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Choose Your Own Adventure Books Return
KermodeBear writes "Eight of the original 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books are to be republished this summer. From the Article: 'First published in 1979, the books let readers remix their own stories - and face the consequences. [...] the original titles return to bookstores, revamped with 21st-century references (cell phones!).'" For me, it's all about 1987's Space Vampire , by series originator Edward Packard. "Do you eject the vampire through the airlock?"
Maybe BushCo. can use one of these to find out the best way to end this silly war.
Napalm is nature's toothpaste
I remember reading these books... Unfortunately, I was always so unlucky with my choices I ended up not getting any good endings.
There's last year's "Escape from Fire Island": "If you ask the lifeguard to bring you to the sheriff's office, turn to page 108. If you ask the lifeguard to warn everyone at the night club, turn to page 32. If you ask the lifeguard if he'd like to work out sometime, turn to page 140."
I always prefered the "Fighting Fantasy" series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston. It was like D&D for people without friends!
(...or, in my case, D&D for when the group is busy going stupid things like "learning"...)
Every time I looked at Hypercard -- and HTML -- I thought "gosh, what an unnecessarily complicated Choose Your Own Adventure Book!"
"If you look at hard core porn, turn to page 12.
If you post to Slashdot, turn to page 14."
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Choose Your Own Adventure books introduced me to the concept of memory limitations in early computers.
:) I ended up "porting" my attempts to the C64, but never bothered finishing after realizing how boring that much typing really was :)
Back when I was single-digit aged, I thought it would be pretty cool to "program" a CYOA book into our Vic20. A buttload of print statements, with function keys acting as the choices at the end of a section.
Needless to say, when you get your first "?Out of Memory" error, just when entering in a program, you start thinking hard about just how this computer is storing things. Pretty much started my obsession with computer architecture at a very low level.
Even with only a few dozen pages of large print text, these books were well over 3500 characters
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Isn't that pretty much what RPG console games are now? A series of canned responses to a limited choice of options, but with some combat graphics thrown in?
These were fun when I was a kid, but that was before computer games really took off. I don't see the young whipper-snappers these days being excited by a book with simple either/or choices.
Still if the came up with a good story that was interesting and compelling, (I seem to remember the plot of these things being pretty weak, even as a kid) I don't see why they wouldn't be successful.
Actually having an interesting and compelling story could sell a few console rpg's too, or movies, or tv shows, etc. etc. It all comes back to that in the end, not the gimmick.
If yes is wrong, I don't want to be right.
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To read the article on "Choose Your Own Adventure Books" turn to page 117.
[Page 117]
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
You have died.
The End
Those were the days! Tiny oil eating shrimp that grew larger than a house, did you find all the possible endings?
Maybe those books lead me into computers... Taught us loops and branching as kids, no wonder I used GOTOs for so long.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Naaah. What a silly idea. It'll never take.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I used to read these alot, and bookmark all the big choices, so I could go back when I didnt like what happened, or maybe was just to curious of what might happen if I chose a certain path.
After about 10 bookmarks its gets out of hand!
I do think these kind of books help kids think think about the way a simple pc program works.
I don't need this, I've got a Master's Degree in folklore and mythology!
My best friend back then had a few of those books. I had no idea they were something new back then!
-Rich
The beta of Inform 7 (A.k.a Natural Language Inform) has already had two extensions written to write Choose-your-own-adventure type games.
/. hasn't had a story up on the beta yet: http://www.inform-fiction.org/ has the IDE for Windows and Mac OSX. There's an alpha Linux IDE in progress (currently using the Windows compiler through Wine, although a native I7 compiler should be out RSN) over at http://thewhitelion.org/inform7 .. It was down earlier today. Linking to it here probably won't help, huh?
There's the simpler one from Emily Short: http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/CYOA.txt
And a more powerful, but more complex one from Mark Tillford: http://www.glpics.com/ralphmerridew/Simple%20CYOA
Inform 7 is a pretty nifty language, and I'm surprised
There's also an overview of Inform 7 language and what it gets you over at http://www.brasslantern.org/
It'd be easy to port these things over to the Z Machine Infocom engine.
