Have you ever considered opening a Kofi? It's like Patreon except they take a very small flat rate monthly fee (it's like $5 or less) instead of a percentage no matter how much support you get on there Unrelated, but VPN's don't protect you from anything; their only use is making it appear like you're somewhere else for access to content. The people you don't want to see your activity (the ISP and thus the government) still see all of your activity regardless. I've got nothing against VPN's, but claiming they protect your data in some way is just blatantly false and extremely misleading to your audience (I know it's part of the script, but maybe you should reconsider having such a sponsor if you're required to falsely advertise their product to the people who put their trust in you). And to be clear, I 100% believe you have been misled about the benefits of using a VPN and that you're not intentionally misleading your audience)
Clearly, either you forgot what Nord did, or never knew in the first place. There's a (very good) reason all the big tech youtubers dropped their sponsorship deals with Nord. They can't be trusted.
Please consider trying to stop speaking in such a slow tempo and in such a monotone voice and maybe lighten up or cutting a bit down on the information dumps
As someone who considers the C64 a major part of their childhood this is blowing my mind, *today.* I can't imagine how it would have hit 35 years ago. Particularly the movie like presentation, which we didn't even see on the Amiga. Amazing.
@@Mankey619 It's always been the case that early-launch games tend to be weak compared to later games. This came out seven years after the C64, so the devs had the better part of a decade to learn tricks and optimizations. Like how on the NES, SMB3 makes SMB1 look like pong. That's why new games for old consoles are usually amazing and manage to do things the devs of the time could never dream of (like James Lambert porting _Portal_ to the N64).
It was amazing back in the day. Especially compared to the normal C64 games, you threw that in, and suddenly were like, “What?” And sans internet, you just kept replaying it to figure out the story. So good.
It was every bit mind blowing back then to my 14-year-old self. I remember seeing it on the new arrivals shelf at Babbage's in Southridge Mall and deciding that I wanted to spend the $29.99 in 1989 dollars for this really fantastic looking game. I was not disappointed, matter of fact I had no idea what I was getting into. Changing the script in the middle of the game by doing different actions? WTF!? I swear I stayed up until the wee hours of the night playing this one, and it's blaring jump scare music. This game was advanced in the context of the era, so much so that if you told me a time-traveler created that game, I wouldn't be surprised.
Right? I remember a couple of games that had a similar vibe around this time, games like Nexus or Survivor, but Project Firestart would have blown me away
The fact that there is only 6 years separating this game RE is mindblowing. At the time, game evolution felt fluid and natural, but looking at it now is astonishing
As a pre-teen and teen, between 1989 and 1997, a month felt like a very long time. As a SNES owner and reader of a Nintendo focused magazine, each new month (issue) showed me something that would blow my mind, from Mega Man X (wow, these graphics can't get any better) to Killer Instinct (wow, these graphics can't get any better) to the first Project Reality prototypes screenshots (wow, these graphics can't get any better) to the actual N64 games (wow, these games really look lame; I think I'll better get a Playstation). But I agree, the evolution felt natural, and it sure was, but only a few years were needed to make really big steps.
@rattenkonig6303 WRONG. While the game may be 6 years older than RE but the hardware was from 1982. If this game would have been released in 82, would you say it'rs mindblowing for a 14 years gap? cos again, the hardware didn't change since1982.
For another tech skip that we will never see again: Parasite Eve 2 came out one year before MGS2. And we will never see that kind of tech progress leap ever again.
As a kid, my parents strictly limited the amount of time I could play video games. Video game manuals were my way of interacting with the worlds I wanted to experience when I wasn't allowed to. I would read them cover to cover for hours and then build things with clay or Legos to recreate scenes from the game as best as I could. I miss game manuals and the nostalgia it triggers for me, and treasure the few games that include manuals in their physical release like Hollow Knight and Tunic.
100% in support of you making a video on game manuals! I was just playing King's Quest VI and remembered I needed a poem from the manual to solve a puzzle. I ended up getting sucked in because the manual was also this charming little Guidebook to the lands in the game written in the perspective of a traveler. Seeing that made me wonder what creative and cool things other PC/DOS games were doing with their manuals at the time.
Holy hell... Used to play this game religiously along side Nexus. Didn't really understand them as a child but something about them just captivated me. Thank you Ragnar for the unexpected nostalgia overload.
I read every. single. manual for a game I ever bought. They were great, not only was it nice for a quick reference of controls and even sometimes certain abilities, but it had some good lore. It's how I know all of the Covenant's races names. I think they should bring them back.
The recent appreciation for game manuals has been really fascinating to watch. Generally, it's kind of a low undercurrent through old game retrospectives like this one, but then you get games like Tunic. I haven't played it myself, but my understanding is that the idea of a game manuel is so integral to the game that pages of said manual are the primary in-game collectible. I personally am a constantly vibrating, ADHD-riddled mess, so much of my experience with game manuals is limited to frantically reading them in the backseat of my parents car, on the way home from buying the game. You make a great argument for them, though! I think that as long as the game makes direct reference to the fact that it expects you to be using the guide (or takes into account that you may not be), ancillary material like that can be a great addition.
When an old game gave you manuals featuring in-game documents and maps, it always gave me that feeling of when you play table-top RPG's, and the game master passes out detailed hand drawn maps and in-game documents/props for the players to look at and inspect. You can't help but to appreciate it. I liked doing stuff like that as a game master too. Like even to the point where I would rip, fray and age maps, notes and letters, and staining the paper with tea and coffee to make them look worn and authentic to the players. Everyone always loved that attention to detail.
