Choose Your Own Adventure
23 comments
·September 22, 2025Nevermark
bobotowned
that's terrible, a low level read would've recovered it. I hope the story ended up well for you anyway
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freejoe76
In 2022 the New Yorker wrote up the CYOA franchise, early history and later existence, in a story that is a choose your own adventure itself: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-a...
hyperman1
As this is a case of perfect timing, I'd like to enlist your help: My 8 year old son loves these right now, we speak dutch (Nederlands) at home. Do you have suggestions? Are the old Choose your own adventures available translated? Thanks
I already have a few from the library - one title for each series:
* Marcel Groenewege: Schaduwkraai
* Jack Heath - 300 minuten
* Tim Collins - Verraders in de ruimte
* Dustin Brady, Het geheim van spookeiland.
bobotowned
if you dont get an answer, well, with all the page flipping and dictionary work already required, adding google lens on top of the process should not be a huge deal. these books basically taught me research skills without me even knowing. it's valuable to learn to ingest information in other languages and we can do so today in a way we could not do 40 years ago.
JKCalhoun
I've begun a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story that's more a philosophical argument (or art?). There are a lot of paths through the story but they all converge to the same ending.
It's something I have believed and have especially reflected on when my mother died a couple years ago. I have wondered for some time whether she could have been happier had "x" happened instead of "y".
She had such a bad childhood that I contemplated what it would be like to clone her and raised her as my daughter. How different might her life be if she had a healthy, happy family.
But I keep coming to the conclusion that she was an inherently unhappy person and, that while plenty of life-events may have made things worse for her, in the end I think perhaps she was "fated" to be unhappy after all.
So the idea was a "Choose your own adventure" where you more or less end up in the same place regardless. Maybe a bit wealthier, maybe with 2 instead of 3 kids — but the fundamentals were already "cast".
(And anyway, upon further reflection I came to see how much my oldest daughter is more or less my mom. We raised her as best we can and yet shades of my mom's "genetics" are clearly there.)
Nevermark
The plain reading of quantum field theory, is that we don't always end in the same place, but that we get to go down all the paths.
I believe that is true, both in the technical physical sense, and as having a solid implication for the experience of existence.
That was the best thing about those books. We got to go down all the paths. Have all those lives.
amarant
The old nature vs nurture! I'm also curious about this and I have a fairly good chance at gaining some anecdotal insight!
A family member who I'm very close with was adopted from South America. He doesn't speak Spanish, but had managed to find his biological family. He wants to visit them sometime, and had asked me to come along as a translator.
Will be interesting to see how similar he is from his biological siblings, in terms of personality. I've gotten the impression his biological family is quite poor, and he was raised in one of the richest countries in the world. Cultures are very different too, Scandinavia Vs south America.
If nurture matters at all, he'll be different from his biological siblings. If not, we should be able to isolate a "awesome bro-dude" gene from his biological family's DNA.
Wouldn't that be cool?
growingkittens
When I was a child, my mother told me that it was like I "wanted to be miserable."
I didn't want to be miserable - I was autistic, ADHD, and brain damaged, but undiagnosed on all counts.
patcon
Thanks to both of you -- parent and grandparent posters -- for the very honest posts. The world is complex, and I'm grateful whenever people help me to see a new edge of that.
vunderba
I used to love these books as a kid. I got really proficient at using multiple fingers to manage all my "Save States" while I was going through the adventure.
As an adult I spent a lot of time thinking about how I seem to have the same rough success ratio at making life decisions as I did when I was a child reading choose-your-own-adventure books.
dooglius
I would always make the bad decisions (i.e. the ones that killed the character and ended the path) right away so that I wouldn't have to use as many fingers
xnx
The ending the sticks with me the most is Inside UFO 54-40. There's a specific ending you cannot reach by following the instructions. You have to "hack" the book and turn to the page directly.
dekhn
Ah, I was going to post asking if anybody else read all the pages looking for unreferenced endings.
the_af
That was intentional, at least.
What surprised me was that there were actual bugs in some of the books. For example, some editions of "Vampire Express" have a typo that leads you to the wrong page, breaking some paths of the adventure.
technothrasher
I adored these books when I was a kid, and a few of us friends re-invented them in college in the 1990's as email chains. You'd write a few introductory paragraphs and a choice, and then email it to a few friends. You'd then end up writing multiple paths as you went, depending upon what your friends chose. The first one I wrote started as just a scruffy little dog who escaped his backyard. He ended up going on all kinds of wild alternate adventures, and did, unfortunately, end up dying quite a few times.
Nevermark
One of my first experiences with ChatGPT was seeing how well it could dungeon master.
I still have the script, it was quite incredible, for a short while. A record of my wonder upon first encountering language models.
The golden days of open ended coherent consistent real-time dungeon mastering/world building are in the not too distant future.
grej
I absolutely adored these books as a kid! Spend every dime of bookfair money on them every year and used to beg my parents to take me to the library to check out others.
I love the framing of them in this article as the gateway drug to interactive entertainment.
lukasmark744
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the_af
> They liked to be told a bedtime story, but Packard was usually so exhausted that he had trouble coming up with one. So, he slyly enlisted his daughters’ help with the creative process. He would feed them a little bit of a story in which they were the stars, then ask them what they wanted to do next. Their answers would jog his tired imagination, and he would be off and running once again.
This is interesting because, without knowing this was the birth of CYOA, I actually arrived at this solution with my daughter. Actually, even better: it was her idea. Bedtime stories are better if she's an active participant and the main character of the story, with me controlling all NPCs. It can be exhausting: re-telling a story can be done on autopilot (the only risk is falling asleep) but creating an adventure on the fly is both very rewarding and extremely energy draining.
Boy, will we have a lot of fun when she's a bit older and I introduce her to roleplaying games!
ricokatayama
The mystery of the Highland Crest is one of my favorite books ever! It gave me another perspective on the medium when I was younger
bobotowned
here's the PDF of the cave, you can download it https://pubhtml5.com/obber/cznb/
In ninth grade in the town I grew up in, there were two junior high schools that traded off computers each semester. With a "newsletter" including printed programs.
The first text adventure I encountered was a future friend's multiple choice adventure, starting in a cave, called "The Cave".
With that as inspiration, began years of my own text adventures, from multiple-choice to broad grammars and vocabularies. "Command English" is what I called my grammar. The first starting at the entrance of a cave. Later versions, almost always involving caves. And mazes.
In high school I worked on a massive adventure called "The Wanderer", with all of my innovations. With an important cave that had to be rapelled down to from a cliff edge. Until the day I was working on it after school, and saved my latest version to disk before going home. At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.
My enthusiasm for creating adventures suffered a fatal blow.