R.A. Montgomery, the author and editor who founded the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books, passed away recently at his home in Vermont.
So much of my childhood was spent buried in these. I’d come home from the library with stacks of them. I have many fond memories of my father taking me to the local bookstore in New Jersey to get the newest releases and trying to figure out how to get off that damn spaceship alive. Spoiler alert: Inside UFO 54-40. You can’t win that one. Unless you cheat. It’s a metaphor for life.
When I was a kid, I liked to study the structure of the books (once I was done reading them, of course). It was fun to discover all the little secrets the books held. There were passages in the book that couldn’t be reached; there were choices that led you in circles; there were interesting connections between different story paths; there were ways the book text would mislead you.
Some might call it crude branching, but that was the genius of it. It was an algorithm that a kid could analyze and that’s a great feeling when you’re ten. For a lot of us, it was our first real introduction to logic. Even if that meant messing up and choosing a path that lead to some horrible demise, like getting boiled alive or sucked out into space. Combine gruesome, painful death with second-person writing style, and you’ve got something that can get a adolescent rattled.
Not only that: dialog trees are a staple of modern video games. Look at Mass Effect or Fallout; the player’s choices dictate success or failure, In modern games, this mechanic is used for tertiary goals, such as getting a character to trust you so they’ll give you something. But it’s the same mechanic as the CYOA books, and has the same charm. Strategy guides say things like “you have to let Fwiffo talk about his home planet before he’ll join your fleet,” which sounds exactly like my ten year old self advising my friends on how to get the best ending in a CYOA book.
I remember feeling nervous about the “choice” in those first few books, and quickly flipping back to that page when I thought I had chosen wrong. Somehow I always convinced myself I had made the right choice the first time. I still get chills when I think about navigating deep into the far reaches of space, making a daring choice or two, crash landing on an abandoned alien planet, and climbing out my ship to find an old, crumpled Coke can. This series taught me how to deal with death, failure, triumph and the Bermuda Triangle all at once.
While I was already an enthusiastic reader when I started to pick CYOA’s up, they turned me into an avid reader, which I remain to this day. Thanks Mr. Montgomery, for helping to make reading fun and inspiring a generation. Your ideas are still used in modern media, and will be for years to come. Few authors have such a legacy. All paths eventually lead to the end. Thanks for all the adventures and here’s to hoping you flipped pages to look ahead like the rest of us.
-Dagobot
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