Chooseco LLC is an American publishing company based in Waitsfield, Vermont. Founded in 2003 by author R. A. Montgomery and publisher

Shannon Gilligan Shannon Gilligan is an author of interactive fiction and computer games. Early life and education Gilligan graduated from Williams College in 1981 and spent a year abroad at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. Career Gilligan has been exten ...

, the company primarily releases reissues of Montgomery's ''

Choose Your Own Adventure ''Choose Your Own Adventure'' is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actio ...

'' series of

gamebook A gamebook is a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. Each narrative typically does no ...

History

Montgomery had approached

Bantam Books Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by parent company Random House, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. ...

in the 1970s with his idea for "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels based upon a concept created by Edward Packard and originally published by Constance Cappel's and R. A. Montgomery's Vermont Crossroads Press as the "Adventures of You" series, starting with Packard's Sugarcane Island in 1976. The initial books were popular, and the series took off with additional authors, with publication between 1978 and 1998, with over two hundred fifty million books sold in thirty-eight languages. In 2003, Montgomery and his wife Shannon Gilligan opted to form Chooseco to republish some of the classic titles of the series, create new titles, and

option Option or Options may refer to: Computing *Option key, a key on Apple computer keyboards *Option type, a polymorphic data type in programming languages *Command-line option, an optional parameter to a command *OPTIONS, an HTTP request method ...

the franchise for other media.

Lawsuits

In March 2007, Chooseco filed a lawsuit against car manufacturer

DaimlerChrysler The Mercedes-Benz Group AG (previously named Daimler-Benz, DaimlerChrysler and Daimler) is a German multinational automotive corporation headquartered in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is one of the world's leading car manufactur ...

, claiming that the company's advertising campaign for their Jeep Patriot model, bearing the tagline "Choose Your Adventure", infringed on Chooseco's trademarks. The suit was ultimately settled. Chooseco filed a similar trademark lawsuit in January 2019 against movie streaming platform

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a ...

following the release of '' Black Mirror: Bandersnatch'', an interactive film produced and released by Netflix that uses the "choose your own adventure" phrase. The company has also sent

cease and desist A cease and desist letter is a document sent to an individual or business to stop alleged illegal activity. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not dis ...

notices to developers of indie video games on the

itch.io Itch.io (stylized as itch.io) is a website for users to host, sell and download indie games. Launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts over 500,000 games and items (assets, ebooks, music) . Itch.io also allows users to host ...

storefront for using the term "choose your own adventure" to describe their game. Netflix had responded to Chooseco's suit with a number of defenses, including the assertion that the use of the term was artistic expression protected by the First Amendment (see '' Rogers v. Grimaldi''), and a request for Chooseco's trademark "Choose Your Own Adventure" to be cancelled on the basis that it had become

genericised A generic trademark, also known as a genericized trademark or proprietary eponym, is a trademark or brand name that, because of its popularity or significance, has become the generic term for, or synonymous with, a general class of products or ...

. Netflix later conceded on the case and settled with Chooseco on undisclosed terms in November 2020.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://www.cyoa.com/ 2003 establishments in Vermont Choose Your Own Adventure Book publishing companies based in Vermont Waitsfield, Vermont