I played an old Sierra game as a kid called Sorcerian, which had an in-depth enchantment/spell system which the manual covered. I cannot imagine how you could fit all that in the game and have it be intuitive. And yes, I would love a video about games with great manuals as you mentioned. Been loving those kinds of topics nowadays
@RagnaRoxShow You should also check out a curious little French game called 'Zombi' which was released back in the 80's, basically a re-enactment of the 1970s film Dawn of the Dead, where you had to secure a shopping mall and survive against zombie hordes and biker gangs, I had a lot of fun with it.
First thing I did, after going to Electronics Boutique and buying a game in the early 2000's, is going to the shopping mall's cafeteria courtyard and opening that game to pour through the instruction manual as I sipped on a nice, hot Tim Horton's double-double in the dead of a December winter snow flurry.
As a fan of Flashback and og Alone in the Dark, this looks like ZE genuine hidden gem for me. So thanks man, I would never have heard of that game without your video and the passion that created it.
I've been hoping for a detailed, professional-level review of old-school video games and all their wacky accoutrements since The Spoony Experiment went under. I'd really like to see you check some of those out.
I'm not sure if you caught it but there's a small flub in the intro to the video. You said Konami was the developer behind Sweet Home, it's blink and you'll miss it I know. Just wanted to point it out in case you missed it in the edit.
I love that the set up is just Solaris. Important space facility goes dark, so one guy gets sent to check it out. Obviously original new ideas are king... But there is something to this era were so much of creativity could just come from taking the pieces of things you liked and smooshing them together. "Ok so the player is the guy from Solaris, except he's being sent to investigate the Nostromo..." Fun stuff. Also literally never heard of this game before. You're killing it sir.
"this era were so much of creativity could just come from taking the pieces of things you liked and smooshing them together." You just described any sort of creative process ever😊 It's not exclusive to that era.
Its exclusive to that era in that you could just mine 1979 movies and get something that hadn't been a game before. Or not since we've had near infinite Alien games, multiple Stalker, Escape From Alcatraz, Apocalypse Now, Mad Max and even a liscensed version of The Warriors but still no Quadrophenia the game or a second attempt at Kramer vs Kramer. Now unoriginal on purpose model kits like Warhammer which were created to be about personal artistic expression that wasn't available in competing historical wargames only survives by selling its decades old Dune meets LotR stolen IP, Lego sets that would have been been generic versions of archetypes thirty years ago are all properties owned by super conglomorates, games like Uncharted which was just Tomb Raider with a guy so its technically a new IP even though Tomb Raider was just Indiana Jones with a woman so it would be technically different has a pointless film version and everything with any budget is just a ripoff of a ripoff. Genre pastiches make great games and toys since genre conventions are basically just toys anyway but audiences that just want genre retreads and companies that just want to manage IP are a disaster. Art can't thrive without influence from outside of the arts. @@JC-kl3uc
The legendary Jeff Tunnell- you had Project Firestart, ArcticFox, Stellar 7, The Incredible Machine, Rise Of The Dragon, Betrayal At Krondor, Tribes. The Sierra On-Line/Dynamix partrnership sure produced a ton of classics.
RE: Manuals I fondly remember the old Infocom packages that included little game-related items that sort of expanded the game world. Sometimes they had something that directly related tot he game mechanics, but most of the time, it was just fun stuff. I also remember some of the old copy protection which would refer to something in the game manual, but it wouldn't be a flat out code, it would be referring to something like the "Plants of The World" or "Gemstones and their Meanings". Those manuals often had nice sections expanding the world beyond the game itself and would be a fun read.
I miss the manuals, I have fond memories of reading Kotor s manual over and over again. I only started buying digital content when it was clear I couldn't collect and read the manuals any more. Now I fill the void left by this in my gaming experience by reading all the in game sources and watching lore videos, while theory crafting my own head canon. or consuming very well made retrospective content like what Ragnar and aesir aesthetics produce. I really love your content my friend. These retrospectives are better researched and narrated than most content you can find anywhere. Truly top notch.
Oh, boy, the nostalgia... My cousin and I played the hell out of Project Firestart back in the day! It certainly was different from the other C64 games but that was what we loved about it. I remember recording my playthrough on our VHS and watching it like a movie afterwards! So, yeah - I'm an 80s kid and I miss manuals. Sid Meier's Pirates (which you showed a short clip from) had this great map of the Caribbean I had over my tv. I always loved when a game manual gave you small little trinkets and in-universe stuff. Good old times.
My best memory for manuals in games was that whenever I got a new game, my dad would make me read the whole manual before I could play it. It was super fun and really got me excited to actually play it
I'm reminded of my favorite manual from the alternate history dieselpunk flight sim, Crimson Skies. Set in a 1930s where the US broke apart from the Great Depression, the manual was designed to look like a magazine for aviation hobbyists - including interviews with main characters, reviews of new planes you get to fly, and full ads for fictional in-setting products. The whole things is available on Internet Archive, and it is still delightful to read through.
Mark my words on this. Sometime in the next 5, perhaps 10 years there will be an extremely successful mainstream video game that brings back "feelies" as part of the game experience. Big manuals with lore, maps, diagrams, etc. and will incorporate these into the experience of the game and it will be hailed as "revolutionary" by the games media. I could easily see this happening with a VR game, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened on one of the big consoles, either.
I forgot how much i liked manuals untill recently. Ive been gaming PC for years but got an Xbox for christmas n ended up getting cyberpunk 2077 and rdr2. The nostalgia i experienced when cyberpunk came with a mini lore book was so fun! Ended up sitting on my floor n just reading the entire thing! Same with rdr2! It came with a full sized map and i ended up using it for most of my playthru instead of using the in game map, circled areas i wanted to check out, wrote where plot points happened, ect. Ended up turning into my own version of arthurs journal!
