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this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Yeah, and old games were just well designed with no handholding and absolutely didn't include full bullet pointed tutorials for the first hour in the manual as a matter of course.
Somebody made a good point in another thread a while back (or maybe it was The 8-Bit Guy in a youtube video?) that a lot of times the manual got read as you were riding in the car back home from the store since you couldn't play the thing yet.
What did you do during the ten minutes it took to load tape games? Or the ten minutes it took to install them from floppy? Or...
Oh, wait, NES/N64, huh? You were into rich kid games.
So what did you do while you were getting driven back from the shop by your valet or whatever you guys had at the time?
All joking aside, I bet there was some divide between console and computer players on that front. I had binders of technical documentation from flight sims and entire novellas that came in RPG and adventure game boxes. The "here's how to play through the first chunk of the game" tutorials were just one format for that stuff, but perhaps the most platform-agnostic of them.
And, of course, there were walkthroughs and guides in gaming magazines. Getting stuck and waiting for the next monthly issue hoping they'd cover the game was a subtle form of monetization for games journalists even then. "Pivot to guides" has happened before.
The GameFAQs era will become a bit of a lost age between the print magazine guides and the "IGN became a guide site so slowly we barely even noticed" period.
I wonder if there will ever be some specific nostalgia for it or it was just too short and grungy for anybody to care.
GameFAQs etc. need to be archived in a public database and incorporated into stuff like RetroArch.
Stop. Please! I can only get SO erect!
GoG has decent manual integration. Steam has decent guide integration.
I think it's a good idea on paper, but at some point having it in an overlay or whatever seems less functional than just bringing it up on a phone or a second screen, you know?
What did you do on the ride home from the mall?