[mhink]

> One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.

While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.

Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.

[BlueTemplar]

I'm more curious at the state of things before online and gamefaqs.com ?

I do remember downloadable (and maybe also bundled with game magazines ?) game tricks encyclopedias in the Windows help file format.

[egypturnash]

Magazines and guidebooks.

Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.

Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...