Another digression: In this article, Mark Sample asserts
September 2003 Andrew Stern maps a CYOA-inspired book (Night of a Thousand Boyfriends) on the group-blog Grand Text Auto. As far as I can determine, Stern’s is the ur-map, the CYOA map that started it all. Stern modestly calls his rudimentary hand-drawn map “a fun exercise,” but as the CYOA visualizations he inspired increase in complexity over time, Stern’s map is revealed to be visionary.
I know of a much earlier CYOA-type map. John Sladek’s own map of his proto-CYOA The Lost Nose, written in the late 1960s. The original book was an elaborate collage, but the map was painstakingly reproduced in CorelDraw by David Langford in 2000:
Langford writes:
No Sladek collection would be complete without such weird and gratuitous diagrams, and I felt I was following the obsessive footsteps of the master as I spent hours fiddling with CorelDraw software to recreate his elaborate flowchart of possible reading routes through The Lost Nose – including the restoration of a pathway he’d omitted. Quite unexpectedly, Maps now contained a map. Next I was reminded that John had written bridging passages to cover lost pages in a certain Philip K. Dick MS (Lies, Inc., 1984), since now I found myself concocting plausible sentences to replace a fragment of gummed-on Lost Nose text that came unstuck and vanished long ago.
As related elsewhere on this forum, I ported The Lost Nose to Twine a few years ago (and took great delight in recreating the above map) but was denied the pleasure of releasing the finished game for copyright reasons. While there are CYOA-type books that predate Sladek’s, this may still be the earliest diagram.