Reference Library
Interactive Fiction
Resources
The history behind the medium — gamebooks, text adventures, visual novels, and the authors and publishers who built them.
Start Here
Read the History
Choose Your Own Adventure — History, Books & Series Guide
184 books, 250 million copies sold — the complete story of the series that made branching books a household name.
Read moreThe History of Interactive Fiction
From 1970s gamebooks and mainframe text adventures to hypertext, visual novels, and modern branching apps.
Read moreText Adventure History
How Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork invented parser fiction — and why typing commands was once the whole genre.
Read moreThe Visual Novel Guide
What a visual novel is, where the format came from, and the titles that defined it.
Read moreMore to Explore
Looking for craft advice, not history?
Head over to the Guide for practical, step-by-step lessons on writing branching stories.
Inspired by the history? Write the next chapter.
StoryQuestor gives you a free visual canvas to build branching stories of your own.