I've always been a bigger fan of the Long Wolf series myself, but CYOA books were what got me into reading in the first place. I wonder how they'll fare in the face of the almighty Playstation, however. Maybe they could stand to have some technical sprucing up as well -- I could see these being done as cell phone games, for instance.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Game:Page_-1
I always thought it was really entertaining (and funny) to read them as if they were a normal book. The confusion that ensues if you read it out loud was always hilarious, especially if "you" die, but then are fine on the next page. This was especially amusing with the Goosebumps CYOA books.
About halfway through, though, it gets boring because you know all the storylines.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
...is it's the *only* genre of books I can think of told in Second Person.
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Check out Demian's gamebook site http://www.gamebooks.org/ and the pdf scans at the Home of the Underdogs http://www.the-underdogs.info/gamebook.php if you're feeling nostalgic.
I remember getting into the Lone Wolf series as a kid. The first few books were a good time, but after a while I got bored with it and started cheating by faking my stats and doing "save games" often and seeing what each path would lead to before I picked one. I think there were a total of almost 30 books in the series, I definitely didn't make it that far and lost interest.
While I'm sure there's a "warm fuzzy" factor with bring back CYOA books, in the end isn't this a dead concept? Are people still going to be interested with having only a handful of choices in these books where there are newer forms of interactive media (video games) out these days that are drastically more open ended? What if I don't like choice A, B, and C and want to go for choice R, stab the mofo in the eye with my dagger, steal everything he owns and forget about the whole quest?
'Lone' Wolf, that is. Accursed spell-check, you've foiled me for the last time!
I didn't DL the game from here http://www.adom.de/ but it looks like the official site. I got it from dosgames.com. Anywyz... choose your own adventure! It's better than a book because at my job it looks like I'm working instead of reading a book.
Pg. 101
You did not make a choice, or follow any direction, but now, somehow, your are descending from the Internet - approaching a great, glistening website. It is Slashdot - the website of paradise.
"Welcome!" says the man. "My name is Cmdr Taco. You have reached the forum of joy and beauty. All our treasures are yours to share with us. All of us here are your friends forever."
THE END
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
The once rich variations on folk stories have been taken hostage by the large media corporations. In high school a group of us got together to watch silent movies. From the earliest silent movies to come out of Hollywood there were a series of films playing of a repeating theme:
Villian wants to run rail line through the land of kindly, hard working farmer. Farmer refuses. Villian buys up farmers mortgage and lecherously pursues farmer's virtuous daughter. Villian relentlessly harasses farmer, turning finally to murder, killing farmer and taking virtuous daughter hostage. Villian demands daughter sign over deed to land. Daughter refuses. Villian ties daughter to railway tracks, laughing (silently) while twirlling waxed handlebar moustache,waiting for train to run over our heroine. Enter the hero, (who may or may not have been introduced earlier). Just as the train rounds the bend and bears down on our fair maiden the hero swoops in to free heroine. Villian may now die run over by train as he struggles against the heroes efforts to free maiden.
Sorry for the long story line without an intermission, but I think the story line, so old and worn, could easily be done up today with the latest special effects and pretty much sum up what Hollywood has added to society.
There are copious collections of folk tales from every territory of every founding tribe in all the nations of the world. As a child I had a shelf full of folk tales from europe that were each bound in different colors, the different color of each book denoted a differnt collection of folk tales.
If the collections of folk tales from all over the world were gathered and put on the web then there would be a deluge of prior art that would act as a source of storytelling free of the cheap ripoffs the media corporations foist upon us as their art. Such collections would allow for the exchange of similarities and uniqueness of the different peoples. The same idea applies to music. So much of the music, especially classical, that is recorded and copyrighted is just an interpretation by the composer of folk music. Bringing the folk music and story corpus online would show the mega media corporations as resellers of folk themes and would galvanize the true owners of much music and many stories, the peoples of the world, against superficial caims of ownership.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I prefer the Something Awful Choose your own Adventure books.
