Choose Your Own Adventure
SMRTR summary
A slim book with a bold promise ignited eight-year-old Jimmy Maher's imagination in 1980. "The Cave of Time," the first Choose Your Own Adventure story, transported this lonely Dallas transplant from Ohio to dinosaur ages, the Battle of Gettysburg, and beyond – all through simple page-turning choices.
"These books were the gateway drugs of interactive entertainment," noted historian Christian Swineheart about the series that would sell tens of millions of copies.
The concept began with Edward Packard, a tired Manhattan attorney who turned bedtime storytelling necessity into invention. When his daughters couldn't agree on plot directions, he wondered: "What would happen if you wrote both endings?"
Publishers initially balked. "It's hard enough to get children to read, and you're just making it harder with all these choices," read one rejection letter.
Everything changed when literary agent Amy Berkower and Bantam Books' Joëlle Delbourgo saw the revolutionary potential. Their marketing strategy? Simply giving thousands of books away to booksellers for children to discover.
By 1989, some 34 million copies had sold. For countless future gamers, these paperback adventures were their first taste of interactive storytelling – and a bridge to the digital worlds that would follow.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Lobsters.
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