CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

I never marked spots but I did love them. i also remember a text-based computer game that was similar.

you can buy them in BOX SETS now.

There's an endless thread on realILX

I wondered about that but did not check google cache. I will give myself 20 lashes with a wet noodle.

Be an Interplanetary Spy
Time Machine

I had problems with the original Choose Your Own series, since there were some many fucked up ways you could die or wind up in some Twilight Zone-hell. They were like Sierra games.

They had a much more elaborate set of rules to ignore than your usual gamebooks.

Hmmmm, this was all just idle wondering, but some of these suggestions are surely going to appear as gifts for my kids someday...

I seem to remember liking lots of non-Choose Your Own Adventure-branded choice-books better? Or at least one in particular: there was this series of awesomely weird futuristic SPACE ADVENTURE ones where instead of just making decisions you had to solve visual puzzles (they were heavily illustrated, obv), like "which tube leads to safety and which leads to the mutant monster's mouth" -- I definitely remember one with a bunch of creepy clone/mutant stuff going on, and in my memory these are like a cross between the Jetsons and Aeon Flux. I've been trying for years to remember the names of these things, and I think maybe the title started with "You Are an Intergalactic ______" (something or other), but no luck dredging them out of my memory.

The only proper CYOA book I remember is titled The Lost Jewels of Nabooti.

x-post I swear to God I have read/played the one Dan is talking about, I think it was actually pre-D&D

oddly enough theres supposed to be a series of CYOA type games released soon for the DS, which will be held sideways like a book during play.

The series did teach me about Moebius loops, cyborgs, and what "next of kin" meant.

I think i lost a TM book about the Red Baron and had to pay the replacement costs to the library. We found it 6 months later under the bookshelf.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762/spy/pics/2-117.jpg

AAH OMG I remember being scared of that thing when I was 7 help HELP it was like grown from an EVIL EAR or something. I dunno, that wonky ear had something to do with something.

xp hahaha, yeah, there was some matching puzzle, where if you picked the wrong ear, you got fed to some sorta outerspace snuffalapagus

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762/spy/pics/6-6.jpg

"I knew it!"

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762/spy/pics/6-8.jpg

My childhood reading has successfully prejudiced me against floating triangular Walken-bots.

It's kinda cool that they published these things in so many languages. It's like they had to mentally feed all the growing dorklings on the planet.

1000 Gefahren (German)
Aukeratu zeure abentura (Basque)
Boken med…olika slut (Swedish)
Choisis ta propre aventure (French)
Choisis ton aventure (French)
Du er hovedpersonen (Danish)
Du und dein Abenteuer (German)
Elige tu propia aventura (Spanish)
Escolha sua aventura (Portuguese)
Escolhe a tua própria aventura (Portuguese)
Is kahani ke hiro ap hain (Urdu)
Izberi svoeto priklyuchenie! [Избери своето приключение!] (Bulgarian)
Kies je eigen avontuur (Dutch)
Kies jou eie avontuur (Afrikaans)
Kraj po va¨a ¸elba (Macedonian)
Macera tüneli dizisi (Turkish)
Odaberi svoju pustolovinu (Serbo-Croatian)
Pilih sendiri pengembaraan anda (Malay)
Pilih sendiri petualanganmu (Indonesian)
Scegli la tua avventura (Italian)
Tria la teva aventura (Catalan)
Valitse oma seikkailusi (Finnish)
Vyber si vlastné dobrodru¸stvo (Slovakian)
Vyber si vlastní dobrodru¸ství (Czech)
Þitt eigið ævintýri (Icelandic)

also, am lolling at this sequence:

154. Cyberspace Warrior
155. Ninja Cyborg
156. You Are an Alien
157. U.N. Adventure
158. Sky-Jam!

and how many of the book titles sound like Troy McClure epics.

and theeeeeen : 122. Magic Master

The Time Machine ones were my favorite. You had the one where you bounced from ice age to ice age looking for the missing link between the dinosaurs and present-day animals (a real fancy bird that took up two pages of illustration.) There was also the scary Nazi one that even featured actual photographs at the end of some of the "characters" you had been interacting with.