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2777
A recent one I picked up was Carlton Mellick III's Ocean of Lard which really had the best opening line I had ever read in a CYOA book:
You shouldn't have molested all those children...
Seriously, I'm glad people are remembering these books enough to reprint the old ones in addition to writing total mockeries of them.
If reading about this has started you jonesin' for the good ol' days, you can always play interactive fiction.
It's like Zork, except literary. I heartily recommend anything by Adam Cadre, especially Photopia (actually made me cry - it's an amazing piece of art) and Shrapnel.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I absolutely hated Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was in junior high. Instead of spending 200-300 pages on plot and character development, these books were basically just a serious of 4-page stories. Even if you did find a longer path through the book there was just no substance there to keep your attention. Besides, I ran out of fingers trying to mark all my places so I could go back whenever I died. Basically the books had all the plot and storyline of a first-person shooter game without any of the graphics or weapons.
I remember reading these books as a kid and would always have a stack of Post-Its (my form of bookmarks) because if I chose a bad path, I can always go back. In order to do that, I had to number these Post-Its. As you can imagine, sometimes I had 30+ Post-Its scattered through out the book.
HD Trailers
As I submitted my last comment, I remembered that during this time when the choose your own adventure books were all the rage, I was showed a bunch of very well-written books from a Canadian author named Gordan Korman. These books are targeted to teenagers mainly, and are at a much more advanced reading level than the choose your own adventure books. But kids are a lot smarter than they look and they do take well to intelligent, well-written fiction. Korman's books include a number of series aimed at, I'd say 12 year olds, called the McDonald Hall series, and then a bunch of very good books aimed at slightly older teenagers including "Losing Joe's Place," "A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag," "Don't Care High," "No Coins Please," and so forth. Great books. I also remember reading "Interstellar Pig" by William Sleater. Around that time I was also introduced to a great collection of science fiction short stories by various famous authors, edited by Asimov. I can't remember the title of this book, but it has some great thinker stories in it.
In short there are *lots* of good books out there that are intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining and won't insult kids' intelligence. Although perhaps the age of shoot-em-up games and FPS have ruined kids for that kind of thing. So maybe CYOA's 10-page stories will be well-received.
I know someone else out there besides me had to find the ending that they wanted and then tried to read it backwards to get to that ending.
You come across a comment that seems to be mysteriously both grammatically correct and adds additional information to the discussion
If you mod the comment +1, insightful, turn to page 15
If you suspect the comment of Karma Whoring, mod it -1, overrated, and turn to page 29
If you were too young to remember CYOA books and the format of this comment confuses you, rate it -1, Offtopic, and turn to page 39.
If you remember checking each possible result of a decision fork in a CYOA book, check pages 15, 29, and 39, and mod this comment +1, insightful.
I'm not sure which was first (too lazy to look it up), but I remember reading both of them in 1st or 3rd grade. CYOA books always seemed somewhat -- I don't know -- slim to me. Not much there beyond the gimick, and often times it was only a few pages between "choices". Twistaplot books seemed to have more narrative substance there, longer periods that allowed for the choices you made to develop in the plot before being forced into another one page branch.
But perhaps that's just time making things all fuzzy... Amazon used books to the rescue?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Not to be confused with "Choose Your Own Destiny" books.
You will die on page 98.
If you would like to get it over with, turn to page 98.
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
Would author- and artist-approved scanning, proofreading, and HTMLization (to say nothing of an excellent Javascript app that can handle inventory management, skill advancement, and combat) meet your definition of technical sprucing?
Granted, Project Aon is the first link at the bottom of the above-cited Wikipedia article -- but just in case, I thought I'd point it out. I was a huge fan of the series when I was younger, and as such it's good to see the books preserved so well.
I think it was "The Third Planet from Altair" (find the complete list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adven ture where there was one ending where you ended up on some utopian planet. The thing was there was no choice that actually got you to that page.
