The Rise & Fall & Rise of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

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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[JonnyInfinite]

"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

[mondomacabromajor]

When a Dungeons and Dragons player was home alone in the 80's a 'choose your own adventure' book was the best companion!

[iktslfu]

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!

[holdencaulfield]

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!

[timothybrandriff]

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.

[MetalJesusRocks]

I loved this series as a kid and I still have several of my original books. Many great memories there…

[jschap]

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.

[frankb]

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."

[francispoverello]

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.

[koolandblue]

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."

[QuakerPop]

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....

[XimaWarriorPrincess]

I am 47. One of my favorites in this series was Inside UFO 54-40. I was today years old when I learned that there was, in fact, NO WAY to reach the “good ending”. Decades of therapy answered in this one question 😂😂😂

[TimHunold]

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.

[TimothyHuangSongs]

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.

[AJBernard]

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.

[Klingon]

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.

[LamarrWilson]

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. 🙏🏾👍🏾

[privatename]

38 endings, 37 of which led to horrible death. Great, fun reading.

[kratze]

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.

[joypadlad]

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.