What happened to the Game Manuals?
Many will remember the exciting wait to play, looking at the back of the box, and after opening it, the adventure began with the smell of printed ink from the manual that showed us the narrative of the video game, its characters, its setting and conceptual art, along with an introduction to the controls of the game and its mechanics.
Today, it is effortless to start your new adventure in a video game: just buy it and start playing, the game itself will guide you, in most cases, through some tutorial. However, some time ago, it was typical for the ritual that immersed us in the video game universe to begin with a tour of its manual.
A look inside the box
Not all the manuals were the same: the differences were marked by the publishers or by the genre of the video game, both in color, shape, style, length, size or creativity, and this is where its richness lies.
At Nintendo, the 16 and 64 Bit video game manuals were mostly very elaborate and colorful. However, in SEGA, they bet more on clarity and precision with dominant colors such as white, black and blue being so characteristic. In addition, they used their manuals to detail in a glossary the Japanese words that were used in the game.
At SONY, they were very diverse and at first in North America more colorful than in Europe, although over time this barrier was broken down. Finally, Microsoft, in general, opted for colorful manuals detailing both the history and gameplay research.
In a review of the history of manuals, the first that can be found in relation to video games are those of Atari 2600 (1977) and MSX (1983) necessary to understand how to play with their new entertainment devices.
As for the manuals specifically for video games, we can highlight some such as 'PitFall' (1994) with 81 pages; 'Commandos: Beyond Duty' (1999) with 64 pages; of the same year or the mythical game of 'Age of Empires ll: The Age Of Kings' with 137 pages.
In 2001, 'Civilization III' appeared with 236 pages, although surpassed in length by 'World of Warcraft' (2005), which contained 255 manual pages.
With the appearance of the digital format and platforms such as Steam, Origin, Xbox Live, PS Store or Nintendo's E-Shop, the manuals were limited to a few pages or even made up only the back cover of the box.
Why is it deprecated?
Some of the reasons for the disappearance of these manuals are their digitization and "uselessness", since now the tutorial and guides on how to play it are introduced in the game's history, or even the economic interest of the publishers or the impact on the environment, being relegated to collecting.
In any case, this space has been transferred to Apps like YouTube or Reddit, where the developers themselves can communicate their perspectives and the communities can focus on it. An example on YouTube is The Game Theorist. Or Kotaku's initiative called 'SNES Manual Archive' tries to collect and scan all the Super Nintendo manuals with the collaboration of the players.
From a useful guide to a collector's item
But if what you want to know is if some of your manuals have value, hobbyconsolas.com present you a list of the most valued, of which those of the following video games stand out:
'Clay Fighter: Sculptor's Cut' for Nintendo 64 valued at €524.
‘Stunt Racer 64’ valued at €201.
And in third place 'Rule of Rose' of the PS2 at € 152.
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