I am still haunted by that book. It was my introduction to the disillusionments of the universe.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
The Dr. Who adventure books were my fav. Exterminate.. Exterminate!!
The issue I always had with the CYOA books was that the plots often would split and then merge back to the original storyline. Often times I'd find myself taking certain death choices simply to avoid a storyline I had just read 1 hour earlier.
Also, I don't remember which book, but I found myself in an infinite loop.
CYOA books are fine as long as it branches more like a tree and less like a Roman royal family tree. Think Binary Tree and not a Graph.
Have any of you ever heard of a text adventure game similar to Zork called "Smirk". Smirk was made for the Apple IIe but thats all I know about it.
The Choose Your Own Adventure concept has been around in electronic form for quite a while in Japan, although less common in the Western world. Essentially, they're novels with pictures, sound, the occasional cutscene, and a few choices here and there. Contrary to what might perhaps be a flourishing stereotype, not all of these games are sexually explicit. Games on consoles especially are almost always clean. Hirameki is one company that is localizing translated PC visual novels for the English speaking market.
I read some of these books when I was 6 years old. It was my formal introduction to the English language. I managed to understand about 40% of the words, however, since the stories were so compelling to me as a child I, armed myself with a dictionary and devoured those books.
Those books were not great pieces of literature, they were cheesy. They were pulp fiction. However, they were empowering and fascinating. They marked the beginning of an enduring love of reading.
It makes me happy to know that these books are making a comeback. I hope that they sell well. When the first one comes out I'll get a copy for my nephews. Perhaps a non multiple choice adventure story will motivate them to read more in the future.
I read them straight through, cover to cover, it would jump all over the place, on one page you'd be climbing a wall and find a bag in a crevice, then it'd ask you if you wanted to check through the bag or leave it where it was and on the next page you'd be drowning, and at the end it'd say you're dead, but then on the next page you're being chased by a lion.
Also, I didn't understand why they were called "choose your own adventure", yeah, I kept telling it what I wanted to do, but the next page never corresponded with what I told it.
"Do you eject the Cylon through the airlock?"
Awesome. I remember reading those back in middle school but I must admit - I did cheat sometimes by finding the ending I wanted and going backwards O_o.
tried to search for it but nothing came up.
I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books, and some of the knockoffs weren't bad either. Had a go at writing one once. Of course, now there's MediaWiki which makes it easy to create a computer-based one.
I was writing "VERB NOUN" text adventures in BBC BASIC since long ago. I had another go recently; this time in perl and using a database for the room and object descriptions. Then I got distracted and tried to make it multi-player. Ended up learning more about select(2) than it's good for a mere mortal to know.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There's also a new series of Choose Your Own Adventure interactive DVDs coming out soon.
I must get them clean!!!!
"the books let readers remix their own stories"
Can we please stop using unnecessary buzzwords and buzzimplementations-of-words in article descriptions?
Art--of which literature is a vital member--as a given medium rarely dies completely. One could use the same argument to claim that radio is a dead concept. After all, doesn't television provide everything that radio does? Aren't 8-bit Nintendo games dead (the answer is no)? While I do believe that the concept of choose your own adventure is not as powerful as it once was before video games, I do believe that they have a niche. I strongly doubt that we will ever come up with a way to make reading books obsolete. There is something irreplaceable about reading a book. I think that many people need no explanation of this phenomenon.
I loved the Lone Wolf books. I periodically pick them up and read one when I am in a particularly nostalgic mood. I loved the cross between D&D and CYOA. What a brilliant masterpiece they were. Fortunately, in the vein of open source software, the author, Joe Dever, has graciously given the rights for the electronic distribution of his books free of charge by Project Aon.
Why are they rewriting history?
:-)
:-(
Why can't they learn from the mistakes of George Lucas? You don't mess with a classic. Kids today don't need cell phones written into their stories to make them relevant. What next? Rewriting "Your Code Name is Jonah" with Bin Laden as the enemy instead of the Soviets?
Other notables:
#9: Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey. A dozen choices on page 101. Possibly a record for the series?
