Inside UFO 54-40

In February 1982, the twelfth Choose Your Own Adventure book, Inside UFO 54-40, was unleashed upon preteens all over the world. Written by Edward Packard, who not only created the CYOA range but arguably the entire genre of interactive fiction (with the originally standalone book Sugarcane Island, written in 1969 but not published until 1976, and later subsumed into the CYOA range as #62 in the series), the book's plot revolves around the search for Ultima, the fabled planet of paradise. And herein lies the book's big secret, which less generous readers may describe with quite a different word.

For the successful ending of Inside UFO 54-40, where you actually find Ultima, cannot be reached; none of the other sections direct you there. This ending has a very unusual, quite possibly unique, double-page illustration:

This illustration appears to have been specifically designed so a reader flicking back and forth through the book will eventually notice it, and it is bookended by two pages of text which cryptically hint at the truth:

You did not make a choice, or follow any direction, but now, somehow, you are descending from space -- approaching a great, glistening sphere. It is Ultima -- the planet of paradise. As your ship slowly and gently descends, you look down on a meadow filled with flowers. Beyond them white-capped mountains tower above hills of golden green and smoky blue. Before you lies a crystal city, adorned by sparkling lakes and flowering trees.

Your ship glides to a landing, and a portal slides open. The air smells as fresh and cool as a pine forest. Music fills your ears. Hundreds of people are waiting to greet you -- the most beautiful and friendly people you have ever seen. Their skin is dark olive and their large eyes are as green as spring grass. Children run forward. They hand you garlands of flowers. A man and a woman, each wearing golden wreaths in their hair, walk towards you, their arms outstretched.

"Welcome to Ultima," says the woman. "My name is Elinka."

"Welcome!" says the man. "My name is Arkam. You have reached the planet of joy and beauty. All our treasures are yours to share with us. All of us here are your friends forever."

Taking your hand, Elinka says, "But no land can be paradise if you can never leave it. So you shall always be able to return home whenever you wish -- in a flash of time."

"Thank you, thank you," you exclaim. "I never dreamed I would ever find a place like this, or even that it could exist!"

"As you can see, there is such a place after all," says Arkam, "though very few from Earth's universe ever reach it."

"No one can choose to visit Ultima," says Elinka. "Nor can you get here by following directions. It was a miracle you got here, but that is perfectly logical, because Ultima is a miracle itself."

The End

I would also draw your attention to the SPECIAL WARNING!!!!, which accompanies the usual WARNING!!!! at the start of the book:

The warning that this is not a conventional book dates back to Packard's very first interactive books -- in addition to Sugarcane Island, he wrote a few more standalone gamebooks before the Choose Your Own Adventure brand was launched in 1979. The warning not to read the book from start to finish remained long after the series was a well-established bestseller, and was presumably just considered a trademark of the range at some point rather than genuinely necessary.

But anyway, I don't think it was Packard's intention to seriously troll 8-13 year olds with this book. The special warning is more or less up front about its nature, I don't think it would have taken readers very long to figure out its trick without having to resort to reverse-engineering the entire book, and there's still enough play value in the book and the other endings of various goodness and badness to escape any feeling of being conned. It's a light joke at most, possibly even a commentary on the nature of perfection. I can understand people being annoyed by it, but I think it's pretty funny.

It also might be worth noting that at this point, text adventure games for the home computer were gaining in popularity -- the populariser of the genre, Colossal Cave Adventure, was released the same year as Sugarcane Island (which, you'll remember, had been sitting on the shelf for a few years before it found a publisher), and Inside UFO 54-40 was published in the same year as The Hobbit for the ZX Spectrum, Bedlam for the TRS-80 and The Queen of Phobos for the Apple II, to name but a few -- and this is a joke you couldn't really do on one of those. Or at least, it wouldn't be anything like as amusing.