Editing CYOA (section)

==In The Beginning==
[[File:WFT.jpg|200px|thumb|right|If you remember this, congratulations, you're truly an ancient neckbeard.]] {{Oldschool}}
"Choose Your Own Adventure" originally referred to the branching-story books published in the 1980s. first imagined in the days of yore by [[Ian Livingstone]] and [[Steve Jackson]] (and if those names sound familiar, that's normal, they're the guys who started [[Games Workshop]].)

Those books were cut up into small numbered paragraphs, each of them describing something happening, at the end of which you had a either a choice to make or dice to roll to determine what happened. The story continues like that, the player jumping from paragraph to paragraph and page to page until their character is stopped by the story, killed in combat, or completes the quest. They were essentially "single-player RPG's" one could play when one had some time to waste. 

Success was as immediate as it was unexpected. These books had a lot of success and popularity in the late eighties and nineties and the first book was followed by a whole series of them. Ian and Steve wrote multiple ones themselves and they were joined by a bunch of other writers (amongst them [[Marc Gascoigne]] and Joe Dever of the [[Lone Wolf]] series) who both expanded on the original idea and branched further off into science-fiction, superhero, horror, and a whole slew of other settings.

The advent of computers and the internet eventually saw to the decline of CYOA books. Indeed, replayability of the books was rather low, whereas forums and MUD's offered a lot more interaction and options than the limited scope of a book. If you dig around a bit, you'll find that a bunch of those books have been adapted and expanded into [[Video games|vidja format]]. Still, the book format is not dead, the originals are still being re-printed and an occasional new one sees the light from time to time as they still have dedicated fans. Whether nostalgic oldfag or younger neckbeard; if you see one of those at a garage sale, grab it! They're good fun to play through on a slow day.