A thread celebrating the inventor of interactive fiction.

In 1941, the renowned Argentine writer-philosopher Jorge Luis Borges published “The Garden of Forking Paths”, a short story about a hypothetical novel whose story branched with each decision the characters made, creating a maze of narrative possibility readers could get lost in.

Borges did not, however, solve the problem of how you would actually write and publish such a book. That problem would be solved, decades later, by a bored lawyer from Long Island named Edward Packard.

To make his improvised stories for his three kids livelier, Packard makes them the lead character and asks them to make choices throughout the story. Sort of like D&D without dice, but in the 60s, years before role-playing games were invented.

Packard resolves to find out if his branching stories can be turned into books. He designs a diagramming and notation system to help him tend his gardens of forking paths (something I can relate to!).

Packard realizes that these branching stories could work in almost any conceivable genre, forming the basis of a series of interactive books. He finishes his first book — the first work of interactive fiction — Sugarcane Island, in 1969.

Packard calls his series idea “The Adventures of You” and spends years shopping it around, getting rejected by a bunch of publishers before finally landing a deal with a tiny Vermont publishing house and its enterprising owner, R.A. Montgomery.

Packard teaches Montgomery his method for constructing a branching narrative and Montgomery starts writing them too. Montgomery turns around and sells the idea to the huge paperback house Bantam Books, under the name “Choose Your Own Adventure”.

In 1979, Edward Packard’s The Cave of Time is published as Choose Your Own Adventure #1, the first of more than 50 books he’ll write for the series. The books are insanely popular and dozens of copycat lines spring up. The genre becomes known as gamebooks.

Packard not only establishes the form, he also sets a tone for the CYOA series that all its writers would emulate: Off-the-wall possibilities. Decisions with real consequences. Fast-paced adventure. Lots of endings, ranging from heroic and triumphant to bizarre and haunting.

Across the nearly 200 titles the series would eventually include, Packard continues to push the boundaries and possibilities of the form more than any other writer. His formal experiments lead readers through looping narratives, impossible endings, and books within books.

By the late 80s, home videogames are moving beyond arcade shooters and adding more narrative elements. The popularity of gamebooks falls away, but not before they’ve sold more than 250 million CYOA books. Trust me, if you were a kid in the 80s, the damn things were everywhere.

The interesting part, though, starts about 10 or 15 years later, as the kids who grew up devouring CYOAs become creators themselves. Easily hundreds of thousands of game developers, writers, and other interactive media creators first discovered branching narrative through CYOA.

CYOA would influence thousands of games across genres, from RPGs to visual novels to entire platforms like Twine. Some studios, such as Telltale and BioWare and Quantic Dream, would go deep with exploring the possibilities of branching narrative.

The influence of Packard's work extends even beyond interactive media: Both the title and the premise of Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? should be familiar to fans of @rianjohnson's film #KnivesOut.

Bantam let the CYOA trademark lapse in the late 90s, and the still-enterprising R.A. Montgomery scooped it up and began republishing (mostly) his own books and those written by his family members. Montgomery died in 2014 but his heirs have kept the business going.

I don't know how or why, but as far as I can tell not one of Edward Packard's groundbreaking works is now in print.

Today is Edward Packard's 90th birthday. He's not on Twitter, but if you'd like to share your appreciation for his work and his legacy, he has a website at http://edwardpackard.com  where you can email him.