this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Video games trained millennials to do this. NES, Sega, SNES, even Atari games very often told you real shit in the manual. They were written to be read and contain training material. There were no tutorials other than reading and trail and error.
I mean, how else were you ever going to figure that out?
Really, the manuals where they made it fun are the best.
If I ever make a game I'm including at least 7 pieces of deep lore in the manual and one clue that you would only figure out by rtfm
And in a matter of a few hours a single guy will have read the manual, figured out the clue and put it on a wiki or a Reddit post so that none of your other players have to rtfm
Every manual is personalized
Personalized, matched to that specific instance of the game, and the clue gets the Star Tropics treatment but with paper that dissolves after 60 seconds.
Back in the day, DRM was handled like this. I had an indy 500 game where the manual contained a bunch of hiatory of the sport and in order to launch the game, you had to answer indy 500 history trivia questions.
Other games had a symbol alphabet (or some other mapping between images and information it could put on the screen) where the key was only contained in the manual (or on a piece of paper that came with the game).
King's Quest VI had riddles that needed to be answered in a symbol alphabet. You could play the game without doing this but you couldn't beat it.
A mickey mouse game had a paper that was dark brown with black ink (so photocopiers would fail to copy it) with Mickey in various poses and you had to find the number for the one shown on screen to play.
My childhood family computer had the old D&D games from the gold box where you had a wheel you had to pull out and align it every single time you played to get the code symbol to put in in order to play the game.
In retrospect, that was kind of cool, even if it's diabolical.
I remember Street Fighter II asked for page x, paragraph y word z. Once it even pointed to the German section of the manual where the word "mitten" was used. I found that clever. You can't just copy the English part.
Also, Leisure Suit Larry did something similar, and they sold more copies of the manual than they sold of the game.
Im really sad that there are no longer manuals in games, and half the time or more it seems nothing has or comes with manuals anymore
You might look into some Zachtronics games. Both ExaPunks and Shenzhen I/O require their paper manual counterparts to be played.
Also TIS-100, the one no one talks about since Shenzhen I/O came out. :(
TIS-100 Sits unfinished in my library as one of the most esoteric and difficult puzzle games I've ever played. It breaks my mind thinking about it.
Tunic is rtfm the game
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Manuals were needed because they contained information that was missing from the games. Since that time, game design principles have evolved, and most of what used to be in game manuals was eventually included in the games themselves in a semi-diegetic manner. For example, the Codex in Mass Effect, or the books in various Larian games.
Player training is another aspect that has evolved beyond needing a written summary. Half-Life 2 is an excellent example. The player's attention is drawn to a demonstration of a mechanic, then they are gated until they solve a simple puzzle involving that mechanic, then a more complex puzzle involving previously learned mechanics. For example: the player sees an energy ball in a socket activating a bridge; then the player has to launch an energy ball into an empty socket; then the player has to bounce an energy ball off a wall to reach an empty socket. Other great examples are Soul Reaver 1, Dishonored, and obviously, Portal.
I'm not against the idea of supplementary printed material, as long as it remains supplementary. If printed material is required* to make a game playable, then it's a failure of game design.
* obviously excludes the other extreme end of the spectrum where reading printed material is an integral part of the gameplay, like various Zachtronics games.
Or you miss something from the one time tutorial and go through a ton of the game not knowing you can do a certain thing. Then you watch some YouTube video where someone does that thing and youβre like FUCK I COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THAT ALL ALONG!
Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn't seen a game manual up until PS3 days. Every single cartridge and disc sold there was just that. Best case scenario in a flimsy plastic case that would disintegrate in a couple of years. Had to rawdog the shit out of those games. Pure trial and error and perseverance.
Stuck? Try every possible button combination in every location that makes any sense.
For example, couldn't finish Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure on Mega Drive (Genesis) because I didn't know you can jump off walls. Finished it earlier this year though π
Not to brag, but my brother and I passed the garage test mission in Driver (PS1) as kids. Now that I think about it, I should put it on my resume.
we were lucky if we or family members in the house could speak enough english to know what the fuck was even on screen.
Yeah, that was the case early on. But because of that problem we were very incentivized to learn English. Which we did pretty fast.
Which also proves the point that a manual isn't preventing anything.
I'm not sure I understand. What point?
Sorry, someone else had suggested that a manual that was necessary to knowing how the game works was some sort of way to try and prevent piracy. Which is just not sensible. Pirates gonna pirate.
They are right, it was used for that. Sometimes some key information for progress would be in the manual or on the box. Luckily it wasn't super popular on consoles, due to the notion that it wasn't as easy to pirate on consoles as it was on home computers, where you could just copy the floppy/CD.
I think that was really more in the Atari days, right? Some of them have technical steps like jump switches.
I'm aware of some DOS games that did it. For example 1989 Prince of Persia had you enter the exact character (page, line, word) from the manual.
On PS1 you'd probably never complete Metal Gear Solid (1998), cause you need to call somebody on the codec, but the frequency was on the box cover.
I think it also functioned as an anti piracy measure
If someone in the 80s or 90s was going to the trouble of copying roms onto new boards and making plastic enclosures, then photocopying a little booklet really isn't that much of a heavy lift.