I often cite Alien Syndrome in 1987 as the first game you could classify as "horror" with a straight face, but it's still just a top-down arcade action shooter. This, this is where horror games truly got the ball rolling and laid down all the design standards central to the genre. It's like how there were "stealth" games before Metal Gear, but none of them had nailed it quite so perfectly yet.
Alien Breed is the first game I remember being scared by.. the aesthetic, the sounds, the colour palette, all of it.. granted, I was about 7 but yeah 😂
I am also saddened, that game manuals is a lost art. While now games can tutorial you, it's limited by the amount of information the game can reasonably present to you. Then you have to resort to online wikis to get more details, not covered by basic tutorials. On the other hand manuals were not limited by the amount of information, while at the same time if being done artfully and creatively could have enriched the overall experience from the game. There are many examples of great manuals, for example Fallout 1 and 2 come to mind.
A two year development cycle for a game pre-2000 is absolutely insane. Even during the PS1, many studios were pumping out games made in a year or less.
i miss game manuals so much. every time i got a game as a kid, i'd scour through its manual until the moment i could actually play it. i loved the art, the lore, being able to easily reference controls and hints, the artistry of it all. it's why i fell in love with GOG as a platform, so many of the old games come with pdfs of all the feelies the physical game would come with, so you could still get a taste of that experience. i actually ended up printing out copies of the fallout 1 & 2 manuals to reference when i only had one monitor and i felt like a kid again (even if i hadn't actually played fallout as a kid). i love all your videos, but i'd love one on manuals especially. great vid! im gonna find firestart and give it a go.
I totally agree with you.. I miss manuals! I loved reading the storyline set up in the manuals and learning little things about the enemies, the characters, the setup. There was so much detail and story building in there most of the time! And I would love to see a video on the history of complex manuals being integrated with the game🙏👍✌️
amazing! I remember seeing this game in a magazine back in the day, at that time I was obsessed with all things 'alien' and desperately wanted to play it, unfortunately, I had a speccy.
Kudos for the manual bit dude, there are manuals that I've kept and read to this day and I don't play the game at all. They were an intrinsic part of the gaming experience and I mourn the loss. A good manual added so much to the game, lore, depth, concept art... a well done manual arguably would inspire the imagination more than the game itself, and gaming as a whole, while it has grown and advanced in myriad ways, is worse for not including them anymore. Anyway, just my take as an older gamer who grew up on the classics, and is now trying to appreciate modern gaming on its own terms as well.
Tunic does a phenomenal job at integrating the manual as part of the game's story and puzzles, being an indy game the manual is virtual and within the game itself, but it teaches you an entire languages and is filled with secrets, including multiple endings, when done right manuals can enhance the experience just as much as a game teaching you through gameplay
Love your take on manuals! The building anticipation and excitement reading them before starting the game, there was something almost ritualistic about it
I'd actually love to hear you talk about old manuals! I grew up during a time when manuals still had colour printing, but they were definitely shorter, less necessary, and on the way to being phased out. I know about some older titles having mandatory maps inside but I'd be really interested to hear more about other ways they integrated with the games they were for. I've also heard in passing about old floppy disk or cassette titles being packaged with not just manuals but also "feelies" - physical objects that tied into the game in some way. If you know of any horror/"spooky" games from that era that did that, I'd be very interested in hearing about them if you'd be so inclined to include that sort of thing in a manual video. Thanks so much for putting games like this on my radar! I don't have the skillset to play certain kinds of horror games but I find the history of them fascinating. I really appreciate you taking the time to break them down like this and put them in the context of titles that came out before and since.
I love manuals for old games. I remember having to look up stuff in the manual for the old Zork games. Like days of the week and stuff. Return to Zork had a lot of that. Also maps. Having a printed map was cool. Old games were so charming. Figuring stuff out instead of having in ruined in a RUclips spoiler or just a quick Google search was so satisfying. I think that's part of why I can learn game mechanics so quick now tho b/c I always just had to pay attention to so many small things and learn as I went. Trying stuff to see what worked. As for you wanting to make different types of videos - make what you want. I love watching you break down old stuff and the interest you show in it. I haven't played any of the stuff you've talked about nor plan to but I still like watching the videos. I'm not really into horror but you make it cool to watch.
I recently read through the Alpha Centauri manual, it's crazy how in-depth it is. It explains the details of game mechanics so well I don't even need to google for how things work.
I love old PC games. I love the feelies, the manuals. I liked how the books and manuals were used as a way not just to learn how the play, but to immerse yourself in the lore. Also I love how you're seeding us with that Bioforge box. There's a lot of overlap between us at the moment and Bioforge is definitely on my list. Can't wait to see how we both cover that one! 😊
Thanks for this great retrospective! In case anyone is interested, the C64 also hosts two seminal games for the cinematic action games genre: Forbidden Forest (1983) and Beyond Forbidden Forest (1985). They a similarity with Firestarter, in that their author (Paul Norman) was a complete outsider to the game development scene, and was free of many preconceptions: as such, the games are pioneers of many staples of the horror and cinematic genres, and they struggle against some of the platform limitations. They are well worth a try and some research if you're so inclined - I heavily recommend it!
I still remember fondly how the manual of Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games explained the rules on how action points are calculated in the game very thoroughly.
Interesting. I enjoyed the recent System Shock reboot, Perhaps they could re do this one as well. I love the idea of the rogue agent running around sabotaging things while your trying to get through your mission. I actually enjoy slow pace games that let you explore freely, so I would not be bored playing it before the mutants start attacking. 😊
I miss game manuals. I grew up playing a lot of JRPGs, so the thing I miss the most in the manuals is the art. Playing PS1 and PS2 games their assets were often limited in how detailed and stylized they could make the in game assets. And the limited disk space for these massive games meant concept art was often not really viable to include on the disks. So manuals were how deyailed art assets were presented and I ate them up. It helped the worlds feel more real, especially with how often the manuals were presented as beginner adventuring guides. It was just so charming
Dragon Warrior's Explorer's handbook was always in my lap when playing. I had rented StarTropics and we got to the point where you needed to wet the letter, since it was a rental the manual and letter was a photocopy. I'll never forget 747MHz.