#62: Sugarcane Island. The *first* CYOA by Edward Packard, it wasn't published until much later. Don't believe me? Read the inside note. It was first written in 1969 and published in 1976 by Vermont Crossroads Press. Predates The Cave of Time.
#39: Supercomputer. You get a new computer with an AI. Geek heaven for a kid in the mid '80s.
I'll spare the list of personal favorites. Most of them before #70 are utterly imaginative and captivating. Some were bound in hardcover for libraries. But they are hard to find now that local libraries have been dumping them in local book sales.
I read these books when I was little as well. It was my obsession to avert disaster, and so I would quietly perform depth first search on the book until I found the path that led me to the best ending! I never got lost in the hall of mirrors or let my jerk friend take all the money we accidentally found in the bushes. Victory was always mine, mwahahaha!
I for one welcome our old literary overlords back.
Frog blast the vent core.
These books ruled. My two favorites (that I remember) were "Lair of the Lich" and "The Badlands of Hark"
Speaking of, I once had what I thought was a pretty good idea: A choose your own adventure meme for blogs. I'm not really sure how many slashdotters are also bloggers, but for those of you who are, let me know what you think. Here's the rules:
RULES
1. Post a comment to the blog post where you found this meme so that that blog owner can add a link to your post. In the comment describe what choice your post takes.
2. Repost these rules at the top of the post
3. Post a link at the top of your part of the story to the blog you got the meme from so people can read what has happened previously in the story.
4. Add your portion of the story. It can be open ended, and therefore a continuation, or it can be an ending. Feel free to write anything you want, and feel free to add pictures to spice it up, introduce a different protagonist, change the very setting of the story, etc.
5. If your portion of the story is open ended then add links within your portion or at the end to blogs that are continuing the story (ie link to people that comment on your post, see rule 1).
I started my own story on my blog, linked above.
Unfortunately the meme proved to be a flop, but perhaps it was just that the people who read my blog aren't very creative. If any of you slashdotters wish to continue my meme, or start your own story, let me know and I'll link to it. I think it has potential as a good way to get one's creative juices flowing, and has a big comedy upside.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many of the chose your own adventure books are here as abandonware
http://www.the-underdogs.info/gamebook.php
and a few joe dever lone wolf stuff here
http://www.projectaon.org/
And yes I used to read ahead and see which way was interesting.
RPGs usually present you with a series of linear game choices. You can either accept, or refuse a quest/mission/whatever series. The steps along the series are almost always the same with no choices offered except maybe choosing the reward of a wand or sword at the end.
With choose your own adventure, the paths that you take close other paths, and you are offered two or three or more choices on about every other page. Some choices lead to a happy endings, some to a sad endings, with varying story lengths among them.
I'd realy like to recommend the game Sryth (www.sryth.com)
It is an online role-playing game, in the same vein as the gamebooks mentioned in the topic.
There is a huge amount of free content, and subscriptions are just $20 a year. New content is continuosly being added. (Most of it for subscibers)
If you want some more information about the game, check out the wiki at sryth.pbwiki.com
(Disclaimer: I am a beta-tester for the game)
I figure this is on topic since we're talking about CYOA, but here's some of the more "bastard" choose your own adventure stories online. New Orleans World Trade Center
I can't believe nobody posted these already.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
It was all about "Third Planet from Altair," what with the co*spoiler*ke*spoiler*ca*spoiler*n on the last page. Sure, it's predictable now, but it blows your mind when you're four!
...
That's not one of the ones coming out again... is it?
Choose your own adventure was ok, but what I really liked was the Avenger series - Avenger , Usurper etc. from the The Way Of The Tiger series. This was based on Ninjas and martial Arts, and mixed the whole idea of choosing your path with dice based combat against opponents. That added a whole other dimension to this style of book that totally thrilled me as a kid. It seems these books were republished in 1998. I rank these as head and shoulders above other similar Choose Your Own Adventure style books...although..thinking about it there was yet another set which involved dice combat, set in a traditional Fantasy realm. I seem to recall a grid of some sort...gah. Can't remember the name. I think there were random numbers ont he bottom of the pages to assist you if you didn't have a dice available.
