"You're walking down the hall. Turn to page 6 to take the left door" _turns to page 6_ "You fall down a never ending pit and are never seen again. You're deader than dead" _ffs_ - 9 year old me

When a Dungeons and Dragons player was home alone in the 80's a 'choose your own adventure' book was the best companion!

My mom got me The Cave of Time and The Mystery of Chimney Rock for Christmas one year. I wasn't too excited because I didn't think books were a great gift. Then I read them. They quickly became my favorite books and I started collecting them. Decades later, I still have them and treasure them. Thank you Mama!

Back in elementary school, early 80’s we were assigned a project to write a letter to somebody famous or influential. I wrote Mr. Packard. I received a letter back from him which I still have to this day. I was requesting him to write me in as a character in a story. He responded back that I was always a character in the story. Realizing now that I’m older what he meant. He did stamp the letter with a cool type of Indian elephant stamp. I had not thought about the letter or the books in a couple decades. It was nice to have this randomly pop up & brought back many years of good childhood memories. Thank you!

I'm over 40 years old and I'm not ashamed to admit I own several of these books and still read them. Space Vampire is probably my favorite.

When I was in 6th grade, we had a reading competition to see who could read the most books. There was a big debate whether my CYOA books counted since you didn’t necessarily read the “whole” book. So I had to agree to read every possible ending in order for it to count. I won by reading every CYOA book available at the time.

A few years ago I decided to recollect original Choose Your Own Adventure books from local used bookstores, and have so far found and bought 57 of the original 200+ books. I don't even have any kids, but my wife and I enjoy reading them to each other as a sentimental throwback, and a fun way of deciding who gets to make certain decisions affecting us jointly. I read her a story and if she dies, I get to make the decision, and vice versa :) it has worked out pretty well! My all time favorite books include "Vampire Express," "Ghost Hunter," and "The Abominable Snowman."

I am 47. One of my favorites in this series was Inside UFO 54-40. I was today years old when I learned that there was, in fact, NO WAY to reach the “good ending”. Decades of therapy answered in this one question 😂😂😂

This was Generation X's introduction to hypertext and the reason we ran with the internet in the early days. We also often did flip-book animations in the footers.

When my daughter was born last year I started thinking about my own childhood rites of passage and bought a used copy of Gorga the Space Monster. One day she picked it up and started flipping through it so I read her a few lines. Then I googled Packard, found his website and sent him an email of thanks. This dude WROTE ME BACK. I guess he had less to do since we were all pandemic quarantined. He wrote me back twice. We had a lovely chat.

My dad taught me to read early in life and I found and loved these books at a young age. My aunt was actually friends with Edward Packard's wife and when I was 8 she took me out to lunch in New York City - a cool restaurant with crayons and paper tablecloths at every table so you could doodle while you waited. We were ushered to our table and sitting there was a smiling man with salt and pepper hair that I never saw before. It was Edward Packard himself! He was as nice as you might imagine....a hero who lived up to your expectations. i still have battered, dog-eared autographed copies of Cave of Time, My Name is Jonah and Chimney Rock, nearly 40 years later....

I first discovered "The Cave of Time" in my local public library. My father had insisted we take piano lessons, and we were goign to the piano store in the local shopping mall... every week we'd get our allowance and then go to piano lessons. I would have my lesson first, because the piano store was just down the way from the Waldenbooks... every week I'd go in and buy a book... I remember that I could afford one book a week, but if I saved my change for a few weeks, every few weeks I could buy two books. I had a massive collection of CYOA books, and when I finally grew out of them I donated them to a local charity... some kid got my pile of books for Christmas in the early 90s. I hope that kid loved them as much as I did. Thank you for this wonderful trip down memory lane.

The best part of those books was always trying to get myself killed. The plots to those books were never all that riveting, but the death scenes were always described very well and really stuck with me as a boy. One I remember is this- "Before you lose consciousness, a vision of your family passes in front of you. You close your eyes to savor the image. It's the last thing you'll ever see."

I had a rule when I read these that when i picked a page to turn to it didn’t count until I took my last finger off the old page.

I was a huge fan of the 'Lone Wolf' role playing game books by Joe Dever and wonderfully illustrated by Gary Chalk. They had a choose your own adventure style story with combat and random elements using dice or a number chart in the back of the book using a simple character sheet. I've managed to collect nearly the entire series including the world of Magnumund Companion which are awesome. It was a unique take on this genre of book series that I very much appreciated as a kid.

