I CYOA What You Did There

Having been writing this blog for nearly three years now, it is perhaps surprising that this is the first time I've ever written something about the Choose Your Own Adventure series. It was a range that popularised the gamebook genre, to the point that its title is to this day used as a synonym for interactive fiction. Edward Packard, who wrote the first ever title in the series and went on to write nearly a hundred more of them, may very well have invented the idea of the gamebook with Sugarcane Island in 1969 - certainly that book was one of the very first gamebooks ever written. The historical importance of this series cannot be denied. So why has it taken me so long to get round to it?

Well, this series is absolutely fucking massive. There are 184 books in the original series alone, and once you include all the various spin-off series (variously aimed at younger and older readers, intended to be more 'educational' or scarier than the parent series, featuring licensed Disney characters, an Indiana Jones series, a Star Wars series, not to mention the early noughties revival with revised versions of the original books designed to bring them up-to-date) that number swells to well over 300. I devoured adventure gamebooks as a child, and I doubt I got through any more than a small percentage of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

And yet... many of them aren't remarkable by themselves. They generally run to just over 100 sections, there's no game system of any kind (no statistics or inventory to keep track of), and with so many entries in the series - cranked out (largely) monthly for the better part of two decades between 1979 and 1998 - it's hardly surprising that there are a fair few where the story just isn't very interesting, or there is little in the way of any real plot. You can't get anything hugely insightful out of many of the individual entries, yet trying to write a history of the entire series is an impossible task. Perhaps the most memorable feature of the books is the surprisingly gruesome and inventive deaths, and plenty of other people have had a go at archiving the best of those.

So for this post I thought I'd highlight a few of the more notable entries in the series - ones I have fond memories of reading as a child, or are notable for unexpected twists or interesting set-ups.

#9 Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?
Written by Edward Packard
Published February 1981

A surprisingly sound murder mystery (a genre which surprisingly few gamebooks are based on) with absolutely perfect consistency and continuity; different 'bad' endings give you looks at different parts of the bigger picture. All the suspects are surprisingly well-written; I have always been a sucker for any half-decent mystery fiction, and I suspect that at least partly comes from this book.

#12 Inside UFO 54-40
Written by Edward Packard
Published February 1982

I never owned this one, but any book that so blatantly trolls its readers can't be overlooked in a retrospective. The object of the book is to find the perfect planet Ultima, and there is a big two-page spread with an illustration for the successful ending. Except it is impossible to reach that section, as none of the other sections direct you to it. The entire book is an Unwinnable Joke Game (cryptically hinted at in the 'successful' ending, which talks about how you finally worked out how to reach perfection).

Am I unfair to dismiss this as 'trolling'? Is it actually an important piece of social commentary on how we should strive for perfection, but never actually attain it? Probably not.

#27 The Horror of High Ridge
Written by Julius Goodman
Published December 1983

Horror was a fairly frequent theme for this series, and although I nearly went for The Mystery of Chimney Rock as an example of it for this list, High Ridge wins out due to its genuinely effective atmosphere, with real tension and mounting dread in the writing as the player character is left alone in a ghost town (helped by Don Hedin's rather disturbing illustrations and some wonderfully gruesome death scenes). Genuinely one of the best 'scary' gamebooks ever written - I never read any of the Choose Your Own Nightmare spin-off, but it's hard to see how they could have topped this entry from the parent series.

#39 Supercomputer
Written by Edward Packard
Published December 1984

A rare gamebook inspired by contemporary issues, with paths based around talking to the world's superpowers in the name of peace, and the titular computer a look at how such technology was seen at the time the book was written. Gamebooks which give you an insight into the world they were written in such as this are rare.

#46 The Deadly Shadow
Written by Richard Brightfield
Published July 1985

A globetrotting spy thriller involving Russians with many different paths and few successful endings; it earns its place on this list for being one of the more challenging entries in the series and managing to pack in more variety than is usual.

#63 Mystery of the Secret Room
Written by Ellen Kushner
Published December 1986

By far one of the best-written and well-plotted books of the entire range, Mystery of the Secret Room offers genuine wit and humour combined with an interesting, well-developed plot.

#69 Rock and Roll Mystery
Written by Jim Wallace
Published July 1987

An amusing relic of the 1980s that often feels like a novelisation of a Saturday morning cartoon from that era, as the player character is cast as the leader of a rock and roll band who has to solve the mystery of two of your bandmates going missing... and then things get very weird, very quickly, with space aliens and terrorists who specifically hate rock and roll amongst the possible paths. Surrealism and random, inexplicable events were often a part of the series, and whilst many of the books that go for that angle fail, this one just about hangs together and is worthy of representing its sub-genre on this list.

#70 Invaders of the Planet Earth
Written by Richard Brightfield
Published August 1987

An entertaining science fiction tale about the end of civilisation as we know it, featuring aliens that have subjugated the planet and made electricity illegal. Another entry that's well-written without much more to say about it.

#150 Who Are You?
Written by Edward Packard
Published August 1994

That massive skip forward indicates how big some of the gaps in my collection of this series are, but nevertheless Who Are You? - based around the player character waking up with no memory of who they are - has a great premise and sense of mystery.

#185 Escape from the Haunted Warehouse
Written by Anson Montgomery
Published April 2015

This book earns a place on this list for its mythological status as the 'lost' entry in the series; it was apparently meant to be published in the 1990s, but the series was cancelled before it could be printed, much like the Fighting Fantasy book Bloodbones. Much confusion reigned amongst the fandom as to whether or not it had ever actually been released, with claims that several promotional copies were in circulation never verified. When Chooseco revived the series for a new generation in the 2000s, they deliberately played up this status, numbering it as an addition to the original series (their reprints had started back at #1, with a new order for the old books), and the cover proclaiming it to be "From the Lost Archives". The book itself isn't bad at all; the author updated it a bit for the modern audience compared to the original nineties version, and there are a fair few nostalgic references inserted for adults finally getting to read the 'lost' CYOA book.

I think that, intentionally or otherwise, I have done quite a good job of summing up the series with these ten books: there are surprisingly effective horror entries, deeply weird if not off-the-wall insane sets of random events, the odd genre wildcard, genuinely solid pieces of interactive fiction it's hard to say much more about, and then a huge mass of hundreds of stories that aren't particularly remarkable beyond just how many of them there are so it becomes impossible to write anything about them.