The Writers' Room: 50 years of choosing your own adventure (Rebroadcast)

For nearly fifty years, Choose Your Own Adventure books have put readers in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose what next steps the protagonist takes in a story. Millions of copies have been sold in the Choose Your Own Adventure series and the interactive narrative style has been used in television shows, video games, and in theatrical productions.

Edward Packard was one of the original Choose Your Own Adventure authors. He was inspired while telling his daughter bedtime stories after returning home from his work as an attorney in New York.

“Sometimes a path will merge in with another path where you might have gone to London or you might have gone to Paris, but you end up in Berlin regardless of which choice you’ve made,” Packard told 1A.

New authors are continuing to experiment in the genre while building upon its historical roots. Kazim Ali’s “Citadel of Whispers” has non-binary characters and a protagonist that is intentionally gender ambiguous.

For our latest installment of the Writer’s Room, we explore the lasting legacy of the Choose Your Own Adventure story.

Some 1A colleagues got to choose their own adventure recently when they sat down to play some Dungeons & Dragons. Welcome to the very first episode of Public Ra-D&D!

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