-Gel214th
I saw Ian Livingstone talk at Hay Literary festival on Wednesday - he said that the original Fighting Fantasy series is also being republished, together with one which never saw the light of day. The talk had an interesting subject, "Geek to Chic", supposedly about how computer games are now extremely fashionable rather than the province of shy geeks. However, it was more interesting to hear his life story, as he developed from geeky, bearded entrepreneur selling Dungeons and Dragons from the back of a van, to helping in the creation of Lara Croft.
Hey!!! Page 12 leads to page 13, which leads to page 14. Hold on, let me close these porn sites so that I can properly post on Slashdot...
I spent what felt like years trying to find the path to the 'Best single ending' in that book. I tried to map out every option so I could find the legitimate path.
Never did, it was very disappointing.
Inside UFO 54-40 was one of the few CYOA books that had 'a best ending', the others were all pretty open ended in the first series.
There were also the RPG CYOA style books where you had to write in the books, maintain hit points etc. Those were -incredible-.
If you want to read what IMHO is a really interesting interactive book for grown-ups, try:
Combat Team: The Captains' War - An Interactive Exercise in Company Level Command in Battle
by John F. Antal (and two others in the same series by the same guy).
Vastly more effective dramatically than any other interactive book I've read, because it tries to simulate a real-world situation, not tell a story.
Antal is (or was) in the US Army. What he does with his books is try to simulate an actual battle, with a combination of choices you have to make and dumb luck (done via dice throws). If you get blown to pieces (which you often do), you think "hmm, well that's war", and try again. And obviously from doing thousands of excercises, Antal has a huge range of good choice-and-consequence sets up his sleeve. (I'm not trying to comment on the politics/ethics of these books, just saying they work dramatically).
By contrast, most choose your own adventure books that I have read are in a slightly conflicted position: trying to tell a traditional story, but one that can go in a huge number of ways. Of course this is tricky, because stories told round the camp fire since time immemorial may have been customised to their listeners - but they rarely involve the listeners making choices, because that tends to break suspension of disbelief. This is of course amplified with a medium where you can actually see the other paths of the story on paper as with books.
Still, have got lots of great leads from these posts, so maybe will find some stories to prove me wrong. Need something to distract me from the news as Rumsfeld et al turn the pages of their own real-life interactive army adventure book and find - damn it! - they can't turn back to the last choice point and try again...
....the adventure CHOOSES YOU!!
If you want Calculon to race to the laser gun battle in his hover-Ferrari, press 1.
...
...
If you want Calculon to doublecheck his paperwork, press 2.
1) Violent Lasergun Battle
2) Tedious Paperwork
Enter now.
- You have pressed 2.
- No I didn't!
- I'm almost positive you did.
- Add in the carryover from form 16A, then deduct line 2B.
The Third Planet from Altair
Edward Packard seems to have been the best writer of the series. The Cave of Time books were good too. It's nice to see the series being kept alive for a new generation of children.
Bruce
First of all, I always loved those books when I was growing up, and I still have a few. But I have to say, I preferred the "Which Way" books over "Choose Your Own Adventure," and I have one "Forgotten Forest" book ("The Master of Mazes" by Carol Gaskin) which blows them all away.
I wonder what would have happened if "Choose Your Own Adventure" would have created patents on that type of book, and the others never would have had a chance. I guess the world is a different place today.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
"You have been trapped in an infinite While Loop. Please turn to page 60 and then back again, forever. HAHAHAHA"
Those books were so stupid. They didn't make any sense! First you would be walking through the woods, then you would be on a space ship, then you would be back on earth... They jumped around so much, I never had any idea WHAT the hell was going on! Not to mention all the interspersed "turn to page x" whatever, what the hell did that even mean, anyway?
Oh wait...
I collected as many of these as I could until the late 90's when the stories started feeling cheesier (I was in college then, so maybe they were always cheesy). Edward Packard was one of the best! Anyone else collect these? I have about 30-40 waiting on little ones.
