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Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

I used to love these books as a kid. I suspect they're not as popular now with all of the non-linear video game options that kids have. But in their time, these were a complete game changer in storytelling.

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The visual novel genre is a huge non-Western electronic version of CYOA gamebooks. Wikipedia states "Visual novels originated in and are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006." They descend from '80s early adventure games, and not paperback CYOA, though.

Similarly, in the U.S., the popular 2010s licensed titles from Telltale Games were essentially electronic CYOA as well, since they were heavily narrative-driven and had simpler gameplay mechanics than traditional point-and-click adventure games.

Visual novels' popularity really can't be understated. They're adapted into anime the same way manga are. Steins;Gate is not only consistently one of the highest rated anime shows of all time, it's an adaptation of a visual novel. The Fate series (Fate/Zero, Unlimited Bladeworks, etc.) also stems from a visual novel.

Apparently they're so popular that people who don't even know Japanese have been motivated enough to create tools for reading them which extract the text and put it into various machine translators and dictionary lookups; and more recently, someone even trained an ML model to do it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/rzhbdz/from_s...

you can find them nowadays as video games, some with just text, some with higher production values. And I've also taken part in forum-based CYOAs, where one poster writes the adventure and the other posters vote on which option to choose, which can be quite fun and can be more reactive, as sometime the players will think of solutions the author didn't think of.

I'm pretty sure at least some were made into video games back in the day-I could've sworn I played the Escape series as a game on a Commodore 64 back in the 80s.

There's been some recent ports too: Steve Jackson's Sorcery, Fabled Lands, Deathtrap dungeons and others

It goes the other way too - there were definitely a few CYOA-style books set in the Zork! universe. Although I will say the Zork ones did let you make arguably cruel decisions.

I've actually been "playing"/"reading" a lot of them from https://www.choiceofgames.com/. They also offer a scripting language called "ChoiceScript" that allow anyone to make their own games. I'm sure it's not super popular, but they have their niche audience.

Thanks! I've had the idea of writing a scientific theory in this format, and having a hard time with how I'd do it. maybe choicescript would be helpful in that regard!

That sounds really interesting! Good luck!

Sadly the adventure books often have much more detail and different outcomes than many supposed “non-linear” games.

They also has the ability to “quick save” and go back to a decision point and try again. Some would even let you loop.

I semi-recently read one of the original series (about UFOs) and a much newer one by a different author (still an official choose-your-own-adventure, "#39: Curse of the Pirate Mist"). The first was much better. Suggests another reason for the decline.

#39 was right in the heyday of CYOA books.

There are split opinions on the original CYOA authors. Pretty much everybody agrees that Edward Packard made very tight and well constructed stories. Many folks hate RA Montgomery's stories because they are weird and meandering, almost psychedelic. Personally that's why I always enjoyed them, even as a kid, but I think I'm in the minority.

At any rate I don't think many people feel the series started to decline until maybe #100+

Yeah, some of those books were revised in the 2000s. I think the settings were modernized a little, that kind of think.

Thanks for the correction!

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