As others have noted, another interesting series of interactive/game books is the Fighting Fantasy series, some of which have been converted into smartphone and console games/apps:
(There are at least two prominent Steve Jacksons in gaming. Somewhat amusingly, and confusingly, American Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, happens to republishing the Fighting Fantasy books by British Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, both of Games Workshop fame.)
I hadn't heard of Lone Wolf gamebooks (https://magnamund.com) or Way of the Tiger (which was also apparently converted into software) until now! Are there any other interactive/game book series of note?
I'm 56. I first discovered these in maybe 1980 or 81? These books were foundational to my sense of creativity, and expectations of entertainment. I had discovered D&D the year prior, and this was fuel to the fire. To this day, when I'm bored, I create my own adventure, and don't rely on computers, film, books, etc... these books taught me how to become self-sufficient and self-entertaining. Funny, the same year I also discovered Douglas Adams and I think Gary Numan's Cars was still on KC Kasem's top 20. 1979-1982: genesis of identity.
I'm a decade younger, but yeah, whenever someone tells me that the setting of X (lately Harry Potter) is "so imaginative", as a forever GM, I can't help but smirk – I've been coming up with stories and worlds vastly more sophisticated every week-end for the past ~30 years.
Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.
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.
> 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.
Wow, that sucks!
When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.
Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....
Thanks. I learned a lot from those adventures, which was the main aim.
At the time, those computers had no hard drives or larger capacity disks. So my avenues for recovery and further progress were limited.
Reality decided I had learned enough in that direction, is a teleological interpretation. But also a realistic viewpoint.
I have no regrets.
Today (literally today) I am working on a grammar/parser that allows exploration of some interesting math I came up with. The beauty of being able to navigate an abstract world with real complexity, seek and encounter genuine surprises, interactively at the speed of keystrokes, captures a lot of the joy of those games! With the addition of a crafting element.
I was so obsessed with this when I was a kid. I created a complete node graph a few years ago in order to cheat and to show the entire tree structure of the book:
I simply didn't have enough fingers to bookmark previous pages if I made a choice which led to a bad ending. This was my first taste of depth-first search algorithm.
With the graph visualization as an oracle, I was able to explore all threads leading to all the different possible endings. You can read this book in OpenLibrary:
I didn't become a reverse engineer but that landed me a job when I was explaining how I used networkx library and handled a couple of edges around detecting cycles during the interview :)
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.)
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.
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.
When I was younger I was certain Nurture was everything. As I have gotten older, had kids, I have been sliding increasingly supporting the Nature end of the spectrum.
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.
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
Also, if CYOA software is something you're into and you aren't familiar with interactive fiction, there are worse places to start than https://ifdb.org/
I loved these books so much I wrote part of my book's first chapter[1] in the same style. Here's an excerpt:
> In all the years I’ve spent studying and working with cryptography, I’ve never noticed a single pattern in which a cryptographic primitive ends up being used in real-world applications. Things are pretty chaotic. Before a theoretical primitive gets to be adopted, there’s a long list of people who get to handle the primitive and shape it into something consumable and sometimes safer for the public at large. How can I even explain that to you?
> Have you heard of Choose Your Own Adventure? It’s an old book series where you got to pick how you want to step through the story. The principle was simple: you read the first section of the book; at the end of the section, the book lets you decide on the path forward by giving you different options. Each option was associated with a different section number that you could skip directly to if you so chose. So, I did the same here! Start by reading the next paragraph and follow the direction it gives you.
> Where it all begins. Who are you? Are you Alice, a cryptographer? Are you David, working in the private industry and in need of a solution to your problems? Or are you Eve, working in a government branch and preoccupied by cryptography?
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.
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.
My summer camps were spent buried in the Lone Wolf book series. The smell of the books. Keeping all my fingers at all the choice points so I could cheat my way back to the book end.
Ooof. Memory unlocked: As an only child staying at my great-grandmother's country home, I played through a series of "gamebooks" that added character stats, inventory and random rolls to the CYOA theme.
I loved CYOA books as a child of the early 80s. It was a boom time for choice-based books. CYOA was first but books aimed at more mature (meaning much more gory) audiences were common. Fighting Fantasy was probably the best known, but Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger were also amazing to my young mind.
This kind of Interactive Fiction is still being developed today. If you like Star Trek you might enjoy my own choice-based game[0] but literally hundreds of games of various level of complexity are being produced every year.