I think my favorite manual design from back in the day was Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance. The manual was diagetically a technical Battlemech manual, and it had entries for all of the Mechs you encountered in the game. The cool bit was that it had been handed down to the player character from their father, and so the Mech models that had been produced in the interim years were all represented as pen drawings--because obviously the player character had had to hand-add the models that weren't in the original printing. It was a little thing but it was really neat.
The goldbox games were ones that required the manuals (and journals) for any progress. Text seemed to take a lot of space and it seemed easier just to print it out, and it also kind of encouraged you to map the gameworld for events and such, even if you had a rudimentary map in-game.
Yes, manuals is something I miss to this day. It was something I loved to read. Its such a shame that they have vanished. Hell, some were full books in their own right.
It looks crazy epic this game. It seems so strange to see big detailed backgrounds and cut scenes on a C64 game. Trying to squeeze that on 2 disks must have taken a serious amount of effort. Great video. :)
I do miss manuals, as a kid one of the best parts of getting a new game was unwrapping it in the car and reading the manual on the way home. It always felt like a wonderful way to slide into the mindset that each individual game was trying to inspire -- by the time I would get home I would be completely ready to dive into whatever digital world awaited. It makes me sad that nowadays this just doesn't really happen, or if it does, it's usually a digital pdf of a manual included with the game and while I appreciate it, it's not the same. Also, manuals had blank pages in the back for note taking!! One of the reasons I became so in love with Signalis as a game was that it encouraged me to take notes!
I love(d) game manuals! I used to read through them all the time when my parents would drive me home from the shopping center. Buying a new game was an event and so was reading the manual. Because my first experience with games was accidentally saving over my brother's Pokemon Yellow file (yes, I was that sibling; but to be fair, we had been told videogames had multiple save files), I would always immediately look up the "how to save" section of every manual. I did this all the way until manuals slowly faded away. Some of my favorite memories include learning Olimar's exact size from an in-manual size chart, reading up on all the special moves for Smash Melee's characters, and, way later, learning retroactively how the US manual for Final Fantasy Legend hilariously tried to cover up the outlandish story of that game with muscular DnD-esque costumed actors in its manual. I also saw the manuals for some PC games at the time at a friend's house. Heroes of Might and Magic's manuals were bigger than some of my fasvorite books!
Playing "Empire of the Overmind", an old text adventure game(I played on a TRS-80), without the "Rhyme of the Overmind" would be impossible. You would never guess "Call Pyro" to call a fire salamander so you can see when you wake up in pitch black darkness. "Wish blanket" was obscure enough for me hahaha. It took 25mins to load from audio cassette, 5mins to load/save. Oh the memories...
Manuals were awesome back in the day. To this day I still read my alone in the dark 2008, Zelda Wind Waker and Zelda Twilight Princess manuals just because they’re fun and pretty.
I never played many games where game manuals were all that necessary, but always appreciated when there was one. My memory isn't the greatest, so having something to reference controls or other important information *within reach* and *without* having to search online, ask others, or comb through game menus is a godsend. They also tended to have tips, game balance info, lore, and so much else that's just completely absent from the game itself. Also, as a kid that loved to draw, having clear pictures of characters, items, etc to reference was always great. As an adult that loves learning about game design and settings, all that art and extra info scratches a different itch. Basically, I miss game manuals.
I _just_ saw this game featured on another channel just a couple of weeks ago and now I've suddenly forgotten where it was. It wasn't a channel I was subbed to, just something from the recommended list.
Yes I loved manuals, it used to be where you would get your lore, and character art, it’s what started me drawing. the gulf between detailed off-model art in the book and streamlined in-game art sparked my imagination
Going to Electronics Boutique with my mate, a tenner between us, digging through the trade-in/reduced bins and finding 2 or 3 *gems* - then excitedly reading the manuals on the bus home, drinking in _every_ single word and image, every enemy, every item.. I'm so SO happy I was a child when I was 1985 - 2001 RIP ❤🙏🏻
Fascinating ! Makes me wish that some dev team would make a remastered version of Project Firestart for a brand new audience that would give it the praises it deserves.
Hey Ragnar, just wanted to leave you a few words in regards to your section on the importance of manuals. I was born in 2003, and it seems like I entered the world pretty much right on the cusp of manuals dying out. For me, manuals filled a very unique niche, less so as guides, and more as an extension of the game's world. I'd usually read them cover to cover when my Mom said I couldn't play that night, or on the car ride home after visiting my local game store. About a year ago, I had a conversation with a friend about manuals and box art, and she told me that she just threw those away after buying a game, because "the game was all that mattered. If I want to look at the boxart or read the manual, I'll just download it." Hearing that broke my heart and helped me to remember how important the physical component of video games is to me. The game Tunic puts a really interesting spin on the idea of manuals by feeding you individual pages of one throughout the game, acting as tutorials, maps, hints, and lore. If you do ever look at game manuals in a separate video, I'd recommend checking that out as a contemporary example of how developers are trying to keep the art from alive. Thanks for making cool videos. Cheers!
