Choose Your Own Adventure

• 1. Introduction

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  Choose Your Own Adventure put the reader in charge of the story. You were the detective, the mountain climber, the spy. Every few pages, the book stopped and asked what you wanted to do next. Turn to page 14 to follow the mysterious stranger. Turn to page 32 to head back to the ship. The choice was yours, and the consequences were real.

  Between 1979 and 1998, more than 250 million copies of these books sold worldwide. That number rivals the print runs of some of the most widely distributed texts in history. The series reached readers in 40 languages. And it all began with a father running out of ideas at bedtime.

  Edward Packard, the man who invented this format, did not set out to change how children read. He was just trying to keep his daughters entertained. What followed was a decade of rejections, a small Vermont press, a deal with Bantam Books, and one of the most successful publishing runs the children's market has ever seen. The questions this documentary will follow are simple: how did a bedtime story become a global phenomenon, and why did it matter so much to the children who read it?

• 2. A Bedtime Story

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  Packard had a character named Pete, and Pete spent his adventures on an isolated island. One night, Packard ran out of ideas for what Pete should do next. So he turned the question over to his daughters. The two girls came up with different paths, and Packard invented a separate ending for each.

  What struck him, he later recalled, was the natural enthusiasm they had for the idea. He began to wonder whether he could write it down. That question turned into a manuscript titled The Adventures of You on Sugar Cane Island. Packard set out in 1970 to find a publisher.

  Nine publishing companies rejected the manuscript. He shelved the project. Five years later, in 1975, he convinced Ray Montgomery, co-owner of Vermont Crossroads Press, to take it on. That small Vermont press sold 8,000 copies of the book, a significant number for a local house of its size. The success caught the attention of Pocket Books, where the series also found readers. But Montgomery believed a larger publisher could take the concept much further.

• 3. The Bantam Era

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  Constance Cappel and R. A. Montgomery published the earliest books under the name "Adventures of You" through Vermont Crossroads Press, starting with Packard's Sugarcane Island in 1976. The move to Bantam Books changed the scale of everything.

  Bantam gave the series its now-famous name and began printing in 1979. Packard and Montgomery were both selected to write books for the series, and the publisher also contracted out titles to additional authors. A 1981 article in The New York Times helped bring the books to a wider audience, and an interview with Packard on The Today Show followed.

  Between 1979 and 1998, Bantam published 184 books in the series. The format remained consistent: stories written in the second person, aimed at readers aged seven to fourteen, with the protagonist defined by the adventure rather than by name or fixed identity. A protagonist might be a private investigator, a race-car driver, a doctor, or a spy. Some books even let readers choose which role to play before the story began.

• 4. How the Books Worked

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  The mechanical heart of every Choose Your Own Adventure book was the branch. After a few pages of setup, the story presented the reader with two or three options. Each option led to new pages and new options, fanning out through the book until a reader landed on an ending.

  Early titles offered as many as 44 different endings. Later adventures sometimes had as few as 7. There was no fixed pattern governing how many pages separated one choice from the next, or whether most endings were good or bad. That unpredictability was deliberate. It made repeat readings feel genuinely different.

  Packard and Montgomery also pushed the format in stranger directions as the series matured. Some books contained endless page loops. Others hid trick endings. Inside UFO 54-40 included what became known as the "paradise planet" ending, reachable only by cheating or by accidentally turning to the wrong page. The only way to reset was to close the book entirely and start from page one. That kind of surprise treated the physical object of the book as part of the game.

• 5. The Stories Themselves

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  The books were written to be broadly inclusive. Stories were generally gender- and race-neutral, though some illustrations presumed a male reader, reflecting the demographics the publisher was targeting at the time. The protagonist's age shifted depending on the book. Some stories implied a child; others placed the reader in an adult role.

  Critics had reservations about literary quality. Writing for Smithsonian, Jackie Mansky noted the series had a formulaic style. She quoted an English scholar who described many of the multiple-storyline books as "true skunks" in terms of literary merit. Mansky herself added that it was important to remember the books were marketed toward children, who responded to the straightforward simplicity of the questions posed to them.

  That directness was not an accident or a compromise. The books treated young readers as capable of making decisions and living with the results. A bad ending was not a punishment; it was information, an invitation to try a different path. The structure carried its own implicit argument about reading as an active rather than passive experience.

• 6. Decline and Revival

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  By the 1990s, computer games were drawing young audiences away from paper-based interactive fiction. The competitive pressure mounted steadily, and the series declined. Bantam discontinued it in 1999, a year after the last book was published.

  When Bantam, by then owned by Random House, allowed the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark to lapse, a new company stepped in. Chooseco relaunched the series in 2003. In January 2019, Chooseco initiated a trademark infringement challenge against Netflix over the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Netflix settled the suit in November 2020.

  Choosequo also has plans to reissue titles by Packard beginning in August 2025. The legal dispute with Netflix had the side effect of reminding a large audience that the trademark still existed and that the format had a living owner. Z-Man Games had already issued a licensed co-operative board game called Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger in June 2018, inspired by R. A. Montgomery's book in the series. A film adaptation is also in development at 20th Century Studios, with the production company Radio Silence directing and Tom Bissell writing the screenplay.