The Cave of Time is the first of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, published by Edward Packard in 1979. It also makes The Top Five and Why best COYA books of all time. Below are some amazing interactive conceptual views of the book. To really appreciate the depth of systematic, technical analysis that these books produced, consider the various elegant digital mappings of Samizdat. They’re also done in live animation display.

This first visual representation details the “data” of the book. What page choices lead to what pages, what pages lead to endings, and a color coding of the type of ending.

The following image visualizes the different “paths” that may be taken.

The following visual representation is a handwritten “walkthrough,” which is a bit more of a familiar path for those who have seen other note-taking visual-mapping versions.

Walkthrough map drawn by David Sky

This last visual representation branches in a way that shows “endings,” with a color coordinated ending type.

For even more detail on The Cave of Time consider Demian’s gaming archive.