The deaths didn't traumatize me when I was a kid. After all, the book taught me the valuable lesson that if you risk your life and get killed in the process, all you need to do is remember the page you came from and try the other choice. It's worked well for me.

I loved this series as a kid and I still have several of my original books. Many great memories there…

I still remember getting that very first print of "Choose Your Own Adventure: In the Cave of Time", from a Scholastic catalog in 1979, when I was in the 5th grade. It became my absolute favorite book, and from that point on, whenever I discovered a new book published, I had my parents snag it for me. I got the ENTIRE original run of Choose Your Own Adventure books, plus the subsequent year's run of Dungeons & Dragons Choose Your Own Adventure books. I still have those books in my book case here. All of them. They were ground-breaking and I'm willing to say, very integral in my getting involved in Dungeons & Dragons and role playing games in 1980. Strangely, in all these years, I've never met anyone other than myself who read these books or knew of their existence. Oh, there are some people I know today, who know about them simply because of the name had entered the common lexicon, but have never actually encountered or read them. I used to tell people all about how great these books were when I was a kid, only to receive blank stares.

38 endings, 37 of which led to horrible death. Great, fun reading.

WAR WITH THE EVIL POWER MASTER is the most metal title for anything.

I started with CYOA, and because of those books ended up reading Encyclopedia Brown and EVERY Hardy Boys book including the Case Files and any with Nancy Drew starring in them. What a foundation back in the 80’s/90’s. Thanks for this video. 🙏🏾👍🏾

Fighting Fantasy was the peak of the “choose your own adventure” fad. It mixed the ability to chose your path with D&D style role playing stats. I hope you do a video on that series someday

The "Twist-a-Plot" series was glossed over in the list of knockoff series, but it had an author who later became famous in his own right...R.L. Stine, who went on to write the Goosebumps series.

I remember buying new notebooks and attempting to write my own #ChooseYourOwnAdventure stories... numbering every page of the notebook first, and finding weird 'glee' in calculating how many pages I wanted to make them turn/in which direction--and even trying to write one of those endless-loop endings. It was a fun exercise. These books were powerful imaginative tools, honestly. I'd been hoping somebody would do a video dedicated specifically to this concept. Well done #ToyGalaxy. This was fantastic :)

Discovering UFO 54-40's secret is still one of the great literary joys of my childhood. Damn I felt so clever. There was also the ending where you were basically the Flash, but everything moved slow to you all the time. It makes a joke about waiting at the grocery store line for what seems like a month, but that's some No Exit grade existential nightmare fuel for an 8 year old.

When I was in junior high, if kids got too noisy at lunch they would put us on a sort of “timeout” period with no talking. So without speaking, my best friend and I were reading a space adventure “Choose Your Own Adventure” after we finished eating and would gesture when we were done with a page; at the time we could both speed read. Needless to say, I guess we looked like we were enjoying ourselves and got into trouble… for reading a book… IN SCHOOL… AT LUNCH! Yeah, that happened.

I still read these books from time to time, and I'm 46! Sure, it's not great "literature" or anything, but no other books get me involved in this particular way. I like to treat the story like a real life or death situation that is actually happening to me and it's thrilling to find out if I would've survived or not. Silly, maybe, but an absolutely fun diversion.

These were the starter kit for the Lone Wolf books, the grittier version of Choose Your Own Adventure with an epic story line.

For a series of children’s books, some of the fates/unhappy endings they chose were rather grizzly and traumatizing. That’s why I remember and loved them a lot as a kid!

A big part of my childhood, in the UK we had Fighting Fantasy. The first one was even a board game.

These books changed my life. In 4th grade (1983)I found them in the library after hearing about them from some other kid. I checked out “3rd planet from Altair”, which was in line with my interest in space / astronomy. I loved it, and started going to the library to check out more of them. I loved them so much that I would go to the library just to see if they had any new ones. Often. If there were no CYOA, I would read another “choose” series. If there were none of those, I read something else. My family didn’t have enough money to buy paperback books for $2.95. But I could use the library and I did. Big time. School work became trivially way for me. My Grades went to straight A’s. The only problem was that school was so easy that I was bored and wanted to read CYOA when I finished my work. My 4th grade teacher, who was pretty awful, got so frustrated with me sneaking those books to read in class that she called me a “retard” in front of the class. My momand I went to the school for a meeting with the principal and teacher. I was terrified because I thought I was in big trouble. Instead my mom tore into the teacher like I had never seen and told the principal that if she ever heard of any teacher saying that to a child again she would take it to the school board. And that’s how I learned how to stand up to authority when necessary.

