Just finished reading this book and all the endings and I love love love this book. Wish we still had more gamebooks like this in print. The level of detail and description, and the sense of adventure is really great. Even though I never read it as a kid (I had other CYOA books that I borrowed from the library though) it still feels pretty nostalgic.

 

I also love that there isn't just one "good" ending (good implying that you get back to your own time). There's quite a few where you make it back to your own time, some with a dinosaur egg, some with an open-ended kind of ending.

 

Also, there are some where you don't get back to your own time but you nevertheless become successful in a different time. It still counts as a win in my book. I'm giving this 5/5.

Struck with a touch of insomnia (I'm finally building my deck tomorrow and oddly it feels like Christmas!) I thought, what better time to read the classic first volume of the Choose Your Own Adventure series?

In The Cave of Time you are a kid, apparently with no name, on a hike. You come upon a cave you've never seen before. You venture inside and when you emerge shortly after it is a completely different time, and thus begins the adventure.

The pictures, by stalwart CYOA illustrator Paul Granger, made this one out as if it were going to be exciting. There's a medieval knight, the Great Wall of China, castles, a swamp monster, and in my travels I never came across one of these. I spent most of my time choosing either the left or the right tunnel, and somehow intuitively knowing all the while which one of those lead to the past and which to the future. Go figure. Anyway, here are the outcomes of the adventures I went on last night...

1) Went back to an Ice Age, met some cave people, migrated south and lived out my life with them.

2) Fell down a crevasse, met an old man who complained about being a do-nothing philosopher. Boo-hoo.

3) Left the cave and found the sun burning up the Earth, went back to the cave and ended up at a tropical island populated by friendly, grass-skirted natives, hung with them a while and then tried to get back to the cave, but got strangled to death by a boa constrictor.

4) Jumped a train, found it was carrying Abe Lincoln, chilled with him while he wrote the Gettysburg address.

This was the first of a new genre of book, the game book, though it came out under the title 'Choose Your Own Adventure'. I remember getting this book and the next book in the series for Christmas one year and I was pretty much all over them, especially since I loved the adventure games that I had on my Dad's computer (this was back in the early 80s). The period in which it was released saw a change in the way that games were being played in that there was a gradual movement away from board games to computer consoles and roleplaying games. However not many people had computers in those days, but craved a form of adventure that roleplaying games could only give for a limited period, so thus appeared the game book.

I note that Edward Packard came up with the idea while reading to his children. I suspect what happened was that his children, while enjoying the stories, wanted more involvement in the story itself, and as such I suspect he began to develop a way to allow them to chose their path through the story.

This is a very primitive version of the genre in that the description generally takes up the page and when you are given choices you turn to the relevant pages. Later we were to see the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks which used paragraphs instead of pages, and were generally a lot thicker with combat, dice rolling, and a character sheet. These books would begin to change the way stories were constructed, that is until computers became ubiquitous and people could now play adventure games in their own home.

The Cave of Time has you, the hero, and you are a very generic hero so that you could imagine yourself in his place, who while out on a hike discovers a cave, so you enter it and begin to explore it and discover that it will take you back and forward in time. There were numerous endings, and there was no actual correct ending, unlike Fighting Fantasy where the correct ending is the last paragraph in the book. However the endings that you arrive at are all dependant on the choices that you make during the story. One particular ending that I remember was the one where a UFO lands on a prairie and leaves behind a couple of humans, suggesting that this was how humanity first arrived on Earth. Personally if I was going down that route I would be a lot more sophisticated than that namely because I would have humanity as being the remnants of a colony established on Earth and then cut off from the rest of their society.

Later the first book in the series would be replaced by another book called the Abominable Snowman, and I am not really sure if I ever read that one. In fact I am very vague about which ones I actually read, though I did really enjoy this one and went out of my way to try and get as many of the others that were available. However there are over 120 of these books and I think I tapered off at around 20.

When you find these books in your mom's attic, do not reread them. They're not as good as you remember.

A little different than the original in that one of the story paths leads you to a time where you are "out of phase" with the timeline you observe. I remember that blew my mind when I first read it - it wasn't until I was in college, reading about phase shifts, that this concept came back to me.
Overall, a decent book, but I was already older than I was when I read the first Cave of Time, and I was already on to Stephen King novels by the time CYOA #50 came out. Still, a good entry in the series - likely one I will read with my kids.