Yes, before any of those things, the only supplementary material video games had to rely on were manuals- it was where you learned the controls, the plot, and just about anything else you needed to know in order to complete a game from start to finish. I used to lovingly refer to manuals as "history books" as a kid, because anything you needed to know about the backstory of a video game could be found there. These days, manuals are a thing of the past- hell, they even were long before physical media as a whole started dying out. But personally I love having them for my old games, even for reasons besides being the completionist that I am. They're a window to the past, they provide quirky and even downright odd (or just plain wrong) commentary on games, and sometimes they'll tell you a thing or two about a beloved game you may have never even known before. So that being said, let's flip back through a few dusty, torn up pages and take a glimpse into the not-so-distant past of gaming history.
We'll start off somewhere just about everyone in my age group should recall- remember the manual for Pokemon? I couldn't have been the only person who actually took the time to fill out the blank pokedex spaces in the back of it whenever I caught something new. I remember always being annoyed that the last few pages didn't have any pictures at all on them.
There's also some weird stuff going on in the screenshots within the manual. "The Brock"? I don't recall that in the game...
And this one ALWAYS bugged me, even when I was a kid. When you use the
fishing rod, you're only supposed to get text saying "oh! It's a bite!"
But "ho! It's a hit!"? Where did that come from? I remember thinking
that if you saw that message, you'd get a really good Pokemon. Still
waiting on my Mew from fishing, damn it.
Localization is a pretty funny thing. For those who aren't aware, localization is the process by which developers translate video games developed in other countries for their local market, most being translations from Japanese. However, back in the day localizations were abjectly terrible, most famously so for extremely poorly translated lines like "All your base are belong to us." Localization isn't entirely about text translation, however- it also involves explaining the plot. As such, back in the day many game developers chose to craft their own stories that sometimes had absolutely nothing to do with the game. Here in the U.S., this often meant that many games became "Americanized" with ridiculous stories that weren't even a part of the original game at all. Case and point: the manual for Metal Gear on the NES. It's already well known that the game itself was somewhat butchered compared to it's Japanese MSX counterpart, but just read the plot synopsis from the NES manual:
I wonder if Hideo Kojima has ever read that...
I mean, really, Vermon CaTaffy sounds like an STD or something. But no, he's the tranquil shepard boy with 27 sisters. This is canon, right? I feel like I can't even make a joke about how the Metal Gear franchise would write another sequel to retcon this information in.
How about the original Resident Evil? One thing I always found funny about the manual is how it has these quite detailed back stories for characters whose only appearances in the game are as corpses. Take good ol' Kenneth Sullivan for example- the only notoriety he gets in the entire game is having the distinction of being the first victim the player comes across, being eaten by a zombie. Yet the manual dedicates half a page to his picture and a few sentences on his background in chemistry.
Sometimes manuals can be pretty damn funny, especially if the game itself is pretty wacked out. This is evidenced in a few snippets from the Earthworm Jim 2 manual for Sega Saturn, as you can see here:
Now that's hysterical. It just goes to show that when developers were having fun with what they created, the end product was always that much better.
The original Super Mario Bros. has a pretty simple story: a regular plumber named Mario must save a princess and her kingdom from the evil King Koopa. But here's something you might not know, straight from the original manual itself:
Wait, you're telling me that the citizens of the Mushroom kingdom were turned to...blocks? The same blocks from the game? The ones that Mario smashes open repeatedly. So...Mario is a murderer, basically.
I always found it pretty cool when manuals hinted at hidden stages within the game. The manual for Sonic & Knuckles did just that, telling only the title of the Hidden Doomsday Zone, yet withholding pictures of it unlike like every other level.
I also enjoy the bio Sonic 3's manual has for Knuckles. He's 15 years old and his favorite food is grapes...that's some vital info right there, folks.
Most manuals were in black and white, which didn't leave a whole lot of room for artistic liberties. However, I think the manual for Street Fighter II pulled off some pretty cool illustrations. I also find it funny how we would always struggle with trying to figure out all of the moves for characters in fighting games as kids, often just smashing all of buttons at once trying to make something happen, while meanwhile the movesets were right there in the manual for every character.
I also find it kinda humorous that manuals often included information like a character's blood type in a fighting game. You know, because Ryu can kick you in the face pretty hard with his tatsu-maki-sen-pu-kyaku, but he's also a universal blood donor. Bet you didn't know that.
But by far the strangest thing I've found is this manual for PGA Tour Golf II. Now, how difficult do you think it is to explain a golf game? You hit the ball in the hole, that's it. But this manual is nearly the size of a freakin' dictionary:
It has all this ridiculously unnecessary information in it like a SIX PAGE history of the PGA tour (including prize money amounts!), lengthy bios for 10 different pro golfers, and very detailed descriptions of different courses.
This is a Sega Genesis game!! What kid was sitting around reading this stuff!? And even if the game was designed for adults instead, what adult would even be reading it?? Or playing it at all for that matter! You know, sitting there in 1992 playing golf on Sega Genesis instead of actually playing golf in real life? Insane.
So anyway, it's always fun to dig around in the past a little bit, because you never know what you might find in between the dirty pages of a long lost manual from over 30 years ago. Thanks for reading.
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