If you’re like us, you grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure books and you also touch yourself. (Shhh, it’s okay. We won’t judge.) The first of those two things was the second-person perspective, slightly interactive literary style pioneered by Edward Packard in the mid 1970s. The second thing was pioneered by your mom.
Now Andrew Weiss is compiling all the ways to die in Choose Your Own Adventure and similar books in the single serving Tumblr You Chose Wrong. He’s going through his old collection of Choose Your Own Adventure, Interplanetary Spy, and Fighting Fantasy books and regularly adding to the website.
Weiss adds that he’s also learned a valuable lesson from this project, which I’ll admit is the same lesson these books taught me: “Be sure to mark your place before committing to even the most remotely risky action.” Thanks for making me the paranoid mess I am today, Choose Your Own Adventure.
Check out some of our favorite endings from You Chose Wrong below. Your adventure ends here.
[Banner picture via Something Awful. All other pictures via You Chose Wrong. Hat tip to Nerdcore.]
Be An Interplanetary Spy 11: The Red Rocket (1985)
Real Life Gamebooks #8: The Fear Factor – Terrorism in the City (1988)
Nintendo Adventure Book: Monster Mix-Up (1991)
Be An Interplanetary Spy 5: Monsters of Doorna (1983)
Fighting Fantasy #10: House of Hell (1984)
Be An Interplanetary Spy 2: The Galactic Pirate (1983)
Fighting Fantasy #13: Freeway Fighter (1985)
Find Your Fate: Jem #1 – Jewels in the Dark (1986)
Fighting Fantasy #8: Scorpion Swamp (1984)
Freeway Warrior #4: California Countdown (1989)
“Slaine: Cauldron of Blood” in Diceman #1 (1986)
Choose Your Own Adventure #45: You Are a Shark (1985)
Be An Interplanetary Spy 4: Space Olympics (1983)
Freeway Warrior #1: Highway Holocaust (1988)
Choose Your Own Adventure #66: Secret of the Ninja (1987)
Real Life Gamebooks #6: Redcoats and Minutemen – The American War of Independence (1987)
Star Challenge #3: The Cosmic Funhouse (1984)
Middle-Earth Quest #6: Treason at Helm’s Deep (1988)
Be An Interplanetary Spy 1: Find the Kirillian (1983)