this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Gen Z/late millenials trying to interpret retro games they play on emulators with no manuals is the modern "people making extremely detailed marble statues because they don't realize Romans painted theirs".
That's how you end up with Blue Prince and Dark Souls and stuff.
Tunic is really cool, it’s sorta based off the dudes experiences not being able to read and playing Zelda trying to use the manual to figure out wtf is going on, to my understanding.
I refuse to believe that Romans painted theirs. I mean, the evidence is clear that they did but it would look so terrible!
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.
Younger me would have been blown away that reading would help me beat games in the future.
For the record, I have a small library now but when I first started playing NES-N64 games, I absolutely hated reading and never would have cracked open the manuals.
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.
Lmao no I grew up in the 90s, and we only got cheap secondhand n64 games. The apartments I grew up in were in the middle of trailer parks, but they all owned the land their trailers were on so I'll leave it up to the reader to determine who was more bougie.
My dad was the one who wanted the consoles and he isn't tech savvy, so until I got my own money, it was always "plug and play" things, none of those new-fangled computers until Windows ME.
And hilariously, I got an old macintosh in the mid 2000s and had fun figuring everything out by trial and error based off what I knew of computers at the time. Even had the x wing game on several floppies.
I would have loved having a computer when you had to actually know how it works to use it.
I remember waiting for next month's issue of different gaming magazines... I never bothered knowing which magazine it was, I just waited for my dad to return from the store with whichever one he wanted that day.
Honestly I miss in-depth game guides with the two pages of ASCII art at the top.
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.
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?
I'm interested in your take on what Blue Prince and Dark Souls are echoing, if I'm reading this right.
Dark Souls is largely inspired by Miyazaki consuming western media without being able to fully understand it. He had to try to fill in the gaps himself. I assume that's what they meant.
A good example of this is Tunic, where the manual is not understandable at first, but you can figure out as you play. These games create very interactive world building where you're supposed to pay attention and piece things together yourself instead of being handed the solution.
I think they're saying if you fire up some old NES games without the manual, you'll only learn from trial and error, and it's going to be hard as hell. (Even with the manual, they were not as forgiving back then)
Hence, people designing challenging games without instructions thinking THAT'S what the old timers must like!
Is there a database of scans of old video game manuals somewhere? Seems like something that would be great to add to stuff like RetroArch etc., along side the automatic download of box art and such.
Edit: @nocturne posted one downthread: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/all_manuals
yeah i have this on emulationstation
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Honestly, I do enjoy that though.
Yes, and that's why Dark Souls is fun. Lol
We do!!! Blue Prince is fantastic
Wait, Blue Prince isn't just a point-and-click adventure/escape room kinda game?
It is a mystery/puzzle/roguelike where you have to figure out what to do, how to do it, and even how the game works. You get a broad goal at the beginning, but you have to experiment, learn, and solve puzzles to progress. It basically requires that you take notes. It's brilliant
That's actually pretty awesome! I have it on my wishlist but it thought it was more like just an adventure/puzzle kinda thing.
Imagine not knowing about Vimm's manual project