CYOA books (off topic)

[Susan]

I was rather excited with the idea of introducing my godson to the "choose your own adventure" books that I remember enjoying as a kid for christmas this year. I went to the bookstore today and discovered they no longer are published. The saleslady mentioned something about a horror series but undoubtedly anything new would not compare to the original stories I remember reading, I was hoping those same books were still in print. Unfortunately the only place I can probably get them now is Ebay.

Why wouldn't they redistribute these books? If anything with kids today having short attention spans due to overstimulations from video games and movies, these would be the most ideal since they were fairly small books with little committment. They gave the reader the change to be creative and imaginative and have some control over their adventure/fate. They were ideal for the boy or girl reader (me being the latter..heh). Anyone remember these?

[Ash]

I loved these books!
I've read nearly all of the older ones...they started getting cheesy as they went on.

My all time favorite was "Hyperspace".
That was a trippy one!

Here's a good website for the books...click on the covers to see them up close and bring back memories.

 http://www.gamebooks.org/cyoalist.htm



Post Edited (11-03-03 20:47)

[JohnL]

>Unfortunately the only place I can probably get them now is Ebay.

Amazon has some listed, mostly used for various prices. I don't know if they're the ones you're looking for.

[Cullen]

Choose Your Own Adventure, Which Way, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Chose Your Own Nightmare, Find Your Fate... you name it, I read it.  Those books were great.

Too bad they're gone...

[Susan]

I saw amazon was selling them used by members - I just wish the book was redistributed.  I can't imagine kids are much different today, these would be great to bring out again. Seems there were all kinds from sci-fi to the kind where you are the person in the story. I think the concept also made it to some actual games on the commodore and later nintendo games?

Of my numerous internet searches I think I found the most interesting page of all, having to do with these books:

Click here

egads!
I hate to see something that was really fun dissapear. I wish I had saved all my old books from childhood but over the years they sort of dissapeared at yard sales and trips to goodwill. I think the only books I kept are old comic books like Willie Weirdie, Fatkat, Peanuts, Garfield, Belvedere, Family Circus and a few others.

I just hope mad libs are still around.



Post Edited (11-03-03 23:16)

[Ash]

Weren't they the books that had a story with blank lines every few words that, if passed around to your friends so they could ad lib (Hehe I just got it!..Duh!  How could've I missed that one after all these years), different words in the blanks?

Yeah...I remember 'em now.
Some books had different themes.

When I was younger and my friends & I filled one out, it was almost always sexual and crude in nature.

[Mofo Rising]

Mad Libs will never die!  Now there's a game I loved as a kid (and today).  The only problem: do you know how few people are any good at Mad Libs?  It requires a bit of imagination, and not just saying "shoes" for a plural noun because you're looking at your shoes.  How many people do you think even consider using abstract nouns such as "the American Dream"?  Or "eldritch" as an adjective?

Anyway, Choose Your Own Adventure.  Have you tried the local library?  The library I work out has tons of these sitting around in the children's paperbacks section.  Cheaper than eBay.  Also, we do have other CYOA type books, just not that specific brand.  I even saw a CYOA-type Return of the Jedi book.

And while we're on the topic.  Did anybody ever play the CYOA-type books that required you to make up a character sheet and roll dice (or use the RNG in the back) to play them.  I played a couple of books from Steve Jackson, and there was one series I was fond of, but I can't remember the name right now.  Could have been Grey Wolf.

[Cullen]

Lone Wolf.  That series was great.

[AndyC]

Mofo Rising wrote:

> Mad Libs will never die!  Now there's a game I loved as a kid
> (and today).  The only problem: do you know how few people are
> any good at Mad Libs?  It requires a bit of imagination, and
> not just saying "shoes" for a plural noun because you're
> looking at your shoes.  How many people do you think even
> consider using abstract nouns such as "the American Dream"?  Or
> "eldritch" as an adjective?

I have the same problem with Balderdash. If you don't play it with a group of fairly bright people, it's no fun.

As for the CYOA books being out of print, it's a shame. I loved those as a kid. Quick to read, and you felt like you had some control over the story. If you were so inclined, you could also go through again and again, trying all of the other choices. Nothing else came close.

On a related topic, it can be a mixed blessing to find a childhood favourite in the bookstore. I was pleased to see that John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy is still in print. It was a childhood favourite of mine, written in the late 60s (A teacher read the books to us in grade 5, around 1981).  Pleased as I was to read them again recently, I was apalled at the new cover art. This classic sci-fi adventure series has been repackaged to look like crappy teen potboilers. What's more, the inferior prequel Christopher wrote 18 years later has been stuck in at the beginning, where it messes up all of the surprises in the original books. Apparently, the marketing folks just stuck it in chronological order, without thinking about what it would do to the story. I suppose it's still better than when the books were presented as a tie-in to the British TV series based on them, but not much.



