I read this Slate article about the Choose Your Own Adventure series, which was interesting enough if you grew up reading this books. But more interestingly, it led me to a few internet treasures. First, this totally obsessive infographic breakdown of a few books in the series, with several observations about how the number of endings changed over time*. Second, this gamebook information repository. That, in turn, led me to something really fabulous: Project Aon.
*It’s a pretty long discussion (and white text on a black background, which I absolutely can’t read for more than a couple of minutes before my eyes feel like they’re about to melt) so I may have missed it if the author mentioned this, but my thought about the decline in the number endings was pretty straightforward: as a kid, I actually didn’t want a lot of endings. The early books get tiresome because there’s an ending every few pages. The later books, with much longer, more elaborate stories, were more satisfying to read. I guess the authors agreed because they got tired of coming up with 30+ endings per book, per the Slate article.
So among the vast realms of CYOA-style books was this one role-playing type of series called Lone Wolf. You got to sort of customize your character and you’d have supplies, and you’d have to make sure you had some food and a good weapon. You developed the character more as the series went along, gaining experience and new items. You’d get into battles too, and you had to be careful because you could indeed die, and it felt like a much more serious death than in a standard CYOA, since you’d invested in this character a lot more. Anyway, I always liked these and always wanted to get to work my way through the whole series.
Uh, then like twenty years passed. So now I’m probably never going to pick these books up again, but the whole point of this is that Project Aon has digitized all of the original books and many of the subsequent ones (which I didn’t even know existed!) with the full blessing of the author. So if I DID ever seriously want to reread these things…
