There was a time when getting stuck in a game could mean months of trial and error until you find the solution. A key moment for an expanding industry that, through today’s surreal experiments, sought to make their work profitable beyond the sale of the game.
Long before the internet surrendered to SEO gimmicks, YouTube was filled with commentless walkthroughs, and even before magazines used guides as a gimmick, game developers themselves tried to turn difficulty into business.
The lunar logic that printed money
It is not the first time that we have collected the term lunar logic here, the mechanics that turned the puzzles of the graphic adventures of our childhood into a nightmare harder than a Malenia up to the bars of meth.
Thanks to the return of the Monkey Island saga, the difficulty of those devilish puzzles, whose lack of logic led to the aforementioned term -because only a Martian would be able to understand the solution-, has made us remember one of the strangest fashions that has lived the medium throughout its history.
Standard-bearers for the Sierra of yesteryear and the Machiavellian mind of its designers, the company behind classics like King’s Quest, Gobliiins or Leisure Suit Larry saw in those puzzles not only an opportunity for games to last longer for users, but also a juicy business opportunity.
If players were getting bogged down in challenges like having to place a butterfly next to a lamp to create a butterfly effect that would make it rain in the future in order to steal some poor lord’s clothes, what better way to take advantage of the situation than by charging them for the solution.
Go ahead for 4 dollars
With a price that moved up to 20 dollars, the equivalent of about 40 dollars –36 dollars– According to inflation, Sierra began to sell a collection of guides and trail books that you could find in the usual stores or through the purchase by mail -the Amazon of the 90s-.
However, this was not the most lucrative experiment that the company came up with, nor the one that lasted the longest. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, companies like Sierra, Nintendo o Lucasarts they grabbed at hotlines to calm the despair of his fans and pocket some good dollars in the process.
With calls that moved at a cost of between $0.50 and $2 per minutedouble according to inflation up to almost 4 dollars at the current exchange rate, answering machines and telemarketers with a library of manuals indicating how to proceed as immediately as possible.
More than a decade later, games like Half-Life or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic still included in manuals and discs those help lines hoping to scratch off the last income before the internet and its Universal Hint System ended up ruining the business.
It may not be the cleanest of all those that have passed through the industry, but it is certainly one of the most curious of that time and one that players remember -surprisingly- with more love.
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