Game manuals from the great companies were amazing, the tsr gold box dungeons and dragons games, the jagged alliance games, the microprose games like Sid Meier’s pirates or airborne ranger or civilization or darklands (you showed in this video) - game manuals were then what dungeons and dragons players and monsters guides are today; namely FANTASTIC 👏🇨🇦. My friends and I would read the manuals in class, at recess, during lunch …, basically any time we weren’t playing the game (I read through the jagged alliance manual until the cover fell off, my other favourite was the sierra game ‘colonel’s bequest), it was great time to be young and into computer games!
I grew up a lot of dos games, so I don't have a lot of personal nostalgia over manuals, but they are something I treasure now in my retro games collecting. ps1 and 2 are my eras of choice most often, and so many of those manuals are packed with general tips and it was the only place you could see some of the original character art. I do miss that, basically getting a free art book with every game
I'd also think copyright might be a major reason it didn't get many ports. Not just for taking a lot from the Alien film, but the mutant is a sprite rehash of Tendril from the Inhumanoids from 1986.
Was looking for a comment to bring this up. I loved this game as a kid but the fact that the monsters were blatant copies of a toy on my shelf kinda undercut the fear factor (I hadn't seen Alien yet so the homages to that were lost on me at the time).
Personally I always loved the game manual for Diablo 2, as it went into quite some detail about the lore of the world and had some pretty awesome artwork as well. It had details and small lore paragraphs about weapon types and otheritems and the way they worked, including something as menial as health potions. The classes and their respective skills got their own dedicated pages and it gave you an explanation about how 'Raise Skeleton' works instead of just the game giving you the skill once you hit level 5 without fanfare or explanation. And you learned quite a bit about the different landscapes you visited in each Act, the monsters there and the overall background regarding the Horadrim, the Prime Evils and the general hows and whats and whens. I still have the booklet flying around here somewhere, still makes for great reading material. Personally I'd appreciate it if they brought back game manuals, perhaps in a digital form for those who wish to read it. Or the overall idea could be integrated into the game as something like collectible codex entries that explain the worky bits of the world. Would actually give further reason to explore a world and fiddle around with different skills and items.
I know it isn't really an "origin" persay, but I'd love to hear something on how these very retro origin coalesced into famed titles like RE1 and Silent Hill- the games that get the credit that games like Sweet Home and Alone in the Dark pioneered. At the time of viewing, Resident Evil PS1 is 28 years old. That's a mere 4 years difference from Alone in the Dark. Anyway, these were a treat to listen to.
I had no idea about this game, mindblown! I hope you can continue with this series, if there's not enough material for a video on an individual game, you could talk about a couple, but if you bring on obscure gems like this one, it will be worth it. Love whatever videos you release anyway!
Funnily enough.. I recall reading an ooooold article (1999-ish?) in a magazine where the author was bemoaning how much he disliked his contemporary manuals compared to the even older games, where game was packaged with various cool items, gags, thematic badges, etc.
Drawing your own maps is something I feel modern developers have overlooked a bunch. Especially since you don't really have to draw it on paper anymore. Think of a big, open world game with exploration like TES: Skyrim. The in-game map is a veritable GPS system. But why? Wouldn't it be more fun to start out with a blank map and no cursor to show where the player is on it, and let the player slap down his or her own bookmarks and notes wherever the player feel like it? It could only enhance the sense of exploration doing this imo.
It dawned on me how much gaming has REALLY changed when you started explaining what game manuals are in detail with this "back in my day" context like it's an artefact from a bygone era. Really sad knowing people will never feel the joy of flipping through the manual on the way home trying to absorb as much as you can about the new world you're about to dive into. Does make me cherish those magical moments a lot more now.
there was this thing about the manuals and boxes of the games, that increased the cost of the whole package, not only by size but in weight. There's that and the fact that the late 90's and early 00's, was all the rage about taking care of the environment, and giant manuals were seen as extra pollution, besides all the plastic and cardboard. I remember looking for a manual in a newly purchased game (I can't remember if was on a console or PC), and I only found an apology for not containing/having a manual, the reason: caring for the environment. Nowadays the middle point are these super specials super expensive collector's editions, with barebones content.
Yeah, the story of Prometheus the titan? The basic premise of the film is pretty good but it has been thoroughly fucked by Aliens fans and the fact that Scott can't recognise a good script from a bad one. One of the earlier scripts is much better than the retardium-fueled script we got. At least Scott always make beautiful films to watch.
I'm late to comment on this but I would love a video about manuals and their integration into the story/themes/design of the games they accompany! It would be a great combination of design history and video game history and also just fun to see the unique ways it was done
I loved reading through the manuals for my dad's PC games. Diablo, Quake 3, Zork. And once I started getting my own games, I made a habit of reading manuals before ever starting the games in order to go in as prepared as possible. I distinctly remember reading the fallout 3 manual, which presented itself as a proper guide for emerging from a vault, and trying to follow it to the letter when I began the game. I would love to see a proper dive into the history of manuals.
I'd be SUPER interested in the best "games with unique manuals" video. I wasn't playing games in the golden era of the manuals, but newer, different games - like Black Watchmen, The Secret World - requires you to do real investigation / reasearch, as they are partially ARGs. If it fits the game's themes, investigation, and finding the answer yourself is an amazing feeling, and as you mentioned it with the "faxed" report and map, fundamentally changes how the game is experienced.
I remember visiting my neighbour and playing this one as a kid. Not too long into it I was too scared to continue, but it left a huge impression on me.
I know it has been mentioned by other people but anyone who loves game manuals should definitely check out Tunic, because that game does an exceptional job at incorporating the concept of an old school manual in its actual gameplay and progressive world building. It's truly something else. Also it's worth getting the physical version of the game, since it comes with an actual printed version of a manual. Although you probably shouldn't read or even look at that before finishing the game, because of various spoilers.
