The Choose Your Own Adventure series is one of the most popular ever seen. With more than 180 books and almost forty years on the shelves, any collector trying to get them all will be very busy, but the new editions have their charm, and that is due to the inclusion of special maps that reveal the complete structure of each volume. This helps us better understand not only the creativity of the authors, but also the complexity of their work.
The story tells us that Choose Your Own Adventure had its official launch in 1979, but the original concept was developed by American writer Edward Packard three years earlier, under the name The Adventures of You with the first book, Sugarcane Island. Bantam Books published the 184 books between 1979 and 1998, the year it ended up under the wing of Random House. The new owners let the trademark drop, giving rise to ChooseCo, a publishing house founded by R. A. Montgomery, author of dozens of stories for the original series. ChooseCo is adding more books to Choose Your Own Adventure, and relaunching old volumes with very striking extra material...
The Secret Maps
These are special maps with the secret structure behind each book. Obviously, the idea is that readers (young people aged 7 to 14 in general) advance without having the slightest idea of what can happen in the story, but the existence of these maps confirms that creating the books was not simple at all. One of the most compelling examples is Sabotage by Jay Leibold, which hides 39 different endings. The second book in the series, Journey Under The Sea, has 42 endings, of which almost 80 percent are calculated to be unfavorable for the reader. So yes: the book not only has to trap you, but make you come back for more. A paper video game, if you will.
The Most Demanding Books
Later we find cases where the author decided to break the binary mechanism and offer three or more options to continue. However, the most demanding are those books that hide endings. Escape from the Haunted Warehouse forces you to solve a puzzle in the text to find it, and others basically depend on the reader disobeying the rules and flipping through the pages like a normal book. A fabulous work, worth knowing and preserving.
Source: Atlas Obscura
