In 1969, a Vermont lawyer named Edward Packard was telling his daughters a bedtime story about a man named Pete who was stranded on a deserted island. Running out of ideas, he asked his daughters: what do you think Pete should do? Their answers launched one of the most significant publishing phenomena of the twentieth century. The Choose Your Own Adventure series would go on to sell more than 250 million copies in 38 languages, and its influence on how we think about story, agency, and interactive media reverberates to this day.
Edward Packard and the Accidental Invention
Packard spent years developing his branching story concept before it found a publisher. His first manuscript, originally called "Sugarcane Island," was rejected by multiple publishers before Vermont Crossroads Press released it in 1976 as part of a series called Adventures of You.
The concept attracted the attention of Random House, which licensed the format and relaunched it as Choose Your Own Adventure in 1979. The series would become the best-selling children's book series of the 1980s — outsold only by the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew combined.
Packard's concept was elegantly simple: write a story in the second person ("You are standing at a crossroads..."), present choices at key moments, and direct readers to different pages based on their decisions. The books were typically 100-150 pages with 20 to 40 possible endings.
The Golden Age: 1980s Interactive Reading
Random House published more than 180 books under the Choose Your Own Adventure banner between 1979 and 1998, written by dozens of authors under the editorial direction of R.A. Montgomery and others. The books spanned genres — science fiction, mystery, fantasy, horror, and historical fiction — and ranged from illustrated children's stories to more sophisticated adventures aimed at young adults.
Competitors flooded the market throughout the decade. Bantam's Find Your Fate, Scholastic's Which Way books, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and dozens of others each put their own spin on the format. Fighting Fantasy added dice-based combat and statistics, blending the branching narrative with tabletop game mechanics — an influence still visible in today's RPG-flavored interactive fiction.
The books became a cultural touchstone. Children read them in school libraries, traded favorites with friends, and developed strategies for navigating the most difficult paths. The physical act of keeping a finger on an earlier page while exploring a branch — the original save state — was understood by everyone who grew up with the books.
The Parallel Story: Text Adventure Games
While the paperback industry was booming, a parallel evolution was happening in computing. Colossal Cave Adventure, created by Will Crowther in 1976 and expanded by Don Woods, introduced the concept of navigating a virtual space through typed commands. Unlike branching books, these text adventures were puzzles — the "story" was the space itself, and progress required solving problems, not making character choices.
Infocom, founded in 1979, elevated the text adventure to an art form. Their games — Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (co-written with Douglas Adams), and Deadline — featured sophisticated natural language parsers and genuine literary ambition. Hitchhiker's Guide, in particular, demonstrated that the medium could be genuinely funny, strange, and surprising in ways that linear text could not achieve.
The text adventure market collapsed in the early 1990s as graphical games became dominant, but the community never fully disappeared. The Interactive Fiction Archive, established in 1992, preserved thousands of games. Annual competitions like the Interactive Fiction Competition have run continuously since 1995, producing new work every year.
The Digital Revival
The internet changed everything. Twine, created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and released as open-source software, made it possible to create hypertext interactive fiction without any programming knowledge. An explosion of browser-based stories followed — many of them intimate, experimental, and deeply literary in ways the commercial paperback market never explored.
Choice of Games, founded in 2009, pioneered long-form commercial interactive fiction for digital platforms. Their ChoiceScript engine enabled novels of 200,000 words or more with branching paths tracking dozens of variables. Their games found an audience willing to pay for serious interactive storytelling on a par with commercial genre fiction.
Visual novels, long dominant in Japan, crossed into western gaming with titles like Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Disco Elysium. These games demonstrated that choice-based storytelling could be a prestige art form, not just a novelty.
Where We Are Today
Interactive fiction today is more diverse than it has ever been. Mobile platforms have created new mass markets for short-form interactive stories. Netflix's Bandersnatch brought the format to a streaming audience. AI-assisted writing tools are beginning to explore truly adaptive narratives.
At the same time, there has been a return to fundamentals. Writers and readers who grew up with the original Choose Your Own Adventure books are now creating their own stories for the first time, using modern tools that put the structural complexity of the craft within reach of anyone with a story to tell.
The core insight that Packard had in 1969 — that readers will be more engaged if you ask them what happens next — remains as true as it ever was. What has changed is our ability to act on it.
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