My first CoG was Cannonfire Concerto which I discovered through playing Alter Ego. It had an option to see other games and I’ve been hooked ever since. My first HG was Evertree Inn.
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I had been playing games like Real Lives and Alter Ego, and someone told me there was a phone version of Alter Ego I could download. In the credits, it mentioned Choice of Games and the company commitment to inclusive storytelling.
I downloaded Choice of the Dragon, which was cute and fun, but didn’t otherwise grip me. Then I tried Choice of Broadsides and fell in love. I could be a captain in the age of sail - as a woman? I could pursue a same sex love interest? Yes please. I’d like seconds. I played Choice of the Vampire (Clotho 
), and that was it for the official catalog in those days. At that point I got on the forums and found out about Hosted Games, downloaded Zombie Exodus which was still in progress, and created an account so that I could talk about it. From there I got into Way Walkers, and so on. The forums were a way to pass the time and stay engaged while waiting for game updates.
I love these games because they let me explore things that I don’t get to in real life. I could play a female protagonist any time I wanted. I could date men or women and nobody in game treated me like I was weird. I want everyone to have that space to breathe.
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My first one was Choice Of The Dragon, where I followed the adventures of Sovdaal and his quest to become the greatest beast of them all (and have lots of snu snu with his mate).
My second one was Choice Of The Vampire, where I observed the grim tale of Katherine Kistenmacher, a ruthless, callous vampire of German descent who fed on innocent children.
My third one was Zombie Exodus, where I played as Mason Stone, the merciful soldier who just wanted a happy ending.
Ever since those three stories, I’ve been hooked.
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I saw a lot of people taking about Choice of Robots on tumblr, and since I played a lot of choose your own adventure games as a kid I went over here to see what the fuss was about. I immediately saw the ‘make your own game’ thing, and set about learning choicescript.
I think I wrote the first quarter of Fallen Hero without ever playing another game, and I have still only played a few. But writing them… so much fun!
The first one I played was Samurai of Hyuga, still one of my favorites.
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Mine was the lost heir.it’s still my favourite.
Been a fan of IF for over a decade. Saw Choice of Robots on Steam, thought it sounded unique and interesting and hoped it lived up to what it promised (spoiler: it did). Then it blew my socks off and got me into the rest of the CoG catalogue, and into a few Hosted Games, too.
Thought about writing my own, but never had the time until a series of peculiar IRL circumstances all took place. Wrote Paradigm City, released Paradigm City. The positive feedback from all that led me to writing Not All Heroes, which started going up three weeks ago.
I’m still working on IF/CYOA ideas. A PC sequel and a bigger idea, one I plan on pitching. We’ll see how it goes. Either way, my CoG story isn’t finished yet.
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Through a philosophy forum I got involved co-writing a text adventure game about a decade ago. I’ve been writing interactive fiction ever since. I played and enjoyed all the early CoG titles like Broadsides and Vampire, and became most familiar with the format about the time of Zombie Exodus (which I wasn’t that impressed with at the time but I believe I didn’t play what was to become the complete game).
Since working on Trials of the Thief-Taker, I’ve played a number of other CoG titles that I’ve liked a lot. Like Pendragon and Hollywood Visionary. I like the possibilities inherent in long-form games.
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When I was young I had an obsession with CYOAs. I had quite a library of Choose Your Own Adventure brand books when I was younger, as well as a few imitators. Then I discovered fantasy gamebooks – CYOAs where you maintain a character sheet, including “special items” that act as boolean variables for story. In particular, I loved the Lone Wolf books now hosted on projectaon.org – although replaying them, I realized I must have kind of cheated by getting a feeling for where the highest results were on their “random number tables,” which you were supposed to hit with a pen with your eyes closed. (The books are much harder if you actually generate random numbers, I discovered when I was older.) Still, I think a lot of my idea of how a game could be not just a short branchy tree of death (the classic CYOA formula) was shaped by those Lone Wolf books; and I still have an appreciation for how they did character creation (pick a set of skills that unlock better options in the story).
Much later: there used to be a site called Home of the Underdogs which would host obscure games from gaming’s history, or point to where you could find them. Besides their cache of even-more-obscure gamebooks (hello, Cretan Chronicles), I discovered Dan’s port of Alter Ego that way. I had no idea at the time that I was a friend of a friend of the guy who ported it. (The original game is from 1985, and fun fact, originally shipped in different versions for males and females.) Alter Ego was the game that I was most trying to evoke with Choice of Robots - I love the emotional wallop the game gives at the end. (Then comes Lone Wolf, then actual CoG games that had been written at that point came in third, in terms of influence.)
