m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Many thanks to Thomas Wolmer for corrections to my history of choice mapping post that push the first choicemap online back by about six months or so (to January 2001). If you don’t want to reread the whole thing, here is just the update:

The oldest documented choicemap of the internet era was created automatically by Ingo Klöcker using GraphViz (of course) in January 2001, as an aside in a discussion of link-checking HTML gamebooks using shell scripts for Project Aon. Thomas Wolmer continued working in this automated vein in 2002 and 2003 using Perl to create clickable GraphViz choicemaps like those described in the 2006–2007 section below. These early choicemaps don’t appear to have survived online, though Thomas Wolmer, who prompted this correction, has also kindly provided links to the software and a 2003-style graph.

Update

I shouldn’t blog at midnight; I overlooked a significant detail now appended to 2006–2007 (that some of the choice maps are clickable):

See the update to 2001 above for the early software, or inquire at Project Aon for the current version. Note also that the nodes are linked to gamebook pages for their hosted gamebooks, e.g., the Lone Wolf example above.