Reading a game's manual would build so much anticipation! I miss reading the manual whilst a game took 45 minutes to download on our old family PC. Simpler times 😭
As a kid I would bring my game manuals to school to read during down time, Even got in trouble once for having the manual for Whiplash (2003) because my teacher thought it was too raunchy. A video about game manuals would be super interesting because I grew up just before they were phased out.
Game manuals were definitely a huge deal for me. I remember when my mom would drive us back from Funcoland with a new game, the manual would be my Bible. My older brother would get the first crack at it and wouldn't relinquish the game for hours, so I would hype myself up reading it over and over. And with specific games the manual/case was part of the immersion. Like in MGS.
I can understand how some people are attached to manuals but I never really had a moment where the manual was a real help it seems to be something really of the time especially in the C64 and even up to the N64 era of games. But I can also see what you mean when you talked about how showing the player in the game and not needing to use a manual or look thinks up in games and say that is “good game design” can be limiting, thankfully there are lots of indie horror games that have you mess with internal files to figure things out (even though they have to be modified if they get ported to consoles like Doki Doki literature plus) and I could see a big manual included with the souls games be beneficial it would help not needing to look things online but at the end of the day I feel manuals are definitely something of the time that most older gamers (probably 28 and above) have great fond memories and nothing wrong with missing those things. Great video thanks for showing so many games that need attention!
I miss game manuals.. They were often REALLY cool to look at, and contained lots of information, not only about how to play the game, but also about the lore of the game's world. That kind of supplemental world-building is such a lost art. It created immersion, and really got you into it. For me, that was always important, because i've pretty much always played games for the story, the experience, the spectacle....the pure escapism of going somewhere else, being someone else, doing things i'd never get to do in my real life. The manuals, and other assorted materials, also used to give greater value for money. Nowadays, you pay your money, and all you get is the game, in digital format..and maybe a digital manual, if the developer could be bothered to make one.. The games are often soul-less, forgettable affairs, that feature more action and explosions than story. There are some rare gems out there, but unfortunately, the gaming industry has been made so corporate and sterile, that there's no real room for genuine innovation, or passion anymore. Another thing i miss, that old games did right, was that they came complete, extensively tested, and they just worked out of the box. None of this lazy "Fuck it, we'll release it broken, because we're up against the clock, and then we'll spend first few months post-release patching shit we should have caught during testing, and then patching stuff our previous patches broke, because we didn't bother putting the product through proper testing before releasing it" nonsense. These days, everything is rushed, publishers put studios under too much pressure, which goes back to the sterile, corporate, soul-less, no-passion thing i mentioned before. These days, unless the dev studio is one of the absolute titans, that a publisher won't dare cross, the only place you're finding titles that are truly imaginative, innovative, or fleshed out (for lack of a better term), is Indie studios....because they haven't yet been consumed by one of the big publishers, and had their souls crushed, and their creative flames extinguished. Between all the stuff i mentioned, and all the forced woke nonsense being pushed on us by activists larping as game developers, it's getting harder and harder to find truly good games anymore. I miss the old days. The entire games industry was better before 2015. Now, it's just a hellscape, with a few rare spots of beauty scattered about.
On Manuals: I have good memories of those - they were fun providing details and tips and tricks outside of the game, but it was a product of its time; it asked the player to invest time outside of the game itself to get better at it - to understand it, and if the developers were interested, in the game's setting and story. Like any piece of art, it depends on how it was done; if it's full of things you could easily learn in-game, then it's a waste of paper, and of the reader's time. But if it gives more information on the lore and story, and/or gives hints on how to proceed in the game you wouldn't find otherwise, it's a good inclusion. It's also possible that manuals, back in the day, were necessary - after all, the hardware of the 80s, 90s and 2000s was much more limited than what we have today, and it couldn't fit everything the developers wanted to explain to the players, gamewise and/or storywise -- hence the need for supplementary material. In the shiny new 2020s, we have the resources to provide both of these things to the players without the need for manuals. And for those truly nostalgic, you have the option for providing online manuals (that you should have the option of printing, for those that truly long for that irreplaceable tactile feel). Overall, while I liked manuals and appreciated them for what they could provide, I don't long for their return; we have the means to give what manuals once provided to the players in the game itself and arguably achieve the same result. But if you're referring to holding something in your hands to read through... that ventures into a different topic entirely, and I won't argue that something is lost when we transition from physical materials to digital spaces.
Yes! Please do a follow-up bits and bob's for the origins of horror series! Also, I loved manuals the best part of renting games was reading the manual on the ride home! I now have to hope special editions of games come with a manual and, though not often, I love it when they do!
I would 100% watch a video on manuals (and probably a note on Tunic that re-contextualized how they can be used in game ). On that same note, I would also watch a video on strategy guides. Some of them were really wild about how they went about doing it: Zelda OOT had one with an almost storytelling format, the infamous FFIX one where half of the guide ended up on a service that no longer exists, or how some guides hid things from the Player intentionally to let them discover some things by themselves. There is something about that era of publication that has completely disappeared. These things had a life of their own and similar to manuals they are a forgotten art form that gave a strange extra context to the beauty of the medium. Everything form extra concept art to lovingly crafted tables that I've spent hours pouring over, a lot of them had something special. I carried a handful of them to school with me every week just to get stuck into them. That might make me a gigantic nerd... but I love it all the same
Regarding the player having to chart their own map: it opened up gameplay outside the digital realm. The game knowing players are actually drawing a map and doing its best to throw them a curve ball in changing the layout of the dungeons for example, forcing the player to somehow include this in their physically drawn maps. Really digging the series, lookint forward for the next part!
Get 4 months extra on a 2 year plan at nordvpn.com/ragnar. It's risk free with Nord's 30-day money back guarantee!
