Still have a ton of these in my home library. Even as an old guy… I LOVE THEM!
Hell yea, I also kept a shorter series called Amazing Stories. Those were dark.
I recently went on Z Library to see what CYOA they had in digital format… lots of NSFW books and a weird one about North Korea.
lol i had this exact book when i was in 1st grade. i must have had dozens of choose your own adventure
we had assigned reading times for homework and none of the teachers would allow these because they’re not “real books” (or some bullshit). i’ll bet any teacher today would bust a nut if as many of their students even cracked one of these open, let alone read it
I was really surprised that this didn’t become a huge thing for touchscreen phones. It seems like the format would fit well.
There are some things – Choice of Games does multiple-choice games. Often open-source Twine-based games are out there, but I feel like the primary target of Twine is really the desktop. There are some individual games. Lone Wolf, a series of gamebooks, was ported and made free. Some other stuff out there. Just thought that it’d be a game genre that would map well to the touchscreen, but I didn’t really see it taking off.
Not sure they were from the same author, but I had some as a kid. I remember them being pretty freaky, I committed cannibalism at least once…
Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf saga was my crack during my late teens. I’ll have to drag them out and replay them.
Huh, can’t believe I still have mine:
Tween me learned that if you erase hard enough, the page starts to disappear too:
Hell yes, Fighting Fantasy is legit. They’re still fun to play. Also Ian Livingston is super nice on his socials if you ever say hello to him.
You can get the books digitally for free: https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books
Really nice of the Authors to allow this!
I was like seven the first time somebody handed me one of these. I tried to read it cover to cover and I was very confused
Maybe I should post this in unpopular opinion but I did not enjoy these! I always chose what I thought were reasonable and pragmatic choices (because I was a boring and scaredy child) and I always died, lol. Looking back as an adult, I imagine that that’s the idea, that you get to and should take “risks” and they’ll pay off in the story. But as a kid I was always super frustrated, ha!
These were so awesome, fellow gen Xer. !!
I got three of these. Loved them when i was a kid
Wow, memory unlocked! I read all of these one year lol .
By gum this is a wonderful trip down memory lane!
When I was a kid we had a family friend who ran a bookstore. I’d get one of these every time I went to visit my dad.
My first intro to save scumming. I’d have my fingers on 4 different pages trying to get a good ending by changing my choices.
God i loved those books.
