Netflix Are Launching A ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Interactive Series & It’s Giving Us Feels

The future is now ~ Netflix have just announced upcoming original shows that will give viewers the chance to ‘choose their own adventure’.

What does that mean exactly? Original children’s series’ have been developed which offer interactive branching narratives that allow viewers to direct the outcome of the story. We reckon this sounds remarkably like the Choose Your Own Adventure book series that were all the rage way back when. Oh, such nostalgia.

The ‘CYOA’ book series were published between 1979-1998, selling more than 250 million copies, and are now somewhat of a childhood relic. If you remember these books, this daunting front page intro will be all too familiar:

It made reading a book all the more exciting and thrilling, with the reader in the driver’s seat as to what becomes of their character’s fate. As a kid, it felt like a big responsibility to steer your character to safety and to avoid the dreaded early finish.

Netflix will begin their journey into interactive television with Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots: Trapped in an Epic Tale, which is already available as a standalone episode of Netflix’s The Adventures of Puss in Boots series. In the story, viewers are presented with 13 choices, leading to two possible endings.

Here’s a explainer vid below:

Trapped in an Epic Tale will be followed by an interactive episode of Buddy Thunderstruck in July and Stretch Armstrong next year.

The new interactive content is compatible with iPhones and iPads, as well as some smart televisions and games consoles. DreamWorks Animation Television’s Doug Langdale, and executive producer/ writer of first ep of The Adventures of Puss in Boots said that Netflix provides a platform for flexible storytelling previously unchartered.

“On Netflix you don’t have to air at a certain time or fit in within a locked timeslot, plus telling non-linear stories offers a whole new level of freedom,” Langdale said.

“Of course creative freedom is a double-edged sword and it actually turned out to be a lot harder than we expected it to be.”

Images via Bantam Books.