Choose Your Own Adventure Books: their rise and fall (documentary: video in full).
Choose Your Own Adventure Books were a big thing back in the day, bringing D&D-like fantasies to the masses. Until they weren’t.
What were they? Choose Your Own Adventure Books were a series of children’s gamebooks in which the reader takes on the role of the protagonist and makes decisions that influence the actions of the main character and the plot’s conclusion. Based on an idea developed by Edward Packard, they became highly successful in the 1980s and 1990s before going out of favour.
They became so much a part of modern culture that they’ve sparked a few lawsuits, the most famous of which was against Netflix for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Interesting that the Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Puffin, from 1982 – 1995 but since changed hands twice and some new books published by each new owner… ) with some 59+ titles seems not to have impinged upon the US market.