My sister recently got an "escape room book", which seems to be an attempt to put the escape room experience into puzzle book format. I guess it's also a kind of spiritual successor to these types of books.
Almost every branch of every story in Choose Your Own Adventure books ended with bold, centered text that said:
THE END
But there was one story I vaguely recall where if you made the "wrong" choice, you fell into a bottomless pit (the books were always in the second person) and you kept falling and falling, forever, and the text said:
THERE IS NO END
I still remember the chills I got reading this. I wonder how kids these days get their introduction to existential horror?
> 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!
I loved "The secret of the ninjas". It had a better research from Japanese culture than tons of local pulp novels (from Spain) about some US born Kung Fu fighting spy/secret agent soon-meeting-a-Japanese-sensei-with-cheap-tropes-everywhere.
That being a book for kids compared to cheap pulp novels were meant for lowly-educated adults, but I would expect less for preteen books where a perfect mythos depiction wasn't always a thing.
Still, Hollywood movies and some Asian exploitation series weren't much better...
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.
If you like CYOA games, you may enjoy my upcoming game Outsider, a modern sci-fi take on dynamic narrative games. It will launch in 7 weeks and I'm working on it full-time!
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:
Not quite what you wanted, but the Lone Wolf ones are (legally) available online [1]. You may be able to read the downloads, or even the online play versions, with Dutch translations.
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.
I miss the old late 1980’s/early 1990’s choose your own adventure phone games. They had an early 1940’s radio show vibe to them with sound effects and voice actors. The felt like old laser disk arcade games too. No one seems to remember them and I can’t find them online.
The most famous one in the UK was called FIST (Fantasy Ihteractive ?Stories? by Telephone or something) written by Steve Jackson (of Fighting Fantasy fame, not the American Steve Jackson)... premium rate telephone number got me into trouble more times than I can remember as a kid
I played them in and around the California Bay Area but I guess similar games were set up all over the US. They were free too. Every time I watch the movie Treasure Planet (2002) the narrator for the holographic bedtime story reminds me of the phone games.
I'm confident you could build one of these in an IF engine like Inform, but the offering is fundamentally different. These books are essentially compressed TRPG experiences where the gamemaster's actions are encoded into the "go-to page n" directives.
Loved these as a kid, I think I had most but not all of them. The Choice of Games mentioned in TFA are often a lot bigger and more complex than those books, but worth looking into for fans. Delight Games is a lesser known company with a slightly different style of them.
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.
There is/was an AI Dungeon app running in the early/pre-ChatGPT days using GPT 3-ish, I think? Long term context was a real problem - story arcs were very.... drifty. A more modern agentic approach might help with this, doing multiple passes over the work to achieve consistency.
Back in the mid-to-late-1990s, when Lynx was the browser of choice, I encountered a collaborative online CYOA just like this. I have always thought it was called "The Neverending Story," although of course that's also the name of a movie. ...This person [3] also thinks it was called "Never Ending Story," and that it was still online as late as 2011(!).
You start at the "entrance" paragraph, where there are four or five choices — or, if you don't like any of those, you can just type in your own choice. The game then prompts you for what happens when someone selects that choice; and choice and consequence both go into some database on the server end, ready to be served to the next player. Anyway, you can follow the existing paths until you get to a dead end, at which point the game tells you to create at least two more choices and responses, so the next player will get to play a little longer.
As Gwern writes:
> So [any] player can ‘author’ an adventure by carefully curating a premise and then choosing actions and backing up and editing, creating a full-fledged scenario [...]
And that's exactly how it felt: By going down different paths at the start, you could navigate into a "Lovecraftian horror" subtree, an "alien abduction" subtree, a "romance" subtree, etc.
The technology at play here is just a minor extrapolation of the BASIC era's "Guess An Animal" game [1].
Plugging an LLM into the thing seems... well, frankly, it seems unnecessary. The core engine/database doesn't need an LLM for anything; the only thing the LLM would help with is coming up with new choices and new response paragraphs "less tediously" than we could do it in the 1990s. But the uncharitable way to describe that is: you could use an LLM to fill your CYOA game with AI slop, instead of hand-crafted texts that are meaningful to some real person in the world. ...Well, OK, maybe an LLM could provide a first rough pass on content moderation; or power a diagnostic like "Your new choice seems similar to this existing choice: [X] Are you sure you want to add this branch?". So there's places for LLMs in this. But I wouldn't use an LLM for content.
