Wow, I also spent years reading those guides before playing by first ever Pokémon game. I even started to write my own guide. As a child, it was very fun.
Now I'm wondering how many people share the same experience.
My friend who I played Red and Blue with had one of those.
They were an incredible resource. Later I was almost more amazed by gameFAQs which has very detailed guides for almost any game. And at least back then it was all ASCII with no ads. A million times better than the blogspam game guides that Google returns these days
gamefaqs often still has really really good mostly text guides for PC cRPGs (with the odd exception of BG3). Maybe all the old-timey text nerds only like RTWP (which is a position I have a lot of sympathy with).
On a cursory survey of GameFaqs as it exists now, checked the top five most recent game additions. Got semi-recent to recent games. Seems very similar to 20 years ago with slight tech additions. Still very slimmed down. Minimal load.
Fate/Extra CCC, All Endings (1/2/24); Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, Recruitment (12/28/23); Shin Megami Tensei V, Walkthrough (1/4/24); Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Strategy (12/25/23); The Sims 4, Rent Object List (12/30/23)
Oldschool Ascii: 1, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
Text HTML w/ Menu: 2, Fate/Extra CCC, Shin Megami Tensei V
Text and Images: 1, Sims 4
Text, Images, Video: 1, Super Mario Bros. Wonder
They all seemed reasonably well written on a cursory glance. Notably, did not delve all that far into checking whether they were factual.
I spent weeks and months taking a dozen different guides online in .txt format and combining and editing them together and doing my own editorializing. I carried this around on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and anytime my parents dragged me somewhere boring that had a floppy drive, I'd sit on whichever computer I found editing my guides while they did boring adult stuff. Usually at a family member's or friend of the family's house.
I had a guide for Wind Waker that I’d enjoy reading and mostly appreciating the artwork from (I’m not sure I even could read English when I first bought the guide), yet I didn’t have the game and only played occasionally at friend’s places.
I remember planning to collect all the statues in that game. I never did, and likely never will, but I’ve enjoyed Wind Waker more recently and it really is a great game and I would like to play through it at some point.
But I feel like that this isn't really the same experience. The Pokémon guide feels closer to the game than the Zelda one, especially since the Zelda games are known for their riddles - which are very hard to properly transcribe in a guide, imo.
Some of Zelda's best riddles can be rendered useless as soon as you read the solution (thinking about a very good one in Phantom Hourglass I'll never be able to experience again) - but the Pokémon ones still feel fresh, especially since the games rely so much on exploration, grinding and battling.
I hadn't thought of it like that, but I agree with you. The magic of good puzzle design lies partly in figuring it out yourself and feeling clever, and you miss out on that when reading the solution to the puzzle in a guide.
I absolutely loved what Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks did with the hardware they had available to them in terms of game design. I'd love to see a remaster of Spirit Tracks, but I'm not sure it'd be possible to capture the cleverness of their controls (admittedly not always a good thing) and puzzles on the Switch?
The Pokemon Power magazine had a very small guide for Red/Blue at the start, I must have read that 1000 times over. Just before christmas that year I was yahooing some Pokemon / Gameboy things when I stumbled upon the no$gmb and the world of emulation... I have fond memories of that emulator and the debugger.
I was the same with a GameFaqs walkthough of Pokémon Red/Blue. It was written in a very interesting style too and like many people I wish I could play the Pokémon game that it helped to create in my head.
A bit younger, so the game isn’t the same, but I had the same experience with Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - I did ultimately get the game within a year or so