Edward Packard attended and graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was one of the first authors to explore the idea of gamebooks, in which the reader is inserted as the main character and makes choices about the direction the story will go at designated places in the text. The first such book that Edward Packard wrote in the Choose Your Own Adventure series was titled "Sugarcane Island", but it was not actually published as the first entry in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. In 1979, the first book to be released in the series was "The Cave of Time", a fantasy time-travel story that remained in print for many years. Eventually, one hundred eighty-four Choose Your Own Adventure books would be published before production on new entries to the series ceased in 1998.