Several years ago I finally decided to try reimplementing the-thing-I-recall-being-named-"The-Neverending-Story" myself [2]; but I didn't get far, because (A) I've been too lazy to do anything requiring server-side hosting since Heroku went belly-up, and (B) opening such a thing up to the public means you're getting into the content-moderation business (Gwern also alludes to this) and ain't nobody got time for that. (See also "Why do you require an email address?" in [1].)
The guy in [3] doesn't think that [4] is the same website; but that's exactly the sort of locked-down, account-required, highly walled interface I'd have expected it to evolve into over the past 20 years. (However, it seems to have been essentially walled since <=2004, according to the Wayback Machine: [5].)
This brought back fond memories of contorting my fingers as bookmarks so that I could keep track of my last N moves, giving me an “undo” stack of however many previous steps I could!
I grew up dog-earing COYA and holding three pages with my fingers like an improvised undo stack. Later it was Suikoden II on a beat-up PlayStation, chasing branching story lines and watching a single choice ripple for hours. The throughline the quiet thrill of being inside the story and having it remember me when I came back.
For a bootstrapped AI project we stumbled into that same space, but from an unexpected angle. Our initial vision was grand, abstract: an interaction layer for stories. When we started building, we assumed gamers and tech folks would care. We were totally wrong, our early users, predominantly women 18 to 35 who grew up on Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural etc. They were using our characters to practice difficult conversations, testing an episode where you’re the love interest, the savior or co conspirator.
Ppl were genuinely writing novella-length interactions daily. 60+ min avg sessions. 100 day streaks. Turns out the human need for deeper story-engagement is stronger and stranger than we imagined...
here's the PDF of the cave, you can choose to download it or if you're a masochist and want carpeltunnelsyndrome you can use the flipping ui here. https://pubhtml5.com/obber/cznb/
Around 1991 I remember having a book that was a cross between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D. It was about the same physical size, but it was a full (albeit small) D&D campaign. There was a character sheet at the back of the book you could copy, and then as you went through the game you would roll for yourself and for your foes, tracking hits and HP on your sheet until you won all the loot or you died.
I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).
Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?
Some feature a branching storyline while in others the paragraphs are arranged in a 2D grid-like fashion and you can visit an earlier place multiple times.
(One thing that has stuck with me is a bad ending in one of them, where you are captured and the last choice you make is whether you want to sit in a small cage or stand in a tall and narrow cage for the rest of your life. I mean come on)
There were dozens of such series in the late '80s and early '90s. My first guess is the "Lone Wolf" series mentioned above (launched 1984). It has a grimdark flavor; if you remember creepy illustrations, I'd look there first.
> I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea.
It would be so, so much worse if the bends were when dissolved diarrhea came out of solution and formed diarrhea bubbles in your blood.
I loved these books. We had a bunch in grade school, few different kinds, I think there was a batman one, though some described pretty gruesome deaths. Those were usually the horror series which to me seemed popular like my favorite classic, Scary Stories to Tell Yourself in the Dark. That fuckin artwork, man, still gives me chills. Felt like it gave rise to the Goosebumps series. That was in the 80's/90s. I am sure they would not allow these books in many (most?) schools any more. Shame. Anyways, to read more turn to page 47...
As a kid, choose your own adventure made me so mad because the covers are super appealing, but by the time they emerged I was a huge sci-fi fan and had burnt through everything the big three had written and was super excited when I picked up my first CYOA book. I didnt know what it was. When I hit the first crossroads I was like, what the is this??!! I wanted a well crafted story. Not a gamification of the style of sci-fi I’d come to know and love. I went back a few times because I really wanted to like them. But there was no way. I still remember the book was Inside UFO 54-40.
Here's another book from my childhood that I never forgot (before reading the solution in Wikipedia, consider buying the book used and trying it yourself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book)
We used to pore over it for hours trying to figure out anything- noticing certain patterns across the images.
Interesting and cool books, and they have been promoting them recently:
https://www.cyoa.com
As others have noted, another interesting series of interactive/game books is the Fighting Fantasy series, some of which have been converted into smartphone and console games/apps:
https://www.fightingfantasy.com
(There are at least two prominent Steve Jacksons in gaming. Somewhat amusingly, and confusingly, American Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, happens to republishing the Fighting Fantasy books by British Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, both of Games Workshop fame.)