Post Edited (11-04-03 09:30)

[FearlessFreep]

I read most of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.  They did start tailing off in quality as they went along , which you could tell by the number of different possible endings. But the first ones were great

I used to use my fingers to save my previous decision places in case I died, so I could go back and try a new direction on a decision

[JohnL]

>I think the concept also made it to some actual games on the commodore and
>later nintendo games?

I think you might be thinking of Infocomics, which were computerized comic books where you could follow the story from different points of view. The following URL lists the IBM versions, but I'm pretty sure that all were available for the C64 also.

Infocomics

Plus, I did a search and found that the first Choose Your Own Adventure, The Cave of Time was made into a C64 game.

The Cave of Time

[Lee]

Holy HELL!!! Choose Your Own Adventure, Mad Libs, this is my childhood allover again! Talk about the good old days. Freep, I did the same thing with CYOA. If I made a choice that ended up with me dead, I'd get mad and backtrack to where I was to FIX the problem. As for Mad Libs. Jeez! Ours were always so goofy. Like with me and my brother, when ever we needed a noun usually the first word we thought up was butt(what can I say we were goofy kids). Although these days it probably wouldn't be much different. That's the type of goofy fun I don't get enough of these days.

[Susan]

Mofo - thanks for the library tip, i'll try that out (even tho i don't want to make this into a scavenger hunt).  I'm suprised nobody has really tried to revive this genre of bookwriting in a clever and imaginative way (i'm sure some exist out there now but no doubt like their predecessors)

Mad Libs - yep Ash, loved those too. The fill in the blanks were adjectives, nouns, people you know..etc. I always thought they should have a mad lib for grown-ups only. ;-)  

John - that cave of time on the C64 must have been what I was thinking of, I just somehow thought there were other similar games like that. I remember the adventure ones which were pretty much storytelling and then you typing in on the greenscreen "open the door", except my game never came with the proper commands so I sat there typing frustratedly trying to make something happen, anything!

I doubt anyone may have seen this but on the topic of games, although this one isn't really a game...I remember playing one which I think was a computer game. It was a two storyhouse you could see everything inside and a man lived in the house. Pretty much all you did was type in commands for him to do, you could make him go upstairs, eat, ring the doorbell..I spent hours trying to drive that man crazy and I never could get him to use the toilet, even tho one was provided on the screen. Ring a bell for anyone?

[JohnL]

>John - that cave of time on the C64 must have been what I was thinking of, I just
>somehow thought there were other similar games like that. I remember the

I think maybe the Infocomics were what you were thinking of. They were basically interactive comic books.

>adventure ones which were pretty much storytelling and then you typing in on the
>greenscreen "open the door", except my game never came with the proper
>commands so I sat there typing frustratedly trying to make something happen,
>anything!

Hehe. Text adventures, now called Interactive Fiction or IF. Such games are still going strong. There's a whole site devoted to them, with interpreters to run them on almost every OS under the sun, tools to write your own, contests etc.

>I doubt anyone may have seen this but on the topic of games, although this one
>isn't really a game...I remember playing one which I think was a computer game.
>It was a two storyhouse you could see everything inside and a man lived in the
>house. Pretty much all you did was type in commands for him to do, you could
>make him go upstairs, eat, ring the doorbell..I spent hours trying to drive that man
>crazy and I never could get him to use the toilet, even tho one was provided on
>the screen. Ring a bell for anyone?

Of course! That's Activision's Little Computer People.

Little Computer People

You can download a copy suitable for use with C64 emulators here;

Little Computer People Download

There were/are also programs to swap out the person in your copy, reset it so that he moves in again etc.

BTW, I *THINK* mine used the toilet, but I'm not positive now. I could never get mine to sleep though. The only time he ever used the bed was when I stopped feeding him and he turned green. :)

[Susan]

>>Of course! That's Activision's Little Computer People.
<<

ahhhhhHA! That must be it...the graphic on that link looks very similar.  It was mindless entertainment to say the very least...I remember cussing at no end to that little man. I miss how simple games used to be, now I can't even figure out how to use those game controls...even computer games are wildely complicated.

I went through a phase a few years back where i downloaded all those 8 bit games on my pc and played, but it's never the same as the joysticks and paddles (which i still have but aren't very operational) I'm such a geek i still have alot of my old toys, including the tomy pocket games and some of those handheld computer games from the early 80's which were baseball, hockey..etc. (nothing but a red blip and alot of loud noises)



Post Edited (11-04-03 20:09)