Ok this is a two part post. The first deals with the lost art of game manuals, and the second deals with what we liked about those manuals long since extinct.
Game manuals have basically died a slow death, once being works of art that complemented the games they were boxed with and added to the immersion into the world you're about to experience, now they're just slips of paper with the cover art on one side and maybe a small foldout giving you basic control schemes and the ever present warnings and legalese. With the major budgets games have, one would feel that they could devote some time into these little snippets WITHOUT having to pay for the Collectors Edition to get them. But times change, and so do profit margins I guess.
In the spirit of the lost art I recall my most memorable manual:
The Adventures of Willy Beamish - Produced by Sierra's Dynamix studio, for PC in the early 90's, Willy Beamish was a point and click adventure game. It was a fun, cartoony world with interesting characters and you took control of young Willy Beamish in his summer break adventure dealing with bad report cards, the last day of school, bullies, crazy babysitters, family and friendship dynamics and, in a meta-ish way video games. The world was colorful, and bright. But the immersive part for me was one of the manuals that came in the box (remember the huge boxes PC games came in?). The manual was a notebook in the style of the spiral ring notebooks most of us used in school, with a bunch of Willy's writing, newspaper and magazine clippings and doodles. It was a fun little piece of the game that I enjoyed, but it also had the other task of acting as the old school predecessor of DRM. But it was beautiful, and a trend that some of the later Sierra games had.
Older Blizzard games, the Zelda series of old, and even some of the Super Mario's also come to mind as great manuals that helped a player immerse themselves in the game world. I wish I had the presence of mind to keep my old manuals because I remember them fondly.
The manuals used to come with a Notes section (which some still do) that I used the hell out of for codes (Mega Man, Castlevania, METROID, etc) so I wouldn't lose progress made before saving your games on a console were a given. I also used my Mortal Kombat for Sega Genesis manual as a baseline for some of my middle school art, doing an awesome reproduction of the Goro sketch contained within... something I probably couldn't reproduce now that I've been lax at my craft.
So anyone want to share their awesome manuals and things you remember?
Game manuals have basically died a slow death, once being works of art that complemented the games they were boxed with and added to the immersion into the world you're about to experience, now they're just slips of paper with the cover art on one side and maybe a small foldout giving you basic control schemes and the ever present warnings and legalese. With the major budgets games have, one would feel that they could devote some time into these little snippets WITHOUT having to pay for the Collectors Edition to get them. But times change, and so do profit margins I guess.
In the spirit of the lost art I recall my most memorable manual:
The Adventures of Willy Beamish - Produced by Sierra's Dynamix studio, for PC in the early 90's, Willy Beamish was a point and click adventure game. It was a fun, cartoony world with interesting characters and you took control of young Willy Beamish in his summer break adventure dealing with bad report cards, the last day of school, bullies, crazy babysitters, family and friendship dynamics and, in a meta-ish way video games. The world was colorful, and bright. But the immersive part for me was one of the manuals that came in the box (remember the huge boxes PC games came in?). The manual was a notebook in the style of the spiral ring notebooks most of us used in school, with a bunch of Willy's writing, newspaper and magazine clippings and doodles. It was a fun little piece of the game that I enjoyed, but it also had the other task of acting as the old school predecessor of DRM. But it was beautiful, and a trend that some of the later Sierra games had.
Older Blizzard games, the Zelda series of old, and even some of the Super Mario's also come to mind as great manuals that helped a player immerse themselves in the game world. I wish I had the presence of mind to keep my old manuals because I remember them fondly.
The manuals used to come with a Notes section (which some still do) that I used the hell out of for codes (Mega Man, Castlevania, METROID, etc) so I wouldn't lose progress made before saving your games on a console were a given. I also used my Mortal Kombat for Sega Genesis manual as a baseline for some of my middle school art, doing an awesome reproduction of the Goro sketch contained within... something I probably couldn't reproduce now that I've been lax at my craft.
So anyone want to share their awesome manuals and things you remember?
