This is my gamebooks page. It lists, first of all, the gamebooks I have. I'm not a huge collector, as I concentrate more on specific series, but they are a lot of fun to look through.
Currently I have pages set up for the following two series:
Interplanetary Spy which had engaging and clear right-or-wrong puzzles(ok, so they were a bit easy) and even better pictures that I managed to scan. My very favorite gamebook series.
Narnia Solo # 5(Return of the White Witch), with a sketched review. Thanks to HPFRI books in Virginia for this. If you have any of the other Narnia Solo books, please please mail me!
Choose Your Own Adventure # 4, 29, 58, 88. I found them in a sale at the Evanston Library for fifty cents each and decided, what the heck?
My current gamebook count is 12(Spy)+4(Zork)+1(Narnia)+4(CyoA)=21, although 3+2+0+0=5 are currently shipping. So I "really" only have 16.
I must be honest, however. Some gamebooks are quite bad, especially the Junior Edition CyoA which were only fifty-odd pages with six endings. In fact, many Choose Your Own Adventure books are more valuable as collectors' items or memorabilia. As a result it is rather easy to satirize certain gamebooks, and here are some efforts that I particularly enjoy.
Choose your own damn adventure. Simple, yet it transcends the experience of many people! Such is great art...they also have a few other adventures which are even more tasteless. Pokemon is satirized here, and this is on the fringes of good taste. This is truly sick.
The sequel to the adventure above, involving high-tech spy rings.
If anyone knows of an Apple disk where you could create your own gamebook, tell me. I remember having one in the '80s...
There are also some authors that have a gamebook-ish quality to them. I include:
Douglas Adams. He of course helped write two interactive computer fiction games, Bureaucracy and Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and with his "pollution of time streams" in that trilogy added a gamebook-esque flavor--but again, much higher quality than the usual.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot. Really entertaining. There are so many "what-if" questions that although this book comes to a conclusion, it leaves a lot of ways to branch off.
Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories were universal gamebooks in a way--and much better written! He considers all sorts of non-linear stories.