I hadn't heard of Lone Wolf gamebooks (https://magnamund.com) or Way of the Tiger (which was also apparently converted into software) until now! Are there any other interactive/game book series of note?
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I'm 56. I first discovered these in maybe 1980 or 81? These books were foundational to my sense of creativity, and expectations of entertainment. I had discovered D&D the year prior, and this was fuel to the fire. To this day, when I'm bored, I create my own adventure, and don't rely on computers, film, books, etc... these books taught me how to become self-sufficient and self-entertaining. Funny, the same year I also discovered Douglas Adams and I think Gary Numan's Cars was still on KC Kasem's top 20. 1979-1982: genesis of identity.
Also, this was the last good incarnation of the trope I'd seen in a while: https://www.cracked.com/blog/choose-your-own-adventure-on-dr...
I'm a decade younger, but yeah, whenever someone tells me that the setting of X (lately Harry Potter) is "so imaginative", as a forever GM, I can't help but smirk – I've been coming up with stories and worlds vastly more sophisticated every week-end for the past ~30 years.
Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.
Yep! Back then: Choose Your Own Adventure, D&D and Zork - what else would a kid need?
Ultima III/IV
Heck yeah. My buddy had Ultima III (Exodus?) on his Atari 800 and I was so jealous.
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.
> 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.
Wow, that sucks!
When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.
Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....
That sounds great! Even a little piece of a game is fun to see come together when you are a kid!
I wonder if your friend's text adventure was itself inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, the very first popular text adventure game.
that's terrible, a low level read would've recovered it. I hope the story ended up well for you anyway
Thanks. I learned a lot from those adventures, which was the main aim.
At the time, those computers had no hard drives or larger capacity disks. So my avenues for recovery and further progress were limited.
Reality decided I had learned enough in that direction, is a teleological interpretation. But also a realistic viewpoint.
I have no regrets.
Today (literally today) I am working on a grammar/parser that allows exploration of some interesting math I came up with. The beauty of being able to navigate an abstract world with real complexity, seek and encounter genuine surprises, interactively at the speed of keystrokes, captures a lot of the joy of those games! With the addition of a crafting element.
I was so obsessed with this when I was a kid. I created a complete node graph a few years ago in order to cheat and to show the entire tree structure of the book:
https://archive.org/details/magic-master-node-map
I simply didn't have enough fingers to bookmark previous pages if I made a choice which led to a bad ending. This was my first taste of depth-first search algorithm.
With the graph visualization as an oracle, I was able to explore all threads leading to all the different possible endings. You can read this book in OpenLibrary:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL30096W/Choose_Your_Own_Adven...
I carried my childhood obsession with me all the way to Ghidra / IDA debugger which shows the disassembly blocks with arrows in its graph view.
I'm now a Reverse Engineer thanks to the Choose Your Own Adventure books I've obsessed over and read a lot as a kid. :D
I did something similar a while ago with Lone wolf books: https://notes.atomutek.org/gamebooks-and-graph-theory.html
I didn't become a reverse engineer but that landed me a job when I was explaining how I used networkx library and handled a couple of edges around detecting cycles during the interview :)
Nerd.
... that's pretty cool.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
When I was younger I was certain Nurture was everything. As I have gotten older, had kids, I have been sliding increasingly supporting the Nature end of the spectrum.
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.
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.
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
This brings me back
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...
Also, if CYOA software is something you're into and you aren't familiar with interactive fiction, there are worse places to start than https://ifdb.org/
I loved these books so much I wrote part of my book's first chapter[1] in the same style. Here's an excerpt:
> In all the years I’ve spent studying and working with cryptography, I’ve never noticed a single pattern in which a cryptographic primitive ends up being used in real-world applications. Things are pretty chaotic. Before a theoretical primitive gets to be adopted, there’s a long list of people who get to handle the primitive and shape it into something consumable and sometimes safer for the public at large. How can I even explain that to you?
> Have you heard of Choose Your Own Adventure? It’s an old book series where you got to pick how you want to step through the story. The principle was simple: you read the first section of the book; at the end of the section, the book lets you decide on the path forward by giving you different options. Each option was associated with a different section number that you could skip directly to if you so chose. So, I did the same here! Start by reading the next paragraph and follow the direction it gives you.
