Mine was Trouble on Planet Earth. It was a great concept: you and your brother Ned are a synergistic psychic team whom the U.S. government calls on to help out with really difficult cases. The problem: all the petroleum in the world is suddenly disappearing. What’s going on? You figure it out! (True to form of these books, the answer isn’t always the same. It could be that aliens are taking it, or it’s being piped to another dimension, or oil cartels are manipulating the supply to drive up prices, or we could just be running out of the stuff.) It was weirdly dark, even for this series, and the characters—particularly Ned—were especially vivid. I think it was based on a true story, or something.
In case you need to have your memory jogged, here’s a pretty thorough list of the titles. Man, I can’t believe that more than a hundred of these books came out after I grew out of them!
Oh, I’ve better not forget “You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat”, which was actually written by Harry Harrison. (You can’t. Be The Rat, that is. The title is lying. Still, it was well written.)
I wonder if this is taking linking too far.
To choose yes, rebuke Scott.
To choose,you don’t care, turn to page 8.
Ooh, any of the time travel ones with the silver covers (can’t recall the names and my copies are all at home at the moment) or the one where you start out in a sub. My memory sucks. The real Choose Your Own Adventures as I recall were all very difficult.
I probably read about twenty of them in my day. I can’t remember the title, but my favorite one was where you’re a kid who travels to San Francisco with his uncle, except it turns out that the uncle is actually a secret government agent who’s somehow involved with the construction of a time machine. Depending on your first choice, you either help the uncle battle international terrorists out to steal the time machine or else you get zapped back to 1906 just before the Great San Francisco earthquake. Now that was a true classic.
Any child who doesn’t get to read these things is being deprived.
Aw man! I loved those books! In fact, after my grandmother passed away, I retrieved my collection from her basement. I’ve got about twenty, and I’ve been reading them off and on since about November. The ones by Edward Packer and R. A. Montgomery are the best. Packer’s Hyperspace is probably my favorite. It is surprisingly sophisticated–the closest thing to metafiction for a young audience. I also really enjoyed Space Patrol, where you keep peace in the solar system, and Escape, where the U.S. has divided up into three or four warring republics and you lead your group to freedom in Colorado.
I loved these books as a kid. Read them, reread them, rereread them, and loved them. Of course they were always too damn short and some of the plots and endings were just plain stupid, but they were great fun. We owned probably the first 10 or so, but, as with all things as a kid, I grew out of them pretty quickly. That and it got too expensive to buy them new.
My favorite would have to be The Mystery of Chimney Rock, where you and your two cousins go to investigate a haunted house with a scary cat and an creepy old lady. Most excellent! The first time I did it I think I turned into a mouse and the cat ate me. Weird what you remember 25 years later, huh?
KID GEEK ALERT!!!
KID GEEK ALERT!!!
My sisters, family friends, and I would enact these books as plays, where our parents get to decide what happens next. We did Chimney Rock, Who murdered Harlowe Thrombey, and Space and Beyond. Yeah, I know… Geeky.
My favorite is from the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. I think the title was Escape from the Carnival of Terror but I could be wrong. I enjoyed it though, and even made it out once or twice. I enjoyed both the CYOA books and the Goosebumps series as a kid, so naturally I was overjoyed when the GYG series started.
I also really enjoyed the Fighting Fantasy series. Never finished one though, and my favorite one out of the library collection was missing pages.
There’s only one that sticks out in my mind. I don’t remember the title, but the plot was that you had to search for Utopia. The endings make for a rather clever twist, which I won’t spoil here.
I think that cmkeller is thinking of “Inside UFO 54-40”. I had that one too, but it wasn’t my favorite. As I recall…there was a Utopia passage in the book, but there was no way to actually reach that ending. There’s something about “you made no decisions and followed no directions, and you made it to Utopia” in there. That kinda bugged me.
Nah, my favorites were the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Kinda like D&D, you got to have a character sheet and battle with beasties as you made your way to whatever goal the book set for you. All of the ones I had were pretty great, with special kudos to #10, “House of Hades”, and #7, “Island of the Lizard King”.
I thought by far the best one was By Balloon to the Sahara, by D. Terman. It had a whole ton of endings, and quite a bit of interesting meta-humor. There were neat things you got by reading it over and over again, such as seeing the same encounter from multiple different angles. And there was a page that you couldn’t get to at all, which teased you and then basically said “And then you died a horrible death for trying to cheat the choose-your-own-adventure gods. Now go back to the beginning”.
Wow. Looking through that list, I saw so many I remember loving. So much fun, and if you read it once, that didn’t mean it would have the same ending a second time!
Of course, after a read or two, you could figure out exactly the right decisions to make to get the optimal ending. Or, you could keep your finger at the last page, scan for a The End, and abort–but that was cheating.
I always enjoyed reading the book through cover to cover. Surreal, but satisfying.
R.A. Montgomery came to my 4th Grade class once. Turns out he knew my great uncle and had dedicated one of his books to him, so we had this incredibly weird “small world” moment when he came to speak to my class.
My favorite were the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? ones. Man, I loved Carmen Sandiago stuff as a kid. I watched the TV show, I had the computer games…
One passage that I remember was that you decide, once you enter the Egyptian pyramid, to only make left hand turns. When you turn to the next specified page, it says something about “it’s not possible that all you’ll make are left hand turns…forever?”
Then you turn to another page, then back to the one where you say you’re gonna make left hand turns.
Apparently, once you make a left hand turn, you keep doing it until you eventually die.
Anyone besides me ever try to read one straight-thru, even though the pages were out of sequence?
Wow! I remember loving these books, but oddly enough remember very few specifics. Only a few of the titles seem even vaguely familar. I read a bunch, though: I’d get 5-6 out from the library at a time, and blow through them quickly before moving to a new one (which is probably why I don’t remember any specific one too well).
I do, however, remember my routine.
First, I’d read through and try to make the choices I thought I’d most likely really make in real life (though sometimes all available choices were things I wouldn’t do/silly/really arbitrary like turning left or right). This was a game; if I made it to a “good” ending, then I won. If not, I lost. I usually lost.
Then, I’d go through and every time I came to a choice, I’d either keep a finger or other bookmark there. I made sure to go back and try all possible choices. After that, I’d flip through the pages in order just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I think this routine was an early sign of some of my OCD tendencies.