I remember discovering "Choose Your Own Adventure" as a kid in a public library; since they'd be checked out, I never knew it was like a big series, all I knew was there was always 2 or 3 on the shelf at a time. Then one day, for some reason, a lady my mom worked for had given her a whole box of books to give to me, and in it were like 30 CYOA books... that was one of the greatest days of my childhood ever :D

"The best part is not knowing if you're going to die or not!" So, just like life.

"Choose your own Adventure" was the best!

I remember I had a Star Trek licensed one - not sure if it was an official Choose Your Own Adventure or not - where you're a new ensign interacting with the main characters. At one juncture, the transporter is malfunctioning, and one of your choices is to just jump into the beam to show everyone it's safe. You end up beamed into a rock. Even had a drawing of a rock with hair on it. * chef's kiss *

Had three of the Time Machine books. They improved on the concept by allowing the reader to select from a list of items to take with them on the adventure, which could be useful on the right page. Loved those books. Eventually gave them to a young man I was tutoring.

I still remember when we used to be able to bring a book for the teacher to read to the class. I brought a Choose Your Own Adventure book. But she didn’t get it and just read it straight through, even reading the instructions. She got confused when the story jumped around and put it down.

The "Give Yourself Goosebumps" series was another example of a CYOA copycat (the CYOA formula applied to the Goosebumps series!). Thanks for uploading!

It is impossible to describe how those books really felt interactive back in the early 80's. The world had very few choices, but video games and these books had endless choices with epic consequences.

I still remember to this day- you train for years in the art of ninja, you adapt to living in the darkness. You now have amazing night vision. You hide in the room ready to jump when, the light is turned on and you fall blindly out of a window to your death.

I remember getting ahold of one of these Choose Your Own Adventure books in the mid 1990s. I was so impressed with the concept I wrote my own story complete with multiple choices. The only problem was when I read it, I knew all what the outcomes of the choices were.

I didn't like reading as a child so the Choose your Own Adventure books were the only books I ordered due to the engagement. Some of the endings were very morbid and it got me thinking a lot about why did my character have to die? I was a big fan of these books until the NES came along.

I remember that the Mystery of Chimney Rock as a kid was my favourite Choose Your Own Adventure. Looking through the list I remember a few of them. Deadwood City, Inside UFO 54-40 and Mountain Survival. The Zork: The Forces of Krill was good too. I had the blue cover version. There were 2 sequels that I had. I remember they had a red and green cover. Apparently there was a 4th book but I never saw it in bookshops. There was knock-off choose your own adventure series too. I remember one I liked called pick-a-path: The Roller Coaster Ghost or something.

Edward Packard is still writing. I contacted him and thanked him for the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. He was appreciative. There are some 4th wall moments in the books where Edward Packard himself appears such as a drawing of him. I beg to differ with your use of the term "copycat books". ; Lone Wolf by Joe Dever was a very different story and game system. By the Way Project Aon was given permission to put the Lone Wolf books online for anyone to read. You can download the Kai Lord adventures!

There was also fighting fantasy game books that shared this format but also allowed you to roll dice to determine the outcome. Deathtrap Dungeon and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain are two of the ones I remember.

Just seeing those book covers hits me with nostalgia. I loved these when I was a kid.

my sister and I used to read these to each other while we washed dishes after dinner. One would read, and the other would wash and get to make the choices. Eventually we got so sick of the 'choices' being presented to us in the books having nothing to do with whether we were observant or clever but just being random 'pick a hallway' that we ditched the books all together and took over telling the stories to each other, with a story teller and the 'main character' who could make choices to influence the story at any moment. Those stories got pretty damn epic - and long - as we got older. As adults, decades later, we still sometimes say 'TBC' to each other which was our code, as kids when our parents told us to stop nattering, that the story was 'to be continued' the next time we were left on our own.

These were great, and a great stepping stone to Joe Denver’s Lone Wolf series of CYOA-like books.

Race Forever blew my mind as a kid. One of the endings time loops back to the beginning so you literally race forever

Joe Dever's Lone Wolf books were my gateway to TTRPGs as a kid!

I remember Deadwood city was the first book I got the desired ending in, I still remember that feeling . Great books .