> Where it all begins. Who are you? Are you Alice, a cryptographer? Are you David, working in the private industry and in need of a solution to your problems? Or are you Eve, working in a government branch and preoccupied by cryptography?
> You’re Alice, go to step 1.
> You’re David, go to step 2.
> You’re Eve, go to step 3.
> ...
(you can read that for free I believe)
[1]: https://livebook.manning.com/book/real-world-cryptography/ch...
Today I learned: The creator of Chose Your Own Adventure is currently 94 and has a website at https://edwardpackard.com/
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Packard_(writer)
Not only that, but he's regularly updating it.
I really quite enjoyed his 'Nine Things I Learned in 90 Years' essay: https://edwardpackard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Nine-Th...
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.
Ah, I was going to post asking if anybody else read all the pages looking for unreferenced endings.
I did this when I figured I had exhausted all the branches, to look for oversights and easter eggs. Found a few!
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.
My summer camps were spent buried in the Lone Wolf book series. The smell of the books. Keeping all my fingers at all the choice points so I could cheat my way back to the book end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)
The number pad at the back which simulated dice rolls!
Thank you! I had completely forgotten about that. Loved them as well.
Ooof. Memory unlocked: As an only child staying at my great-grandmother's country home, I played through a series of "gamebooks" that added character stats, inventory and random rolls to the CYOA theme.
https://www.scribd.com/document/717863174/The-Way-of-the-Tig...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Tiger
Similarly, I got one of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks) from the public library once.
I loved CYOA books as a child of the early 80s. It was a boom time for choice-based books. CYOA was first but books aimed at more mature (meaning much more gory) audiences were common. Fighting Fantasy was probably the best known, but Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger were also amazing to my young mind.
This kind of Interactive Fiction is still being developed today. If you like Star Trek you might enjoy my own choice-based game[0] but literally hundreds of games of various level of complexity are being produced every year.
[0] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/
My sister recently got an "escape room book", which seems to be an attempt to put the escape room experience into puzzle book format. I guess it's also a kind of spiritual successor to these types of books.
Almost every branch of every story in Choose Your Own Adventure books ended with bold, centered text that said:
But there was one story I vaguely recall where if you made the "wrong" choice, you fell into a bottomless pit (the books were always in the second person) and you kept falling and falling, forever, and the text said: I still remember the chills I got reading this. I wonder how kids these days get their introduction to existential horror?Much more horrifying: you are (rather unexpectedly) bewitched into eternally picking up pieces of a broken china cat!
#5 The Mystery of Chimney Rock, page 60: https://archive.org/details/mysteryofchimney00pack/page/60
A moment ago I was a fifty year old man, but thanks to your comment, I am a stricken 10 year old again.
> 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!
I've literally just started replaying/rereading these with my 9yo son. It's been eye opening.
A book that allows you to _do things_ is finally a challenge to the allure of the tablet and the Switch.
Don't forget about Pop-up books and Where's Waldo!
Perhaps we'll break the curse of the iPad babies yet
I loved "The secret of the ninjas". It had a better research from Japanese culture than tons of local pulp novels (from Spain) about some US born Kung Fu fighting spy/secret agent soon-meeting-a-Japanese-sensei-with-cheap-tropes-everywhere.
That being a book for kids compared to cheap pulp novels were meant for lowly-educated adults, but I would expect less for preteen books where a perfect mythos depiction wasn't always a thing.
Still, Hollywood movies and some Asian exploitation series weren't much better...
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.
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.
If you like CYOA games, you may enjoy my upcoming game Outsider, a modern sci-fi take on dynamic narrative games. It will launch in 7 weeks and I'm working on it full-time!
Here is the Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
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.
Not quite what you wanted, but the Lone Wolf ones are (legally) available online [1]. You may be able to read the downloads, or even the online play versions, with Dutch translations.
[1] https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books
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.
OK the line from his mom equating the bends with diarrhea really made me chuckle. Sounded like something my mom would have said.
I miss the old late 1980’s/early 1990’s choose your own adventure phone games. They had an early 1940’s radio show vibe to them with sound effects and voice actors. The felt like old laser disk arcade games too. No one seems to remember them and I can’t find them online.
