• Videogames.Other lives of 'Choose your own adventure'

There must be a secret and joking pendulum law by which the stories that moved us as children fall into grace or disgrace before our children: Ana de las Tejas Verdes, Mujercitas and Las Torres de Malory , the type of books that 30 years ago They appeared in grandmother's houses and caused the sadness and compassion of grandchildren, today they pass from hand to hand among children and inspire sumptuous television series and movies. Who would have said?

An old acquaintance for parents raised in the 70s and 80s now returns to bookstores to test the pendulum law. Choose your own adventure, the collection of adventure novels published in Spain by the Timun Mas label, has been in the windows with the RBA-El Molino label since this summer.

Does a child read to us who needs an explanation of what the Choose Your Own Adventure books consist of ? Let's give an example: one started the novel and, after five pages, he found that a terrifying lion appeared in very bad manners to the characters, who did not know what to do. So, the narrator offered two options for the reader to choose. For example: " If you decide to fight the lion, go to page 26. If you decide to escape through the crack in the wall, go to page 46 ". It seems silly, but we loved that. Understand us: at that time, video games were not common.

«I see Choose your own adventure almost like a classic. I think it is a series that can be very attractive for children as well as for adults. For many people, Choose your own adventure was a very important reading experience in their lives ", explains Mar Peris, editorial director of RBA-El Molino . “That idea is important: reading becomes experience . The appeal of this series lies not only in the nostalgia of the parents. The main attraction is that the children have a great time. "

What was the story of Choose your own adventure ? "The first stories are from 1979. The writer who invented the formula was an American who, as far as I know, was a very traveler, somewhat like an explorer, and who told stories to his children. From there, he had the idea of ​​allowing different itineraries in reading », explains Peris.

The American traveler was actually RA Montgomery , a Himalayan climber, skier, and diver, who "first sporadically published his stories in small editorials until he came to a major label that believed in him," according to Peris.

What a bet that was. Choose your own adventure sold over the following years 260 million copies in 40 countries. Packard wrote 50 titles in the series, which later became a literary factory that recruited writers and covered every possible landscape of the adventure novel.

The proof is in the first four titles of the new Choose your own RBA-El Molino adventure : a space odyssey, an expedition through the Amazon, an underwater trip and an encounter in the Himalayas with the Abominable Snowman.

«We have worked the texts a lot and with a lot of care and a lot of love. There are new translations and some very attractive illustrations that are signed by women, "explains the editor. Has it been necessary to reach out to the old texts to make them seem correct to the readers of 2020? "In some specific things we did have to be careful."

However, Peris argues that Choose Your Own Adventure has actually always been the opposite of prudish literature. "The important thing was freedom, self-interpretation, decision-making" ... It will happen to any reader of the series today that she has forgotten the plots of those novels. However, the phrase "from page 26" is recorded in memory.

Choose your own adventure also lends itself to a more intellectual reading. Didn't Miqui Otero write a novel that played to sample the idea ( The Time Capsule , edited by Blackie Books)? "Yes. But it is that before, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges also tried to make this type of games to tell their stories, "recalls Peris.

"Also," he continues, "at the time there was something very groundbreaking in these stories. Until then, children's books tended to be somewhat moralistic , almost always based on a final moral. Choose your own adventure broke with that and offered children the pure pleasure of play in book form.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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