<
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/jan/17/the-revenge-of-the-video-game-manual-tunic-the-banished-vault>
"Players of a certain age will no doubt have fond memories of the paper
instruction manuals that once came with every video game. Dan Marshall, creator
of
The Swindle and
Lair of the Clockwork God, certainly does. He remembers
the ritual of poring over the manual for a new game on the bus ride home from
the shops, trying to absorb all of its information in preparation for playing
the game itself.
He vividly recalls receiving Bullfrog’s 1993 game
Syndicate via mail order
early one morning, then impatiently waiting hours for his brother to wake up so
he could play it on the PC in his room. “And for that solid time I did nothing
but read the manual over and over and over again,” Marshall says.
Marshall has now given away most of his old DVDs, games and magazines, but he
still retains a shelf of treasured physical items that remind him of certain
times in his life: the book he first used when learning to code, a 1989
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles LCD handheld, the odd game box that he couldn’t
bear to part with. “They’re things that you can walk past, and it brings a
smile,” he says. “And a well done manual, a well done box, is joyful in that
sense.”
In the early days of home video games, manuals were essential. Every byte of
memory was precious, and even adding an instruction as simple as “press A to
jump” would take up memory that could be better allocated elsewhere.
Information about how to play the game could instead be offloaded to the
manual, which also offered an opportunity to provide some story and background
to accompany the simple sprites on screen. There might be other exciting things
in the game box, too. Memorably, Revolution’s 1994 adventure game
Beneath a
Steel Sky came with a comic by
2000AD’s Dave Gibbons, which explained some
of the events leading up to the game’s opening. The pioneering 1984 BBC Micro
title
Elite came with an entire novella called
The Dark Wheel that gave
insights into the
Elite universe.
But as consoles and computers became more powerful throughout the 1990s, it
became increasingly feasible to include instructions on how to play within the
game itself. In-game tutorials soon became de rigueur, so players could dive
straight into a new game without pausing to study the manual first. Then
digital downloads started to take off in the 2000s. Initially, publishers would
often provide a PDF version of the game manual, but eventually even this
tradition tailed off. The instruction manual was redundant, dead.
However, a few developers have been working hard to resurrect this lost part of
gaming tradition. The 2021 strategy title
HighFleet: Deus in Nobis by
Konstantin Koshutin arrived alongside a lovingly produced 92-page PDF manual
that could be downloaded from Steam. The game was published by the newly
reformed MicroProse, a company that has historically specialised in simulation
and strategy games like
F-15 Strike Eagle and
Civilization, all of which
came with suitably enormous manuals (the instructions for
Civilization ran to
well over 100 pages).
And earlier this year, Media Molecule released
Tren for its Dreams game
platform. The game is based around Brio-style wooden train tracks, and the
company released a beautifully crafted digital manual to explain the “Tren
Modular Play System”, a fictional toy produced by a company called BeechCorp.
Brilliantly, the manual even features authentic-looking tea-ring stains and
child graffiti."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
