A nerderific blast from the past

Now I know I risk outing myself as having been a dork as a child (wipe that look of shock from your face), I recently ran across a website that sent me into paroxysms of memorial nerd-dom.

When I was a kid, I absolutely LOVED these books called the Lone-Wolf series, which were Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style books with the added benefit of hit-points (and a few other customizable skills your character could use). It even had the crappiest random number generator I'd ever seen (a low-tech(!) version of dice-rolling) - you closed your eyes and pointed your pencil at a grid of numbers.

The problem with these books was that even in the late 80s when I found them, they were basically out of print, so I was only ever able to find one or two of the books, though I always craved more. Well, apparently the creator of this fine series of books, Joe Dever, agreed in 2000 to completely open the rights to the books, and allowed the world community to publish the full works online at Project Aon. So now you can download or read the books online in XHTML for free! And there are shitloads of the books! I had no idea the series was so popular! So I've been obsessed with playing through these books for the past few weeks - they are some serious old school fun. Fans have even coded some nice character sheets to make it easier to keep track of your stuff, as well as... ACTUAL random number generators! How far technology has come...