Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second person's perspective, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the actions of the main character and plot results. The series is based on the concept created by Edward Packard and originally published by Constance Cappel and Ross Crossroads Press by R. A. Montgomery as the "Adventures of You" series, beginning with Packard's Sugarcane Island in 1976.
Choose Your Own Adventure , as published by Bantam Books, was one of the most popular children's series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling over 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998. When Bantam, now owned by Random House, enables your Stop Your Own Adventure trademark stopped, this series was relaunched by Chooseco, who now owns the trademark. Chooseco did not republish the title by Packard, who had started his own trail, U-Ventures.
Video Choose Your Own Adventure
Format
Originally made for children ages 7 to 14, books are written in the second person. The protagonist's character - that is, the reader - takes on a role relevant to the adventure; for example, private detectives, mountain climbers, race car drivers, doctors, or spies. Stories are generally gender and race neutral, although in some cases, especially in illustrations, the presumption of male readers (target demographic groups) does appear. In some stories, the protagonist is implied to be a child, whereas in another story, they are adults.
The stories are formatted so that, after a few pages of reading, the protagonist faces two or three choices, each leading to more options, and then to one of the many endings. The final amount is unregulated, and varies from as many as 44 initial titles, to at least 8 in the next adventure. Likewise, there is no clear pattern among the various titles about the number of pages per end, the ratio from the good end to the bad end, or the progress of the reader backward and forward through the pages of the book. This allows for a realistic sense of unpredictability, and leads to the possibility of rereading, which is one of the distinguishing features of the books.
As the series progresses, Packard and Montgomery experiment with gamebook formats, sometimes introducing unexpected twists like endless page rounds or tip tricks. Examples include "heaven planets" ending with In UFO 54-40 , which can only be achieved by cheating or accidentally switching to the wrong page, and a potentially endless storyline in The Race Forever
Maps Choose Your Own Adventure
History
According to Packard, the core idea for this series comes from the bedtime story she tells her daughter, revolves around a character named Pete and her adventures. Packard stated, "I have a character named Pete and I usually tell him to face all these different adventures Tuesday on a remote island, but that night I ran out of things for Pete to do, so I just asked what they would do. Her two daughters came with different paths to take and Packard thought of the end of each path. "What really surprised me was their natural enthusiasm for the idea, and I thought: 'Can I write this?'"
Packard soon developed this basic premise into a script titled Your Adventure on Cane Island . He left in 1970 to find a publisher but was rejected by nine publishing companies, causing him to put aside the idea. In 1975, he was able to convince Ray Montgomery, one of the owners of Vermont Crossroads Press, to publish the book and sell 8,000 copies, a large sum to a small local publisher. The series is then marketed to Pocket Books, which are also sold well, but Montgomery believes it will sell better if larger publishers can be found. After some discussion, Montgomery can make a contract for the series with Bantam Books. Packard and Montgomery were selected to write books for the series, including contracts from titles for additional authors.
The famous phrase "Choose Your Own Adventure" was born when Ed Packard sold his second book and all three. The second, Deadwood City, is a Western story, and junior editor Dinah Stevenson is tasked with creating a jacket line that will explain this unfamiliar narrative style to the reader; Stevenson came up with "Choose your own adventure in the Wild West." The sentence is adapted for the next title with the tag line, Third Planet of Altair: Choose your own adventure in outer space.
This series is very successful after starting to print with Bantam Books. This encourages the creation of three other series by authors with Bantam Books that work in the same format. Nineteen other series of the same format were published by rival publishers. The immense popularity of the concept led to the title of a new genre of writing for the format, called gamebooks.
See also
- Register Choose Your Own Adventure book The
- Usborne Puzzle Adventure Series
- Choose Your Own Adventure: The Abominable Snowman
- Fighting Fantasy
- Lone Wolf
- Give Yourself Goosebumps
- Twistaplot
- Interactive fiction
- Visual novel
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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