[jdwithit]

The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.

Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.

[thaumasiotes]

> If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.

The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.)

GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.

[int_19h]

They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page.

Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.

[hakfoo]

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon did that, and the thing about railway enthusiasts is that they go encyclopedic on that.

They could identify any of the locomotives and probably tell you every pixel of them that was wrong.

[aidenn0]

I can probably still answer most of the copy-protection questions from Wing Commander. e.g. Maniac is 23 years old.