Choose Your Own Adventure

Overview

Choose Your Own Adventure is the paperback series that taught millions of children that a book could fork. Each one is written in the second person — you are the deep-sea diver, the time traveler, the explorer — and every few pages the text stops and offers a choice: if you decide to follow the dolphin, turn to one page; if you head back to the surface, turn to another. Some paths end in triumph and many end abruptly and badly, and the fun lies in going back to try again.

The series was published by Bantam Books from 1979 to 1998 and ran to 184 titles, selling more than 250 million copies in roughly 40 languages. It was not strictly fantasy — its books ranged across science fiction, mystery, history, spies and the supernatural — but its branching structure became one of the foundations of the Gamebooks & Interactive Books and of interactive storytelling in every medium that followed.

Origins

The idea belonged to Edward Packard, a lawyer who told bedtime stories to his children. When he ran out of ideas he would stop and ask them what they thought happened next, and he noticed that their choices made the story theirs. In 1969 he turned the technique into a manuscript, Sugarcane Island, about a young castaway. The William Morris Agency sent it to a string of major publishers, and all of them turned it down.

The book found a home in Vermont. R. A. Montgomery and Constance Cappel ran a small publishing house, Vermont Crossroads Press, and in 1976 they issued Sugarcane Island as the first of a line called Adventures of You. Cappel later made the connection to Bantam's marketing chief, Jack Romano, and in 1979 Bantam launched the series under a new name: Choose Your Own Adventure. Book 1 was Packard's The Cave of Time; book 2 was Montgomery's Journey Under the Sea. Packard went on to write dozens of titles and Montgomery more than fifty across the series and its offshoots.

How it plays

A Choose Your Own Adventure book is the simplest kind of gamebook, and the easiest place to see what a gamebook is. There are no dice, no statistics, no character sheet and no score. The reader starts on page one and reads normally until the text presents two or three options, each with a page number. Choosing is the whole game. The pages form a branching tree, and early titles could have as many as 44 different endings; later ones sometimes had as few as seven.

That makes it different from its close relatives. A Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf book adds a small rules system — dice or a random number table, stamina, combat — so luck and bookkeeping can decide your fate as well as your choices. A tabletop roleplaying game goes further still, replacing the printed text with a human game master who can answer any choice a player invents. Choose Your Own Adventure sits at the pure-story end of that spectrum: it is a novel with forks in it.

Reception & impact

The books were a publishing phenomenon of the 1980s, stocked in school libraries and bookfairs and aimed squarely at readers from about seven to fourteen. Chooseco, which now owns the brand, calls it the fourth best-selling children's book series of all time. Its success spawned imitators across the industry, and it arrived in the same years that Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork were teaching computer users to type their choices into a parser — two routes, print and digital, to the same idea of a story steered by its audience.

In Britain, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone launched Fighting Fantasy in 1982, taking the numbered, branching book and adding the dice and character sheet of Dungeons & Dragons. The result was the gamebook boom of the mid-1980s, which filled bookshop shelves with dozens of competing series.

Legacy

Bantam ended the original series in 1998 and later let the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark lapse. Montgomery and his partner Shannon Gilligan relaunched the series through their company Chooseco of Waitsfield, Vermont, which by its own account has been bringing the books back to shelves since 2006; in August 2025 it began reissuing Packard's titles as well. Packard himself moved into app-based interactive stories.

The brand's grip on popular memory was tested in court in January 2019, when Chooseco sued Netflix for trademark infringement over the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch; Netflix settled in November 2020. The phrase itself is now everyday shorthand for any branching experience, and the format's lineage runs through interactive fiction, dialogue trees in the computer RPG, and the choice-driven games of today.