Have you ever considered opening a Kofi? It's like Patreon except they take a very small flat rate monthly fee (it's like $5 or less) instead of a percentage no matter how much support you get on there
Unrelated, but VPN's don't protect you from anything; their only use is making it appear like you're somewhere else for access to content. The people you don't want to see your activity (the ISP and thus the government) still see all of your activity regardless. I've got nothing against VPN's, but claiming they protect your data in some way is just blatantly false and extremely misleading to your audience (I know it's part of the script, but maybe you should reconsider having such a sponsor if you're required to falsely advertise their product to the people who put their trust in you). And to be clear, I 100% believe you have been misled about the benefits of using a VPN and that you're not intentionally misleading your audience)
I think this was the first video I ever watched where the add in the beginning was what made click the thumbs up.
Clearly, either you forgot what Nord did, or never knew in the first place. There's a (very good) reason all the big tech youtubers dropped their sponsorship deals with Nord. They can't be trusted.
Please consider trying to stop speaking in such a slow tempo and in such a monotone voice and maybe lighten up or cutting a bit down on the information dumps
@@HollowJacket please ignore this comment. Your tone and pace lend itself well to the dark and brooding theme.
Manuals could be rather special-I loved when there was more art, concept art or bespoke manual art.
I remember watching my dad play games and when he'd get stuck at a part he'd say, "Hey. Hand me the manual." 😂
As someone who considers the C64 a major part of their childhood this is blowing my mind, *today.* I can't imagine how it would have hit 35 years ago. Particularly the movie like presentation, which we didn't even see on the Amiga. Amazing.
It's is incredible that the C64 showing these amazing cutscenes here.
@@Mankey619 It's always been the case that early-launch games tend to be weak compared to later games. This came out seven years after the C64, so the devs had the better part of a decade to learn tricks and optimizations. Like how on the NES, SMB3 makes SMB1 look like pong. That's why new games for old consoles are usually amazing and manage to do things the devs of the time could never dream of (like James Lambert porting _Portal_ to the N64).
It was amazing back in the day. Especially compared to the normal C64 games, you threw that in, and suddenly were like, “What?”
And sans internet, you just kept replaying it to figure out the story. So good.
It was every bit mind blowing back then to my 14-year-old self. I remember seeing it on the new arrivals shelf at Babbage's in Southridge Mall and deciding that I wanted to spend the $29.99 in 1989 dollars for this really fantastic looking game. I was not disappointed, matter of fact I had no idea what I was getting into. Changing the script in the middle of the game by doing different actions? WTF!? I swear I stayed up until the wee hours of the night playing this one, and it's blaring jump scare music.
This game was advanced in the context of the era, so much so that if you told me a time-traveler created that game, I wouldn't be surprised.
Right? I remember a couple of games that had a similar vibe around this time, games like Nexus or Survivor, but Project Firestart would have blown me away
The fact that there is only 6 years separating this game RE is mindblowing. At the time, game evolution felt fluid and natural, but looking at it now is astonishing
As a pre-teen and teen, between 1989 and 1997, a month felt like a very long time. As a SNES owner and reader of a Nintendo focused magazine, each new month (issue) showed me something that would blow my mind, from Mega Man X (wow, these graphics can't get any better) to Killer Instinct (wow, these graphics can't get any better) to the first Project Reality prototypes screenshots (wow, these graphics can't get any better) to the actual N64 games (wow, these games really look lame; I think I'll better get a Playstation). But I agree, the evolution felt natural, and it sure was, but only a few years were needed to make really big steps.
Seems so short but I suppose the C64 had been around since 1982.
@rattenkonig6303 WRONG. While the game may be 6 years older than RE but the hardware was from 1982. If this game would have been released in 82, would you say it'rs mindblowing for a 14 years gap? cos again, the hardware didn't change since1982.
@@CharlesLeCharles The PS was released in 94. So 12 years, not 14. Not much difference but still.
For another tech skip that we will never see again: Parasite Eve 2 came out one year before MGS2.
And we will never see that kind of tech progress leap ever again.
As a kid, my parents strictly limited the amount of time I could play video games. Video game manuals were my way of interacting with the worlds I wanted to experience when I wasn't allowed to. I would read them cover to cover for hours and then build things with clay or Legos to recreate scenes from the game as best as I could. I miss game manuals and the nostalgia it triggers for me, and treasure the few games that include manuals in their physical release like Hollow Knight and Tunic.
Same here.
Yoooo! Same!
Absolutely. The same with video game magazines. I would read the solutions for games I didn't have back-to-back like stories!
@@Onomatopeizator yeees
Same here, i loved the jak and daxter manuals i remember one having a full fold out map. They were so charming I miss manuals 😮💨
100% in support of you making a video on game manuals! I was just playing King's Quest VI and remembered I needed a poem from the manual to solve a puzzle. I ended up getting sucked in because the manual was also this charming little Guidebook to the lands in the game written in the perspective of a traveler. Seeing that made me wonder what creative and cool things other PC/DOS games were doing with their manuals at the time.
Holy hell... Used to play this game religiously along side Nexus. Didn't really understand them as a child but something about them just captivated me. Thank you Ragnar for the unexpected nostalgia overload.
I read every. single. manual for a game I ever bought. They were great, not only was it nice for a quick reference of controls and even sometimes certain abilities, but it had some good lore. It's how I know all of the Covenant's races names.
I think they should bring them back.
I agree, but outside of digital I don't see it happening. Printing manuals is expensive, cuts into the publisher's bottom line.
They can be neat but they don't serve much of a point anymore with full on walthroughs online.
The recent appreciation for game manuals has been really fascinating to watch. Generally, it's kind of a low undercurrent through old game retrospectives like this one, but then you get games like Tunic. I haven't played it myself, but my understanding is that the idea of a game manuel is so integral to the game that pages of said manual are the primary in-game collectible.
