[isolli]

Thanks for sharing. This part resonated :)

"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."

[nervousvarun]

These books were incredibly important to me as an 80s kid. Was a voracious reader in general but absolutely loved these because they had replay value! I remember scouring through these on long family trips in the car to find every possible ending.

The parallels with modern video games are obvious.

[slfnflctd]

The first video game (and one of the first programs) I wrote was a self-styled Choose Your Own Adventure on a C64 with ASCII art and maybe a total of 10 pages.

The only person who acted impressed by it was my grandmother - who had paid for the C64 - but that was enough for me.

[pests]

Same. I would compulsively graph the options as I went so I could backtrack back decisions.

[isolli]

In fact, this inspired me to buy such a book for my 9-yo son! They've grown in size, apparently (250-300 pages). Let's see how, in the age of omnipresent screens, he likes it :)