lane 😀
i loved these books in elementary school! it was this series, Encyclopedia Brown, and the Hardy Boys which i loved the most ! : )
Heck ya!
Dang, that's like my exact reading list as a kid. I admit I also dipped into a few Nancy Drew books.
Encyclopedia brown was a favorite. I loved these books too. I'll admit I often cheated and went back to get a better ending.
@@dbel1980 the spookiest ending was in a book about space travel , ended with an illustration of a skeleton in an astronaut suit, i quickly turned back and choose a different path : )
wish i remembered what that choose your own adventure was
Oh man encyclopedia brown! Remember book it from pizza hut?
Loved them! I think they may have even sparked my lifelong love of reading in general. I even remember graduating to a series called "Way Of The Tiger" about being a ninja, if anyone remembers those - they were awesome too!
Yep, I remember them. You played a guy called Avenger. They released a couple of new ones a few years ago. A prequel, and a finale - the series having been left on a cliffhanger since the late 80s!
@@bentilbury2002 wow I can't remember the cliffhanger but I do remember keeping my thumb in the pages in case I made a wrong decision and had to go back and choose another path lol
the martial arts panels inside the cover were the best
used Iron Fist Punch a lot;
never pulled off a Teeth of the Tiger tho
When I was watching....well playing...whichever...Bandersnatch on Netflix with my son at one moment I said to him: "We have no choice here, sometime we go to dead ends or dull things and have to chose again, this is an illusion of choice, we go where they want us to go". At this moment the main character says "They think they have a choice, but they only have the choices I give to them" (or something). In two nights we navigated every branch of the story but we never felt that we really were at the driver's seat.
I watched that a few years ago when I had Netflix, and felt the same. Even though it seemed you had choices in the story, I think it was either failure to restart, or go through their path.
I remember the "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" computer game, and I think it would have been a good one to turn into an interactive movie.
@@sandal_thong8631 In fact Netflix made one interactive adventure of Carmen Sandiego based on their series.
@@sandal_thong8631 This also remembers me of Arkham City the most underwhelming game I ever played: the same problem.
I loved CYOA books. I still have my books, about 60 of the CYOA brand (1 thru 60) and 40 of various other brands mentioned. In fact, 3 years ago I had a company scan them into pdf documents where the choose section is a link to the page in the document. Thank you for this episode! It brought me a smile.
The series was what got me into a life-long love of reading and role-playing games. I had no idea the concept of game books was so much older though! Neat! The TSR ones were some of my favorites. A lot you can say about these books. Thanks for the wonderful video. :)
I remember these books fondly. I couldn't get enough of them and looked forward to each new book coming to our library.
I had a huge collection of these books back in the 80's. This and The Hardy Boys were what made me love reading.
I had loads of the Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone series of books in the 80's. I didn't go further afield as there was more than enough of them. We even adapted Warlock to a board game, which led to Middle Earth Role Playing shortly after.
I also recall reading some of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew stories but here in the UK, the big equivalents were The Famous Five and The Secret Seven. I had a full set of Famous Five books and they were what got me hooked on reading.
Got stuck in an infinite loop during one where you had to survive the Civil War.
Also, there was one where you were a squire/page to a knight. In one scenario if you got caught you died by literally getting turned into a candle. 25 years later and I still remember the illustration of you hanging over the wax quite vividly.
How about The Way of the Tiger series? They were choose your own adventure AND RPG…where you were a ninja.
Great series. Those two writers started building their world in a couple of Fighting Fantasy books first. Way of the Samurai and I think Talisman of Death.
I "CHOOSE" to watch this...
Turn to page 42...
You died. 👎🏻😟
My kids read them. As they got older they also got ALL the other game books. Good stuff.
Nice choice to cover! I used to enjoy reading these books. I only remember "Your code name is Jonah" ; don't pick calling yourself "Whitecap" because you will get killed. Today, many video games have that "choose your own adventure" feel based on choices you make gives you different outcomes.
_Your Code Name is Jonah_ was the one that was most confusing to me. It has something to do with whales disappearing to an underground cavern. I read it again a few years ago, but your efforts don't seem to matter as the leadership sorts out the problem off-page. _The Lost Jewels of Nabooti_ doesn't seem to make much sense either as in one ending they've been in your pocket all along?
We went nuts for these books when they first came out (I'm that old). The campaign to get them into public school libraries worked extremely well. Anytime these books were back on the shelves, they were gone the next day.
I remember enjoying the Mario books, you even had to keep track of how many coins you collected. My favourite though was Fighting Fantasy's Robot Commando. I mean, it was a choose your own adventure book about giant robots and dinosaurs, what wasn't to like?
I also remember reading an expanded universe Star Wars one where you went up against Boba Fett. I forget the name of the character you played, I think it began with an H.
I miss my Flown the Koopa book. I loved adding up the coins at the end LOL :P
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the cover art on Robot Commando. I never finished the story though. I think I ended up going in circles.
Han solo?
I had a few of the fighting fantasy books those were fun . Solo DND or starfrontiers adventures.
I still have my home made paper map tucked into my copy of Deathtrap Dungeon... :)
Never mapped Robot Commando, but I liked switching between robots and getting different abilities
When I was a kid, one of my most prized possessions was a bookshelf containing books 1 - 102. I recently found the choose your own adventure board game and played it with my my two kids 12 and 13 and had a great time.
One of my favorite D&D characters I've used for over 20 years was inspired by those books.
Had a bunch of these in the early 80's. My favorite ones were the ones that had slight RPG elements in them. What's interesting is that elements of these still exist today,just in other forms. Board games like Gloomhaven,and even more,Sword And Sorcery use chose your own adventure aspects in their gameplay. It's an interesting way to make board games different and give them replayability.
The same idea lives in video games like "Heavy Rain" or "Detroit Become Human"
@@VespoLiveGaming True, although those aren't the first games to do that. I tend to think of those games as more advanced Dragon's Lair games but they do have Choose Your Own Adventure aspects to them.
@@kellinwinslow1988 Yeah, they didn't showcase _Dragon's Lair_ properly in _Stranger Things._ In reality it's a memorization game with a couple mirror rooms to throw you off where left is right and right is left. They should have had some notes and played really deadpan saying, "right, left, up, down, fire button" in unison then get kicked out for spending 15 minutes on one quarter.