All of which is a preface to the somewhat uninteresting way I got involved with CoG proper: I knew one of the editors when they were just getting started, through mutual friends and a D&D focused con in Connecticut called AnonyCon. Adam said, “hey, you write pretty good adventures, want to write one for us?” I said “sure.” I think I had played Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides and Choice of the Vampire before this, and I liked some things they did while feeling like I had a few new ideas to introduce. But it took me a while, and I think they were genuinely surprised when I finished.
EDIT: Incidentally, I thought I’d point out here that while various people give me crap for the “Kevin Gold, Ph.D.” byline of Choice of Robots, I did it partly as a nod to the author of Alter Ego, who did the same thing. (The other reason was to short-circuit complaints of “grad school/robots can’t possibly be like that.”)
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Honestly, I didn’t even know that IF existed until I found- more like stumbled onto- a CoG on steam.
I was looking into buying a game that I had my eye on for a few days, but in my recommended list, a game popped up that caught my eye, if only because the art on the cover was utterly gorgeous to me: Choice of Robots. I only had enough money to pick up either the game I was originally looking into, or choice of robots, and for whatever reason, I decided to give Choice of Robots a shot.
For a while I didn’t even know Choice of Robots was part of a larger website. I ran through several play-throughs of the game, until eventually, I chose the option to have my robot learn from reading a corpus of interactive fiction books. Then this popped up.
"You have Artimus download the giant corpus of text-based games, paying for legal copies of the Choice of Games games because you’re classy like that. (Sadly, nobody ever wrote a game called Choice of Robots, which probably would have helped Artimus considerably.) "
At first I brushed it off as just a random joke, but after a moment, I realized how that line felt a lot like some sort of in-joke I wasn’t in on. So I did a little poking around and found myself on the Choice of Games website.
To keep a short story short, I spent a few months reading the free content of most of the books, before I found one whose free content I liked so much I decided to buy it. Then I bought another, and another, ad nauseum…
As far as joining the forum goes, I was just curious, really. After almost two or three years of just reading the books, I hopped onto the forum and shadowed a few threads for a week or two before I made an account and jumped in myself. That’s pretty much it, really.
((PS: Sorry if this is too long of a post. I got into storytelling mode. 
))
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I stumbled on it like 2 years ago. I could only play the free games and the demo’s since I was under 18 and not in charge of my own money back then. I remember always getting so disapointed when the demo ended XD I was really happy when I could buy the games and finally play past it.
The first game I played was Choice of Dragon and my first paid game was Choice of Kung Fu (I really need to replay those…)
I only discovered there was a forum begin this year It was a Samurai of Hyuga fan-art thread and I posted my crappy drawing there…( deleted it a few months later) After that I discovered there were W.I.P’s and such and now I come here daily.
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For a while I didn’t even know Choice of Robots was part of a larger website. I ran through several play-throughs of the game, until eventually, I chose the option to have my robot learn from reading a corpus of interactive fiction books.
yaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy it worked
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Your masterful scheme has drawn in another victi- I mean, uh, loyal reader. 
Seriously though, I love your work! Thanks for drawing me in here, never would have found this place otherwise.
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I searched interactive light novels. I was bored and I needed “interaction” with “people”.
I found a top 5 that seemed decent. For some reason Psy High was among the recommended games (I still don’t understand why).
Didn’t want to buy it on Steam. I found out it existed on Android. Played it for 4 hours straight until I got a “perfect” ending. In the google playstore recommendation, I saw a trilogy of games named “Hero Rise”.
Now a bit over a year later, I own most of the games (around sixty games).
I read CYOA books as a kid and played Zork and parser games for a long time but found so little story with most of those games, I lost interest. When Choice of Vampires came out, I was hooked. It was like a choose-your-own Ann Rice novel. I started making Zombie Exodus and haven’t stopped.
@jojo I remember a lot of bad reviews came out due to the XYZZY awards. People over at the IntFiction site were really upset ZE was even in the field of nominees. My impression was that CS games really shouldn’t be a part of those parser-focused awards, but I guess it’s all ancient history now.
