The in-game manual for the 2022 game Tunic by Andrew Shouldice, meanwhile, leans heavily into nostalgia for NES and SNES-era games such as The Legend of Zelda and Star Tropics famously, the latter came with a letter that players had to immerse in water to reveal a hidden code. The legal information on the first two pages heavily implies that the game might be haunted. He and collaborator Ben Ward thus came up with an instruction manual for a fictional kart-racing game called Unkarted Territory, which was created by an “insufferable indie developer called Tarquin,” who takes all of the credit while relying on others to do the work, says Marshall. “And I said to them, could it be a manual for a different game?” Marshall says. When Limited Run, a company that creates special-edition physical versions of retro and digital-only games, picked up Marshall’s game Lair of the Clockwork God in 2022, it asked him to create a manual to go with it. This is perhaps part of a wider trend right now in which physical objects are being venerated by a generation that has seen films, music and video games disappear into the digital realm – see also the younger generation’s unexpected fondness for vinyl. “Turns out folks never really tired of beautiful game manuals,” said Mike Bithell, the head of publisher Bithell Games, on X/Twitter. The developers were surprised at just how many players did exactly that: around 10% of people who bought the digital game purchased a paper manual as well. In July, The Banished Vault from Lunar Division featured an in-game manual that could also be ordered on paper, via print on demand, for £4.99. We have seen a few developers try their hand at physical manuals, too. Getting physical … The Banished Vault manual. Brilliantly, the manual even features authentic-looking tea-ring stains and child graffiti. The game is based around Brio-style wooden train tracks, and the company released a beautifully crafted digital manual to explain the “Tren Modular Play System”, a fictional toy produced by a company called BeechCorp. ![]() The game was published by the newly reformed MicroProse, a company that has historically specialised in simulation and strategy games like F-15 Strike Eagle and Civilization, all of which came with suitably enormous manuals (the instructions for Civilization ran to well over 100 pages).Īnd earlier this year, Media Molecule released Tren for its Dreams game platform. The 2021 strategy title HighFleet: Deus in Nobis by Konstantin Koshutin arrived alongside a lovingly produced 92-page PDF manual that could be downloaded from Steam. However, a few developers have been working hard to resurrect this lost part of gaming tradition. The instruction manual was redundant, dead. Initially, publishers would often provide a PDF version of the game manual, but eventually even this tradition tailed off. Then digital downloads started to take off in the 2000s. In-game tutorials soon became de rigueur, so players could dive straight into a new game without pausing to study the manual first. The pioneering 1984 BBC Micro title Elite came with an entire novella called The Dark Wheel that gave insights into the Elite universe.īut as consoles and computers became more powerful throughout the 1990s, it became increasingly feasible to include instructions on how to play within the game itself. ![]() Memorably, Revolution’s 1994 adventure game Beneath a Steel Sky came with a comic by 2000AD’s Dave Gibbons, which explained some of the events leading up to the game’s opening. There might be other exciting things in the game box, too. Information about how to play the game could instead be offloaded to the manual, which also offered an opportunity to provide some story and background to accompany the simple sprites on screen. Every byte of memory was precious, and even adding an instruction as simple as “press A to jump” would take up memory that could be better allocated elsewhere. In the early days of home video games, manuals were essential. Box of delights … early video games came with an array of instruction manuals Photograph: Stephen Cooper/Alamy
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