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.