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It’s interesting to see other people mention Alter Ego, because that’s also what brought me to CoG… despite the fact that I’ve still never read it 
Basically, I was just curious to look for life simulators at one point, so I was just googling around to see what I could turn up, and Alter Ego popped up. So, I looked it over, and then was like “so… can I be gay…?” and found that I could not 
But I looked at some links and saw that I very much could be gay in the official choice of games lineup, and I looked over some of the offerings, and then read Psy High. I was hooked 
(And, yes, this all demonstrates that, yes, the option to be gay really can make the difference between disinterest and attention.) Pretty soon afterwards, I’d peeked at the forum (probably due to googling?) to find out how to read code, and became a major code-reader, but did not yet have a forum account.
I joined the forum after reading @JimD’s (hi, poster above me 
) A Wise Use of Time, where I’d just spotted a bug, and saw a fellow user (@Lys) running into the bug on the Wise Use of Time forum thread… so I registered and posted.
I then proceeded to be absent from the forum for some months, until I was like “okay, maybe I’ll try a WiP,” at which point I read @Sashira’s Monsters of New Haven High. Shortly followed by @ParrotWatcher’s Totem Force… And from then on, I’ve been a regular forumgoer 
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My view was always that CS games are fine to be judged on the same terms as the parser stuff, the problem that year was mainly about community voting norms. (After all, the undum game The Play featured in the same year with no real controversy.) But as you say, it’s all history now, since that year choice games have done well in the awards.
I came across CoG when searching up interactive games, and stumbled upon Alter Ego. Alter Ego was the first game I had played on CoG back in 2014 and I would play Alter Ego quite a lot. At school, I would play Alter Ego since it was the only game that were not blocked by the school. After seeing that there were more games, I began playing the Choices of the Dragon.
And now I’m here.
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I came across CoG six years ago when I was actually still in middle school. My family owned an iPad and we bought the “Choices of the Dragon” from the App Store. I passed my time during the commute home in my public bus system just playing it on the iPad. Fast forward years later, I came across CoG again when I got my first job and did a random search of “text adventures” in Google’s Play Store in an attempt to find it again. I was young back then, so I really have no excuses as to why I forgot it.
Well, here I am. I’m now coding my first game and I’ve titled it Project Watney (I love space movies, as you can probably tell). I’m not really good at keeping my project titles permanent and creative so for now, I think I’ll settle for this temporary label. I started working on it just this past weekend and I think I’m at 2000 words right now.
I’ll post more details on Project Watney within the week. I’m feeling a might bit shy about my horrendous summary.
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I like interactive fiction. Joined the forum to ask a question, stayed for Vendetta: RoaG. Just came back after a 3-month suspension for a crime I did not commit, nor was “tried” for. But such is life. I wouldn’t consider myself a member of the community because I’m only occasionally active and haven’t really made any connections.
I like dark, gritty fiction, westerns, low fantasy, medieval-inspired or anything with swords and/or guns, really, as long as it isn’t too high fantasy or too comedic.
Welp, finally found a thread to talk about this. Hold on to your seatbelts, people:
A few years ago (2012 or 2013, I think), my sister and I were chatting in our house one night and she said “Hey, you should check this out, it’s called Choice of the Dragon”. I googled it and played the whole thing in a couple hours. It was good, and also unlike anything I’ve read before. I often thught abut gamebooks like those, but I never knew other people did on that level. I really liked Heroes Rise Vampire too, even though I only played the demos dozens of times and never bought the games (Vampire, in particular, I really enjoyed). Never touched the forum. CoG was, for some time, that-- a piece in the mosaic of my youth.
But, through the years, I always had times were I would think “Wow, I wonder what that company’s been doing lately” even though I never, y’know, actually checked it out.
Flash forward to mid-2015 (I want to say June or July). I remember it very well: it was the day I went with family to watch Jurassic World. Before we left, I decided to finally search for CoG on the AppStore and found a new game with a lovely cover, named Choice of the Petal Throne. I got into the site, played the demo and knew I had to read more. Bought it on the same day (I suppose that’s where I lot of my affection for that game comes from) and, some hours later, it was over.
The rest, my friends, is history.
Or… sort of. I spent the rest of 2015 buying the other CoGs: Robots, Hollywood Visionary Deathless, Heroes Rise, Vampire (finished them after so much time!), etc. But I never really interacted with the forums or with other fans.
Flash forward to early 2016 (February or March), where I had just finished the Infinity games. I knew the Guns thread was by far the largest on the site and, as fans are wont to do, I wanted to be a part of that, which led me to create this account.
And here we are, a year and a half after that. Joining the forums and meeting all of you was definetely one of my finest choices. I suppose it’s all thanks to what my sister said, all those years ago.
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