My 90's and 2000's Experience: My Favourite Video Game Manuals

 Hey everyone, how were your weekends? Mine was pretty good. As you may have noticed, I didn't post the Star Wars post that I had said I was gonna post. I was busy last week getting ready for my appearance on The VHS Club Video Podcast, which was really fun. I'll do that post eventually, but for now, let's talk about today's topic, which is video game instruction manuals. Particularly my favourite ones from the NES, SNES, and N64 eras, as well as a Game Boy/Game Boy Color one. These won't be in any real order or anything, though I'll save my absolute favourite one for the end. So let's get into it.

The first one I want to talk about is the one for SimCity for the Super Nintendo. I've already talked about this game as the first post in this series, so I won't say too much about it again here. The manual was great though as it takes you through the whole process of building and managing a city in the game, with the game's character, Dr. Wright, as your guide. Of course, the manual opens with Demolition and all the natural, and not so natural, disasters you can use to destroy your city, or one of the cities depicted in the various scenarios included in the game, like rebuilding Tokyo after a Bowser attack. The manual takes you through all six stages of the game, from village to Megalopolis, as well as provides examples of fictional cities that failed because their mayors sucked. 

Next is the manual for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. One of the things that these manuals all do very well is give the story of the game, including background information that you either get in game, or you know because you read the manual. As we'll see with the Mario games, particularly the ones for the NES and SNES, they couldn't give you the whole backstory in the game, since the game mechanics were fairly primitive for the time that those particular games were coming out. They also allow you to figure out the controls for the game before turning the game console on. Some even allow you space to write in game passwords, and cheat codes. Others, like Ocarina of Time even give you a map of the world of the game you're playing.

Next is the Pokemon Trainer's Guide for the first generation of Pokemon games (Red, Blue, and Yellow). This essentially is a combination of instruction manual, and a condensed version of the Official Player's Guide book published by Nintendo. It takes you up to Pewter City, and the first gym badge. Which is cool.

The manual for Majora's Mask isn't as good as the one for Ocarina of Time, but I think that's just because the game came out in 2000, which was the end of the N64's lifespan, when video game manuals had less effort put into them than they did in the 80's and early 90's. I still like it though because it does make the game feel like a follow-up to Ocarina of Time, instead of its own standalone game. 

Then there's the first manual I ever saw, which was the one for Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, which was the game cartridge that came with our original NES console. One thing I haven't mentioned in this post is that because I'm Canadian and live in Canada, some of the game manuals were slightly thicker because they included the French language version of them in the back of the manuals. This game did, as did the one for Super Mario World, but I think that's it. I don't have any of these manuals anymore, as I gave them to my brother since he has the Super Nintendo, but I'm pretty sure that this manual and the one for Super Mario World were the only ones to include a French language version in the back. This manual is how I found out about the story for the Mario games, because, well, the game itself didn't have the capacity to tell the story.

Of course I was going to mention Star Trek in this post. The booklet for Star Trek: The Next Generation - Future's Past for the SNES is the one that allowed us to write down passwords that the game provides you whenever you visit a Starbase between missions, which allow you to return to that segment of the game as, for whatever reason, the game doesn't actually allow you to save your game in a save file like most SNES games let you do. Especially given that this game was released pretty late into the SNES's lifespan, as it came out in 1994, long after TNG had ended its television run. 

The manual for Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES is unique because the game is a compilation of the three NES Mario games, plus the previously unreleased (in North America) Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, which was the original Super Mario Bros. 2 that got released in Japan shortly after the original game came out in the mid 80's, but was deemed too difficult for players, so it got replaced by the game that we know as Super Mario Bros. 2, which was also included in this compilation. The manual only devotes two pages to The Lost Levels as it treats it as an extension of Super Mario Bros., which it actually is.

And then we finish off with my favourite video game manual of all time, the one for Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo. There's just something about this manual that made me read it and look at it over and over again. I think it's because it connects the game to the previous NES Super Mario Bros. games in a way that, well, the other games didn't connect to each other really. And the manual makes reference to Super Mario Bros. 3 multiple times. The first time is in the story at the beginning of the manual, which establishes that this game takes place soon after the events of that game. Which is really cool, because, again, the game itself doesn't give that much detail. And then on pages 19 and 20 (I'm looking at a scan of those pages online) it gives us a map of Yoshi's Island and the various locations you have to go to. 

It also highlights a sunken ship off of Chocolate Island with the caption, "This is a strange looking sunken ship. Haven't you seen it somewhere before? That's right, in Super Mario Bros. 3, Koopa and his kids used a flying ship to make life tough for Mario. I wouldn't be surprised if Bowser is lurking somewhere nearby." I always thought that this description sounded ominous and a little scary, given that it is an abandoned sunken ship. But the fact that it's Bowser's airship from Super Mario Bros. 3 gives it a bit more gravitas that it wouldn't've had if it were just a generic sunken ship. And I think that's what Miyamoto and his team were going for when they made this game. 

The best thing about looking at these manuals, particularly the Mario ones, is seeing what the games were like back then. In the case of the Mario games, there was no Bowser Jr. and the seven Koopalings, were Bowser's kids. It's also interesting to see Bowser being referred to as Bowser or Koopa, as the name was pretty interchangeable throughout the early Mario games. 

And that is my look at my favourite/most memorable video game manuals. I love thinking about stuff like this, since we don't have manuals for video games like this anymore. They started to go away during the GameCube/Xbox era in the early to mid-2000's. I love talking about this stuff too, which is why I have this blog. I'll be back soon with more nostalgic goodness. So until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.