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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?"
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.
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
...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