I'm kinda surprised that they're doing these as physical books. Seems like it would be a lot easier, cheaper, and more convenient to do this on the Web. Hypertext is pretty ideal for this sort of thing, and I've seen people do collaborative authoring projects in with choose-your-own-adventure style structure before.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The book was Inside UFO 54-40. You get kidnapped off an airplane by a UFO (seen at co-ordinates 54-40), and have to try to escape.
The foreword to the book had a warning about the ending. All the CYOA had the usual "WARNING: Don't read in order". This one had:*
Of course, most people didn't see the special warning. We were all used to skipping over the newbie "don't read in order" warning.
Inside UFO 54-40 was always my favourite of the series. UFO abduction, telepathic alien kidnappers, secrets of the universe, a hidden ending, and some truly disturbing "deaths". The two that always resonated with me were:
P 40:Miscalculating a jump through a transporation portal, and being sliced in half.
Several endings: Being "discovered" by the ship's computer, and put into cryo sleep for a billion years.
The former because it was, well, shudder. The latter because a) When you're young, trying to think about a billion years is kinda mindblowing, and b) It was the first time I really thought about how stupid cryo sleep was as a punishment. Sure, the world is different when you wake up, but really, what's the big deal? You were asleep. You didn't notice any time go by. You close your eyes, then open them again, and you're free.
FYI: The secret ending is on pages 101-104, complete with a double-paged illustration of Ultima.
* Note: yes, I did pull out my CYOA to make this post. =P
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I was thinking how cool it would be to start a collaborative writing project dedicated to CYOA-like books, and found out someone has already done something exactly like that. It lacks content, but the idea has potential.
Yeah, I seem to recall an illustration that went with the "sliced in half" ending. Kinda disturbing, even if you just catch a glance at it while searching for a different page.
My favorite CYOA was "Hyperspace" by Edward Packard. I don't remember exactly what I liked about it, except that it's possible to run into Dr. Vivaldi, who first appeared in "Third Planet from Altair". She was teh hotness.
They were publishing DIY solo adventures for Tunnels & Trolls in the mid 70's. You had actual combat, and it was a great way to play an RPG when there was no one around to play with.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
A group of people have, with the permission of Joe Dever, started to transcribe the Lone Wolf, World of Lone Wolf, and other CYOA books to make them available online. Take a look at Project Aon. They've gotten through the Kai and Magnakai books as well as some of the Grand Master books.
I preferred the Time Machine series to CYOA. They seemed more detailed and in depth. The one I remember most in the one with the pirates.
For those unaware, the Lone Wolf books are all available for free download now: www.projectaon.org Maybe this is common knowledge now, but I just found out about recently.
I remember these! I would go through and flow chart the page numbers for my decision and the ones I didn't choose. Whenever I hit a bad ending, I would go back to the last branch and try again. It was probably the 'nerdiest' thing I've ever done but it was still pretty cool ^_^
CYOA was nothing compared to FF gamebooks. Better stories, better illustrations, better puzzles. 'Warlock of Firetop Mountain' and
'Deathtrap Dungeon', those were excellent.
Official FF Site
Ah yes, these books were my favorite form of entertainment between the 4th grade or so and the 7th (when I got my C64). There were a few imitations, too, that could be occasionally just as good as the original brand, like twist-a-plot and endless quest. I was a bit surprised they all went out of print, as though there wasn't going to be any kids left to read them or something. Though perhaps that was the case during the early computer era. I wonder why they think there's a market now?
For an immature-yet-adult take on choose your own adventures online, I've always dug BRAD: The Game. Just about the weirdest choose your own adventure one could imagine.
Cheers.
I remember picking up "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" in junior high thinking it was a CYOA book. Both books had similar artwork and were similar in size and it was in the CYOA section of the library.
:)
I got it home and was amazed at how few choices there were, right up to page 20 when I figured out it was a real book, and by then I couldn't stop reading. Then I read the entire series.
A happy mistake.