My favorites have always been "The Mystery of Chimney Rock" and Which Way Books' "Invasion of the Black Slime."

Imagine not cheating at Choose Your Own Adventure

My mother used to take us to the nearest library once a week during summer vacation, to pick up some books and buy some ice cream at the nearby shop. I read *so many* CYOA books during those summers. I loved them, and they seeded my later foray into Dungeons & Dragons, which has lasted to this day. But I sometimes miss those old kids' books.

Awesome video, guys! Thanks so much for taking a chance and choosing this option! I went and looked at my collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books right after watching this vid. Have a few I don't even remember reading. Fun times.

I loved these books growing up. It was fun to see what would happen depending on your choices. A couple of them I flowcharted out, not even knowing what a flowchart was at that time. I started programming and put the logic from a couple of books into a program that showed the different choices. This was when our school had one Apple II+ for the entire school.

*realizing you made a choice* “I didn’t take my hand off the page so it doesn’t count!” I remember having this in school that had to do with historical events. Great video!

One of the best books I remember is, "Mountain of Mirrors" by Rose Estes. It was a perfect and brief D&D adventure without rolling the dice.

When I saw the title I was reminded by the Goosebumps choose your own ending books that my older siblings had. I was very excited to hear how this started!

As a child I thought reading was boring and refused to sit and read any book simply for enjoyment. When I stumbled across Choose Your Own Adventure books it was the first time I genuinely enjoyed reading and would scramble to read as much as I can. That started me on my path to reading for enjoyment.

My favorite version of this was Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series. An adventure RPG with combat and persistent growth of skills and equipment that carried over to later books. EDIT - oh lol they got a shout out.

I’ve got such happy memories of reading these type of books as a pre-teen / teenager - especially the Fighting Fantasy series that was everywhere in the UK in the early 80’s 😊👍

I still have my copy of The Mystery of Chimney Rock. I liked the dark/scary aspect, instead of the usual no one dying or being locked away in a house forever preteen books.

I still have my D&D choose your own adventure books from the 80's, about a dozen or so. My school library would have book fairs and I got as many as my allowance could afford.

The Time Machine series were my favorite. I liked how there was only ever one ending and they were sneaking in history lessons while I read. In college (mid 90s) I made a cheesy tribute page and one of the authors thanked me for keeping the series 'alive'. I must have read book #2, "Search for Dinosaurs" a dozen times!

I was a big fan of the "Lone wolf" series. Very similar in format, those kind of game/books were so awesome and helped me to learn to enjoy reading.

I remember getting really into these books when I was in 6th grade (1984-85). I also remember the teachers and librarians at my school having an irrational hatred of these books and we weren't allowed to read them for class assignments or book reports. One thing I liked the most about the books was that "plot armor" didn't really apply, since many of the endings ended up in horrible deaths for the main character. In normal books, once the main character of the story is established, you can usually tell if they are going to survive some terrible danger based on how much of the book is left to read. For example, if your main character is trapped in a tree with hungry lions clawing at him from the ground on page 50 of a 300 page book, then you can pretty much assume that main character is going to make it out of that situation mostly intact. This wasn't the case for CYOA books.

We went nuts for these books when they first came out (I'm that old). The campaign to get them into public school libraries worked extremely well. Anytime these books were back on the shelves, they were gone the next day.

I remember being introduced to goosebumps choose your own adventure books as a kid and having my mine blown. I literally thought it was pioneering reading technology 🤣😂

I remember going to the library in the late 80s and through the 90s to check out the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I spent hours trying to read through all the paths cause they hooked you into the story. Good times.

Thanks for the overview! Loved all these multiple option books (MOB), from Chose Your Own Adventure to the Endless Quest and Find-Your-Fate series.

Wizards Warriors & You! This series is what launched my love of reading books. Thanks for reminding me of such an innocent time.

9:10 wait a minute, William H. Macy & Felicity Huffman were in the _Choose Your Own Adventure_ DVD?? *If you decide to pay off The Abominable Snowman to take the SAT for your daughter, turn to page 6.*

I read literally every single one of the original series. Growing up in the bay area in the 80s, my library would trade books with all the other libraries around and I would special order each one, keeping tabs until I read every single one.

Interesting! When I read them as a kid, I always bookmarked pages and when a path ended retraced my steps to try to get see what other possibilities there were.

