In 1999, after twenty years and many tens of millions of books sold, Bantam Books announced that it would no longer be publishing its Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s paperbacks. So, since these histories currently find themselves in 1999, this seems like a good time to look back on one of the formative influences upon the computer games I’ve been covering for so many years now, as well as upon the people who played them — not least, yours truly. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for me to finally write an article I should have written a long time ago. Either way, I hope you don’t mind if I step out of the chronology today and take you way, way back , to steal a phrase from Van Morrison.
These books were the gateway drugs of interactive entertainment. — Choose Your Own Adventure historian Christian Swineheart
My first experience with interactive media wasn’t mediated by any sort of digital technology. Instead it came courtesy of a “technology” that was already more than half a millennium old at the time: the printed book.
In the fall of 1980, I was eight years old, and doing my childish best to adjust to life in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where my family had moved the previous summer from the vicinity of Youngstown, Ohio. I was a skinny, frail kid who wasn’t very good at throwing balls or throwing punches, which did nothing to ease the transition. Even when I wasn’t being actively picked on, I was bewildered at my new classmates’ turns of phrase (“I reckon,” “y’all,” “I’m fixin’ to”) that I had previously heard only in the John Wayne movies I watched on my dad’s knee. In their eyes, my birthplace north of the Mason Dixon Line meant that I could be dismissed as just another clueless, borderline useless “Yankee,” a heathen in the eyes of those who adhered to my new state’s twin religions of Baptist Christianity and Friday-night football.
I found my refuge in my imagination. I was interested in just about everything — a trait I’ve never lost, both to my benefit and my detriment in life — and I could sit for long periods of time in my room, spinning out fantasies in my head about school lessons, about books I’d read, about television shows I’d seen, even about songs I’d heard on the radio. I actually framed this as a distinct activity in my mind: “I’m going to go imagine now.” If nothing else, it was good training for becoming a writer. As they say, the child is the father of the man.
One Friday afternoon, I discovered a slim, well-thumbed volume in my elementary school’s scanty library. Above the title The Cave of Time was the now-iconic Choose Your Own Adventure masthead, proclaiming it to be the first book in a series. Curious as always, I opened it to the first page. I was precocious enough to know what was meant by a first-person and third-person narrator of written fiction, but this was something else: this book was written in the second person.
You’ve hiked through Snake Canyon once before while visiting your Uncle Howard at Red Creek Ranch, but you never noticed any cave entrance. It looks as though a recent rock slide has uncovered it. Though the late afternoon sun is striking the surface of the cave, the interior remains in total darkness. You step inside a few feet, trying to get an idea of how big it is. As your eyes become used to the dark, you see what looks like a tunnel ahead, dimly lit by some kind of phosphorescent material on its walls. The tunnel walls are smooth, as if they were shaped by running water. After twenty feet or so, the tunnel curves. You wonder where it leads. You venture in a bit further, but you feel nervous being alone in such a strange place. You turn and hurry out. A thunderstorm may be coming, judging by how dark it looks outside. Suddenly you realize the sun has long since set, and the landscape is lit only by the pale light of the full moon. You must have fallen asleep and woken up hours later. But then you remember something even more strange. Just last evening, the moon was only a slim crescent in the sky. You wonder how long you’ve been in the cave. You are not hungry. You don’t feel you have been sleeping. You wonder whether to try to walk back home by moonlight or whether to wait for dawn, rather than risk your footing on the steep and rocky trail.
All of this was intriguing enough already for a kid like me, but now came the kicker. The book asked me — asked me!! — whether I wanted to “start back home” (“turn to page 4”) or to “wait” (“turn to page 5”). This was the book I had never known I needed, a vehicle for the imagination like no other.
I took The Cave of Time home and devoured it that weekend. Through the simple expedient of flipping through its pages, I time-traveled to the age of dinosaurs, to the Battle of Gettysburg, to London during the Blitz, to the building of the Great Wall of China, to the Titanic and the Ice Age and the Middle Ages. Much of this history was entirely new to me, igniting whole new avenues of interest. Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish.
I remained a devoted Choose Your Own Adventure reader for the next couple of years. Back in those days, each book could be had for just $1.25, well within reach of a young boy’s allowance even at a time when a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today. Each volume had some archetypal-feeling adventurous theme that made it catnip for a kid who was also discovering Jules Verne and beginning to flirt with golden-age science fiction (the golden age being, of course, age twelve): deep-sea diving, a journey by hot-air balloon, the Wild West, a cross-country auto race, the Egyptian pyramids, a hunt for the Abominable Snowman. What they evoked in me was as important as what was actually printed on the page; each was a springboard for another weekend of fantasizing about exotic undertakings where nobody mocked you because you had two left feet in gym class and spoke with a stubbornly persistent Northern accent. And each was a springboard for learning as well; this process usually started with pestering my parents, and then, if I didn’t get everything I needed from that source, ended with me turning to the family set of Encyclopedia Britannica in the study. (I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea. Needless to say, this put a whole new spin on my underwater exploits until I finally did a bit of my own research about diving.)
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