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# 2025-01-20 - Choose Your Own Adventure Gamebooks
Las Ruinas Circulares by Ricardo Garbini
> He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter
> of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task a man
> could undertake, even though he might penetrate all the enigmas of
> a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a
> rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. --Jorge Luis Borges
The other day i went on a walk and found a stack of seven
Choose Your Own Adventure books in a little free library. I grabbed
all seven of them because i fondly remember checking these books out
of my grade school library. I read a couple of them and was pleased
to learn that i still enjoy the books.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Gamebooks
One of the books contained an informative article titled
"The History of Gamebooks" which is included at the bottom of this
post.
"Consider The Consequences" is the oldest gamebook i could find,
published in 1930.
About "Consider The Consequences"
Download "Consider The Consequences"
Archive.org has freely downloadable gamebooks, listed in the link
below.
List of Gamebooks
My list includes four Zork titles.
## Interactive Fiction
These Zork titles are fun for me, because this means Zork comes in
both gamebook form and as interactive fiction. I was first
introduced to Zork on a minicomputer, only at that time it was named
"Dungeon". This was around the same time i discovered the
Choose Your Own Adventure books in the school library.
Dungeon (DOS port)
Interactive Fiction
GET LAMP (Documentary About Interactive Fiction)
IFArchive Gopher Mirror
## The History of Gamebooks
Although the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series, first published in
1976, may be the best known example of gamebooks, it was not the
first.
In 1941, the legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published
"Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain" or "An Examination of the Work
of Herbert Quain," a short story that contained three parts and nine
endings. He followed that with the better known work, "El jardín de
senderos que se bifurcan," or "The Garden of Forking Paths," a novel
about a writer lost in a garden maze that had multiple story lines
and endings.
More than 20 years later, in 1964, another famous Argentine writer,
Julio Cortázar, published a novel called "Rayuela" or "Hopscotch."
This book was composed of 155 "chapters" and the reader could make
their way through a number of different "novels" depending on choices
they made. At the same time, French author Raymond Queneau wrote an
interactive story entitled "Un conte à votre façon," or "A Story As
You Like It."
Early in the 1970's, a popular series for children called "Trackers"
was published in the UK that contained multiple choices and endings.
In 1976, R.A. Montgomery wrote and published the first gamebook for
young adults: "Journey Under The Sea" under the series name "The
Adventures of You." This was changed to "Choose Your Own Adventure"
by Bantam Books when they published this and five others to launch
the series in 1979. The success of CYOA spawned many imitators and
the term gamebooks came into use to refer to any books that utilized
the second person "you" to tell a story with multiple choices and
endings.
Montgomery said in an interview in 2013:
> This wasn't traditional literature. The "New York Times" children's
> book reviewer called "Choose Your Own Adventure" a literary
> movement. Indeed it was. The most important thing for me has
> always been to get kids reading. It's not the format, it's not
> even the writing. The reading happened because kids were in the
> driver's seat. They were the mountain climber, they were the
> doctor, they were the deep-sea explorer. They made choices, and so
> they read. There were people who expressed the feeling that
> nonlinear literature wasn't "normal." But interactive books have a
> long history, going back 70 years.
See also:
Choose your own adventure digraphs
tags: article,book,fantasy,fiction,retrocomputing
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