I only had two: You Are A Monster and You Are A Millionaire. I still have them. I just wish I had more. Thank you for the upload.

missed my own personal favorite series: Sorcery! By Steve Jackson The series featured a neat spell system that required you to memorize spell names and collect spell components, as well as keeping a notecard with your character's items, to proceed through a several book adventure, that could be played as each adventure separately, or all three in a row with a continuing character

i loved these books in elementary school! it was this series, Encyclopedia Brown, and the Hardy Boys which i loved the most ! : )

I was a Wizards, Warriors, and you reader. Loved that I could choose who my character was.

The seeding worked well. I would walk out of my High School to the Library across the street and read these almost daily until my grandfather picked me up.

Honestly, one of the best things about being a kid at the time.

Those were some of my FAVORITE books to read! Thanks for making this informative video! I enjoyed learning about their origins & the journey they went thru over the years! 🤓

A similar series of books is "Lone Wolf Adventures". It's a full single player ttrpg where you make a unique character with a full character sheet and carry your progress forward through the books. Theres 32-34 books in the series. You need a D10 for the rolls, but it has a number grid in the back and ya drop your pencil on it and where the eraser lands is your dice roll.

Great video. I used to love those books as a kid, but I didn't realize they made it so far into the modern age with Audible, et. al, although I do remember that Black Mirror episode. I don't know if it was specifically a CYOA book but I remember one where one of the endings was being stuck on a stairwell that never ended no matter how many stairs you went up or down... that one ending always haunted me.

I got rid of most of my collection, but I still hold onto my favorite 3: "Cave of Time", "Forbidden Castle", and "Mystery of Chimney Rock" -- the best one of all IMHO.

My favorite ones were the RL Stine "Give Yourself Goosebumps: Reader Beware You Choose The Scare!" Books. I also loved his regular Goosebumps books as well, and both are a big reason I am a horror novelist.

Great efforts were put in this chronology video. Thank you, this was amazing.

Fun fact: The video game variant of these books are nowadays visual novels who are highly popular in Japan, but also played (and written) elsewhere. They mostly add graphics and music to the whole experience.

I was more into Ian Livingstone + Steve Jacksons: _Fighting Fantasy_ style books.

We did a choose your own adventure book for my book club. I died after my first choice

CYOA books led me to writing my own 50 page CYOA book for an assignment in 6th grade. It was supposed to just be a short story but I asked to write a CYOA for it. This led to me making full RPGs that played on a stack of paper with each sheet being like a screen in a game. About 10 years ago, I made a wrestling storyline game (Quest for Gold) that was CYOA with a full editor to create your own storylines.

I like stories like this when each move you make you get an ending whether it be a book,game,video,etc

Most of the CYOA titles from the mid-80's were pretty tame, so I wasn't prepared for "The Horror of High Ridge" by Julius Goodman. The gore & suspense freaked me out, but despite the drastic shift in intensity levels, I loved that book, and read the hell out of it.

Toy Galaxy is the channel I didn’t know I needed and Choose your own Adventure is the book series that I couldn’t live without. I devoured these books and own a few today. My two favorites were Vampire Express and Curse of Batterslea Hall. Great memories of riding to the library getting those books (and others) and spending a stormy summer afternoon dodging ghosts and the undead. Thanks, Dan, for an amazing show. I always look forward to each episode. This one was a real treat!

This was awesome! I never knew the whole backstory or what happened to the series, although I did have a couple of the "Which Way" books as well as several of the OG books (purchased at book fairs in elementary school).

these videos are always so insightful and well researched! thank you.

4:41 As regards law puns the Onion is still reigning champion with "Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On Technicality"

I loved these. I also really liked the Wizards Warriors and You books where you had to choose between being a Wizard or Warrior and then pick a certain number of weapons or spells. Some of your choices were dependent upon your inventory, so it added an element of strategy. I also remember reading a couple of the Indiana Jones Find Your Fate series. So much fun!

Thanks! Really enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane. It reminded me of going to my elementary school library in the early 90’s and reading as many of these as I could get my hands on!

I’m very thankful that this Book series was created. I really got involved through a knockoff myself when I picked up a “Twist of Fate” book tied to James Bond. It was a lot of fun. I don’t think I ever read any books from CYOA but I have also become a big fan of Give Yourself Goosebumps from the Goosebumps series. I certainly might have to look up the original series sometime. I loved the ridiculous joke about your cat that was funny as heck and I sneezed from laughter! Great job on this recap!