The most famous one in the UK was called FIST (Fantasy Ihteractive ?Stories? by Telephone or something) written by Steve Jackson (of Fighting Fantasy fame, not the American Steve Jackson)... premium rate telephone number got me into trouble more times than I can remember as a kid
I played them in and around the California Bay Area but I guess similar games were set up all over the US. They were free too. Every time I watch the movie Treasure Planet (2002) the narrator for the holographic bedtime story reminds me of the phone games.
Interactive Fiction still exists and is being actively developed. Check out the top games on Interactive Fiction DB. https://ifdb.org/viewcomp?id=1lv599reviaxvwo7
I'm confident you could build one of these in an IF engine like Inform, but the offering is fundamentally different. These books are essentially compressed TRPG experiences where the gamemaster's actions are encoded into the "go-to page n" directives.
Loved these as a kid, I think I had most but not all of them. The Choice of Games mentioned in TFA are often a lot bigger and more complex than those books, but worth looking into for fans. Delight Games is a lesser known company with a slightly different style of them.
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.
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I always thought there was decent promise in gwerns (gpt-3 era) proposal of a meta-llm CYOA: https://gwern.net/cyoa
Wonder if anyone ever took a crack at this
There is/was an AI Dungeon app running in the early/pre-ChatGPT days using GPT 3-ish, I think? Long term context was a real problem - story arcs were very.... drifty. A more modern agentic approach might help with this, doing multiple passes over the work to achieve consistency.
Nah, it wouldn't work. LLMs don't have coherent, total concepts of things in the same way humans do.
AIDungeon was built on a fine-tuned version of GPT-2. Less coherent but infinitely more fun than later models.
Back in the mid-to-late-1990s, when Lynx was the browser of choice, I encountered a collaborative online CYOA just like this. I have always thought it was called "The Neverending Story," although of course that's also the name of a movie. ...This person [3] also thinks it was called "Never Ending Story," and that it was still online as late as 2011(!).
You start at the "entrance" paragraph, where there are four or five choices — or, if you don't like any of those, you can just type in your own choice. The game then prompts you for what happens when someone selects that choice; and choice and consequence both go into some database on the server end, ready to be served to the next player. Anyway, you can follow the existing paths until you get to a dead end, at which point the game tells you to create at least two more choices and responses, so the next player will get to play a little longer.
As Gwern writes:
> So [any] player can ‘author’ an adventure by carefully curating a premise and then choosing actions and backing up and editing, creating a full-fledged scenario [...]
And that's exactly how it felt: By going down different paths at the start, you could navigate into a "Lovecraftian horror" subtree, an "alien abduction" subtree, a "romance" subtree, etc.
The technology at play here is just a minor extrapolation of the BASIC era's "Guess An Animal" game [1].
Plugging an LLM into the thing seems... well, frankly, it seems unnecessary. The core engine/database doesn't need an LLM for anything; the only thing the LLM would help with is coming up with new choices and new response paragraphs "less tediously" than we could do it in the 1990s. But the uncharitable way to describe that is: you could use an LLM to fill your CYOA game with AI slop, instead of hand-crafted texts that are meaningful to some real person in the world. ...Well, OK, maybe an LLM could provide a first rough pass on content moderation; or power a diagnostic like "Your new choice seems similar to this existing choice: [X] Are you sure you want to add this branch?". So there's places for LLMs in this. But I wouldn't use an LLM for content.
Several years ago I finally decided to try reimplementing the-thing-I-recall-being-named-"The-Neverending-Story" myself [2]; but I didn't get far, because (A) I've been too lazy to do anything requiring server-side hosting since Heroku went belly-up, and (B) opening such a thing up to the public means you're getting into the content-moderation business (Gwern also alludes to this) and ain't nobody got time for that. (See also "Why do you require an email address?" in [1].)
The guy in [3] doesn't think that [4] is the same website; but that's exactly the sort of locked-down, account-required, highly walled interface I'd have expected it to evolve into over the past 20 years. (However, it seems to have been essentially walled since <=2004, according to the Wayback Machine: [5].)
[1] - https://www.animalgame.com/play/faq.php
[2] - https://github.com/Quuxplusone/NeverendingStory
[3] - https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/ezx6kh/tomtw...
[4] - https://infinite-story.com/
[5] - http://web.archive.org/web/20040318190551/http://www.choose-...