One of those CYOA books once included the phrase along the lines of "You check yourself and realize that you're still you, the same person born in the early 1970s and everything." It was neat realizing that I could read that sentence twenty years later (like now) and it would still be true.

is this the one that had a utopian ending stuck in the middle that none of the choices led to...? like the only way to get to it was just to violate the rules of the book and turn to that page? that was pretty genius.

I gave a copy of this to Jon for Christmas.

Another vote here for the Lone Wolf D&D-esque gamebooks! They were great. I was on a listserv for them in middle school. I played up through twelve and then discovered that from thirteen onward they were abridged for US publication (originally being British) and so I relentlessly pursued UK copies of 13-20 or so on ebay but it was hard and i had no money when i was a kid.

hahaha yup, where i learned about the archeoptryx, too. Look, a hand-drawn gatefold photograph!

let me see if i can remember the riddle from the second one, which had me stumped for WEEKS. sexydancer, hope this brings back fond memories:

on courga's face you kiss across
and finish with the lips
but careful something ... fuck no i've forgotten
erm erm erm lest he spits

"left eye, right eye, forehead, lips" was the correct combination. might have taken you to 241. or maybe 241 was when the fucker gobbed an arrow down your throat. DAMN, i'm gonna look for my copies of these. i can't have chucked them. surely? failing that, i'm re-buying them.

there was one puzzle where the facing page had a drawing of a scroll on it with a load of runes and LIX (heh, no, not an anag) at the top. "the opposite page should suggest a number," it said. "if so, you know where to go. if not, your adventure ends here." (only slightly less prosaic.) my first introduction to roman numerals. think my dad had to explain that one to me.

hoo. it's like being 11 all over again. only in a good way.

hang on ... what was the jokey series, where you kept being sent to 14 when you died? there was a thing with a frog that couldn't spell. and a fake castle. and garlic. it was really easy to cheat. you were called "pip" ... [googles] ... THIS WAS IT!.

(sorry if all this was done on real-ILX but i never saw that thread and i'm now happily drowning in geek nostalgia.)

"To put it in her ass, turn to page 14.
To put it in her mouth, turn to page 75.

14) It turns out that your date, for scientific purposes, is wearing an explosive anal chastity belt that is attached to her internal sphincter. You die upon contact.

THE END"

It probably predates archive.org, unfortunately.

I remember one about going on an 18-30 holiday, by the comedy double act that the "double-take brothers" were a take-off of on Harry Enfield. (they used to do kids "What to do in the holidays" shows, where they'd walk around going "oh there's nothing to do" and walk into a sports centre where everyone would be playing Badminton sort of thing.) Them.

The ones I actually remember reading were Rings of Kether (some horrible loops in that one), House of Hell, Citadel of Chaos, and one of the Sorcery books which i remember being massive and I could barely get through the first section climbing a cliff, or something.

Bizarro coincidence time... I was just thinking about Grailquest 2 days ago and googled JH Brennan to see if he'd done anything else since then. I loved those books!

My fave CYOA was The Mystery Of Chimney Rock with the creepy cat curse.

I had a later Fighting Fantasy book called Creature Of Havoc which seemed to be impossible to solve, like they'd made a mistake when they printed it or something. I'm sure it wasn't but I got completely fed up with it, after going through the whole maze cheating constantly I still couldn't find a way out to the rest of the book.

I probably have the first 20 FF books, but could never really be bothered to play any of them properly; I just loved the pictures, and the beasties, and the worlds - so obviously I bought "Out of the Pit", the bestiary, and "Titan", the book on the whole FF world.

House of Hell was a good one

that was bloody vicious. IIRC there was some deal with a cupboard/ante-room under the stairs, and you could either be in the real one or one that looked like the real one. very sinister, too; wasn't it set in the present day, unlike any of the rest?

there was a futuristic one where you were driving down a road; number 13 in the series, i think, but i'm not going to check right now. it was bloody brilliant. you could do the whole thing, then die right at the end from a rat scratch you sustained ages before.

You're welcome! I'm happy I wasn't the only kid obsessed with these. (It seems that there were even other kids in the SAME TOWN - shocker!)

I felt like kind of an idiot yesterday when, about an hour after starting the thread, I looked at one of the bookshelves of kid's books in my house and spotted two CYOA books. I don't think my son has looked at them yet, though.