When I first started cataloguing them, around 1998, it was happening in the Czech Republic. A few come out, they become explosively popular, a flood of knock-offs are released, they reach critical mass and then drop off into nothing.

“Researching interactive books,” Demian Katz, gamebooks archivist, says, “There’s pretty much the same pattern in every country. “I could see the peak being reached and then things going off.” “I knew that, like all series, they get very popular, sales shoot up and then trail off,” he says. The end of the series was hardly a surprise for Packard. Recognizing the value of Packard’s idea, he bought the book and announced a line of interactive stories for children called “The Adventures of You.” Montgomery was a big advocate of experiential learning and he had been designing role-playing exercises for Abt Associates, a consulting company that applied social sciences to government and military problems. In 1976, he saw an ad for Vermont Crossroads Press, a small publishing house run by Raymond Montgomery and his wife, Constance Cappel, that was looking for innovative children’s books. “I had written a couple of children’s stories that I hadn’t been able to sell,” he says, “And I couldn’t sell this one either. They each gave a different answer and he turned this branching path story into what would one day become the Choose Your Own Adventure book Sugarcane Island. While telling his daughters their story, Packard, then a lawyer who was “never comfortable with the law,” asked them what happened next. But all of these efforts were eclipsed by the bedtime story Edward Packard told his two daughters in 1969.

Basically an extended multiple-choice quiz, a correct answer sent you forward in the text while an incorrect answer sent you to a page explaining just how wrong you were. Skinner’s “programmed learning” books that culminated with Doubleday’s interactive TutorText series, which debuted in 1958 with the thrilling The Arithmetic of Computers. A more prosaic early attempt at interactive texts were psychologist B.F. The idea for interactive fiction was laid out by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941 in his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”: A Chinese spy for Germany living in Great Britain discusses his ancestor’s ambition to write a vastly complex novel that is also a labyrinth wherein every branching path is determined by the reader’s choices. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, which required friends or computer games, which required your parents to spend a lot of money or arcade games, which required your sister to drive you to the mall, Choose Your Own Adventure books cost $1.75, and you could read them on your own. Between 19, entertainment went interactive, and, for myself and many others, Choose Your Own Adventure books were the catalyst.

The cave of time by edward packard