It was like a ritual. You sat in the back seat, opened the game, and started looking at the game. manual while your mother actively and passively told you not to read in the car, because you were going to get dizzy.
It didn’t matter if the trip was to a shopping center close to home or if you came down from Andorra with a new Game Boy under your arm, you could stay the whole way with your eyes fixed on that handful of pages with tutorials, comics and illustrations.
Today, like so many other rituals that our children will never understand, spending hours in front of the pages of a video game manual It has almost disappeared. But faced with the abandonment of the companies, in a mixture of nostalgia and rebellion, there are those who refuse to let the companies die. paper tutorials.
Goodbye to the video game manual
Although some companies are reluctant to turn their backs on the manual – normally indie studios that, surrounded by that nostalgia, put all their effort into creating their own physical editions – the fight to recover the video game manuals It is already a lost battle.
What once were real behemoths with which you could hurt your brother if you threw it right at his head, soon became small magazines and, in their last moments, just a handful of pages with more legal texts than information about the game.
After some more than likely disappointment when opening a box, someone was sure to blurt out a “for this don’t put anything” which he must still be regretting. The great video games did not take long to forget about the manuals.
No small booklets, no promotions for other games, no anything. Nowadays the box has plenty of space everywhere. An already meaningless space that was previously occupied by comics, tutorials, game art and some pages to jot down notes that, masks aside, I never really knew what the hell they were doing there.
Just look at a handful of pages like the ones you have on these lines, taken from the first Pokémon manual by Game Boy, to appreciate the care and attention that was put there. A love that, luckily for those who miss it, has not yet been completely lost.
Fan-made manuals
Although their realities are very different, Nacho’s (@ProjectoNach on Twitter) is a story very similar to that of other creatives and designers who have entered the world of fan made manuals. Whether with their sights set on business or occupying their time with a hobby, they seek to recover those lost treasures.
“I am a self-taught illustrator/designer who restored video game covers that the passage of time had destroyed. You know, so that people can print a Game Boy or Game & Watch box on cardboard without leaving their salary to profiteers” .
Unfortunately for him, a problem with his arm made him abandon drawing little by little to avoid pain, but luckily he found an alternative that could allow him to continue exploiting that mix of art and video games that he liked so much: create manuals for games that they didn’t have them.
What at first started as something for him, since he says he was terrified of opening a game box and seeing a desert inside, soon began to generate glances among his followers. Over time, even the developers themselves approached him to ask for copies of his creations.
“The Metroid Dread one is the one I’m most proud of. The guys at Mercury Steam saw what I did, congratulated me, and ordered me copies for them. That day I thought, I’ve already reached my personal peak.”
With tremendous work behind him, manuals like those shown, or those that populate pages like Etsy, are usually a mix between the formats of that time and the style of each creator. According to Nacho, “those of yesteryear mostly just vomited out the information without giving much free rein to the design. They followed a kind of prefabricated template“.
He says to opt for a more personal touch and that, in addition to offering useful text, “Let the reader feast their eyes on the design. Make it a very pleasant visual experience“. A work that, as you may have already imagined from the images, has behind it a huge amount of hours.
“Paper Mario was the one I started learning with and I had to redo it three times by trial and error. It’s the most beautiful of all the ones I made, but I think about the whole process and I get cold sweats.”
Although it is easy to find stores where the manuals amount up to 20 dollarsNacho’s rarely exceed the 12 dollars between the booklet and shipping costs. At that price not only is there not much business behind it because he barely makes a couple of dollars from each copy, but because it is not usually a very grateful job.
Ordering high-quality prints from a printing company is only relatively cheap if the bulk of the order is enormous, so in order to offer them without losing money you have to resort to pre-purchases that later end up being canceled if people are not willing to wait.
“It depresses me a lot because sometimes I think if it’s worth spending a month or a month or so designing a manual so that later I can’t get ahead.”
Like so many others who dedicate themselves to it as a hobby and then share it openly, the idea of going against the grain of the big companies and keeping the spirit of the video game manual It’s more than enough to continue.
“It costs Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and other companies a ridiculous expense to make manuals and keep people happy, but if they can save that money, then they do it.
It is heartbreaking to open a box and see that there is a box to put a manual that does not exist.
It would be very cool if the community of players through some forum dedicated themselves to the same thing as me, to design manuals together.”
Although his wish is to see how the manuals so that the new generations can spend time “browsing, reading, smelling and above all, enjoying it“, that the winds of change will arrive today seems quite unlikely. Until the miracle occurs, it will be necessary to entrust ourselves to the magnificent work of a good handful of nostalgic people who, despite the difficulties and incipient oblivion, have become the resistance of the paper tutorial.
In iGamesNews | In search of the lost instruction manual
Cover image | etsy