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Just in case anyone's interested, https://twinery.org is a pretty great editor and associated tooling for making your own CYOA games.
This brought back fond memories of contorting my fingers as bookmarks so that I could keep track of my last N moves, giving me an “undo” stack of however many previous steps I could!
I had these and would scour book stores when on vacation with my parents to find new ones. UFO 54-40 gave me nightmares as a young kid.
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
I grew up dog-earing COYA and holding three pages with my fingers like an improvised undo stack. Later it was Suikoden II on a beat-up PlayStation, chasing branching story lines and watching a single choice ripple for hours. The throughline the quiet thrill of being inside the story and having it remember me when I came back.
For a bootstrapped AI project we stumbled into that same space, but from an unexpected angle. Our initial vision was grand, abstract: an interaction layer for stories. When we started building, we assumed gamers and tech folks would care. We were totally wrong, our early users, predominantly women 18 to 35 who grew up on Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural etc. They were using our characters to practice difficult conversations, testing an episode where you’re the love interest, the savior or co conspirator.
Ppl were genuinely writing novella-length interactions daily. 60+ min avg sessions. 100 day streaks. Turns out the human need for deeper story-engagement is stronger and stranger than we imagined...
here's the PDF of the cave, you can choose to download it or if you're a masochist and want carpeltunnelsyndrome you can use the flipping ui here. https://pubhtml5.com/obber/cznb/
Around 1991 I remember having a book that was a cross between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D. It was about the same physical size, but it was a full (albeit small) D&D campaign. There was a character sheet at the back of the book you could copy, and then as you went through the game you would roll for yourself and for your foes, tracking hits and HP on your sheet until you won all the loot or you died.
I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).
Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?
Could it be Steve Jackson's Sorcery! perhaps?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson's_Sorcery!
Steve Jackson and Ian livingstone Fighting Fantasy books, mentioned in the article.
PDFs may be found online…
A long list of the books in the series can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fighting_Fantasy_gameb...
Some feature a branching storyline while in others the paragraphs are arranged in a 2D grid-like fashion and you can visit an earlier place multiple times.
(One thing that has stuck with me is a bad ending in one of them, where you are captured and the last choice you make is whether you want to sit in a small cage or stand in a tall and narrow cage for the rest of your life. I mean come on)
There were dozens of such series in the late '80s and early '90s. My first guess is the "Lone Wolf" series mentioned above (launched 1984). It has a grimdark flavor; if you remember creepy illustrations, I'd look there first.
Other options on my bookshelf include "Fighting Fantasy" (including the famous "Creature of Havoc") — https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html
Or "Middle-Earth Quest" (1985-ish) — https://gamebooks.org/Series/270/Show
Or "SwordQuest" (1985) — https://gamebooks.org/Series/333/Show
Or "Fabled Lands" (1996) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands
> I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea.
It would be so, so much worse if the bends were when dissolved diarrhea came out of solution and formed diarrhea bubbles in your blood.
Has anyone tried these books for their kids? Or are they just too dated?
I loved these books. We had a bunch in grade school, few different kinds, I think there was a batman one, though some described pretty gruesome deaths. Those were usually the horror series which to me seemed popular like my favorite classic, Scary Stories to Tell Yourself in the Dark. That fuckin artwork, man, still gives me chills. Felt like it gave rise to the Goosebumps series. That was in the 80's/90s. I am sure they would not allow these books in many (most?) schools any more. Shame. Anyways, to read more turn to page 47...
You died.
https://darkartandcraft.com/blogs/news/stephen-gammell-illus...
As a kid, choose your own adventure made me so mad because the covers are super appealing, but by the time they emerged I was a huge sci-fi fan and had burnt through everything the big three had written and was super excited when I picked up my first CYOA book. I didnt know what it was. When I hit the first crossroads I was like, what the is this??!! I wanted a well crafted story. Not a gamification of the style of sci-fi I’d come to know and love. I went back a few times because I really wanted to like them. But there was no way. I still remember the book was Inside UFO 54-40.
Here's another book from my childhood that I never forgot (before reading the solution in Wikipedia, consider buying the book used and trying it yourself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book)
We used to pore over it for hours trying to figure out anything- noticing certain patterns across the images.
I used to pick up as many these as I could as a poor kid at swap meets.... I could read them over and over and still enjoy them. Some great memories.