I personally am a constantly vibrating, ADHD-riddled mess, so much of my experience with game manuals is limited to frantically reading them in the backseat of my parents car, on the way home from buying the game. You make a great argument for them, though! I think that as long as the game makes direct reference to the fact that it expects you to be using the guide (or takes into account that you may not be), ancillary material like that can be a great addition.
There was something magical about reading them on the way home
When an old game gave you manuals featuring in-game documents and maps, it always gave me that feeling of when you play table-top RPG's, and the game master passes out detailed hand drawn maps and in-game documents/props for the players to look at and inspect.
You can't help but to appreciate it.
I liked doing stuff like that as a game master too. Like even to the point where I would rip, fray and age maps, notes and letters, and staining the paper with tea and coffee to make them look worn and authentic to the players.
Everyone always loved that attention to detail.
I played an old Sierra game as a kid called Sorcerian, which had an in-depth enchantment/spell system which the manual covered. I cannot imagine how you could fit all that in the game and have it be intuitive.
And yes, I would love a video about games with great manuals as you mentioned. Been loving those kinds of topics nowadays
@RagnaRoxShow You should also check out a curious little French game called 'Zombi' which was released back in the 80's, basically a re-enactment of the 1970s film Dawn of the Dead, where you had to secure a shopping mall and survive against zombie hordes and biker gangs, I had a lot of fun with it.
Is that the game that was referenced on the ZombiU game on wii U?
Yes. And it was Ubisoft's very first game.
First thing I did, after going to Electronics Boutique and buying a game in the early 2000's, is going to the shopping mall's cafeteria courtyard and opening that game to pour through the instruction manual as I sipped on a nice, hot Tim Horton's double-double in the dead of a December winter snow flurry.
As a fan of Flashback and og Alone in the Dark, this looks like ZE genuine hidden gem for me.
So thanks man, I would never have heard of that game without your video and the passion that created it.
Try 7 days a stranger. 6 days a skeptic and 5 days
A damn good game series like this
I've been hoping for a detailed, professional-level review of old-school video games and all their wacky accoutrements since The Spoony Experiment went under. I'd really like to see you check some of those out.
I'm not sure if you caught it but there's a small flub in the intro to the video. You said Konami was the developer behind Sweet Home, it's blink and you'll miss it I know. Just wanted to point it out in case you missed it in the edit.
Oh yeah I never noticed this one despite watching it so many times while editing. Thanks for pointing it out!
Come now, clearly Ragna did that on purpose so we would watch Sweet Home. There's no way anyone could make an easy mistake like that.
That deserves a ban, Ragnar-sensei!
I almost took it as an ancient joke meme where people used to swap Konami with capcom on msg boards for the laughs
I love that the set up is just Solaris. Important space facility goes dark, so one guy gets sent to check it out.
Obviously original new ideas are king... But there is something to this era were so much of creativity could just come from taking the pieces of things you liked and smooshing them together.
"Ok so the player is the guy from Solaris, except he's being sent to investigate the Nostromo..."
Fun stuff. Also literally never heard of this game before. You're killing it sir.
"this era were so much of creativity could just come from taking the pieces of things you liked and smooshing them together."
You just described any sort of creative process ever😊 It's not exclusive to that era.
Its exclusive to that era in that you could just mine 1979 movies and get something that hadn't been a game before. Or not since we've had near infinite Alien games, multiple Stalker, Escape From Alcatraz, Apocalypse Now, Mad Max and even a liscensed version of The Warriors but still no Quadrophenia the game or a second attempt at Kramer vs Kramer.
Now unoriginal on purpose model kits like Warhammer which were created to be about personal artistic expression that wasn't available in competing historical wargames only survives by selling its decades old Dune meets LotR stolen IP, Lego sets that would have been been generic versions of archetypes thirty years ago are all properties owned by super conglomorates, games like Uncharted which was just Tomb Raider with a guy so its technically a new IP even though Tomb Raider was just Indiana Jones with a woman so it would be technically different has a pointless film version and everything with any budget is just a ripoff of a ripoff.
Genre pastiches make great games and toys since genre conventions are basically just toys anyway but audiences that just want genre retreads and companies that just want to manage IP are a disaster. Art can't thrive without influence from outside of the arts. @@JC-kl3uc
The legendary Jeff Tunnell- you had Project Firestart, ArcticFox, Stellar 7, The Incredible Machine, Rise Of The Dragon, Betrayal At Krondor, Tribes.
The Sierra On-Line/Dynamix partrnership sure produced a ton of classics.
RE: Manuals
I fondly remember the old Infocom packages that included little game-related items that sort of expanded the game world. Sometimes they had something that directly related tot he game mechanics, but most of the time, it was just fun stuff.
I also remember some of the old copy protection which would refer to something in the game manual, but it wouldn't be a flat out code, it would be referring to something like the "Plants of The World" or "Gemstones and their Meanings". Those manuals often had nice sections expanding the world beyond the game itself and would be a fun read.
Those are called "feelies." Like the maps, ankhs, or moonstones in an Ultima game.
I miss the manuals, I have fond memories of reading Kotor s manual over and over again. I only started buying digital content when it was clear I couldn't collect and read the manuals any more. Now I fill the void left by this in my gaming experience by reading all the in game sources and watching lore videos, while theory crafting my own head canon. or consuming very well made retrospective content like what Ragnar and aesir aesthetics produce. I really love your content my friend. These retrospectives are better researched and narrated than most content you can find anywhere. Truly top notch.
Oh, boy, the nostalgia...
My cousin and I played the hell out of Project Firestart back in the day! It certainly was different from the other C64 games but that was what we loved about it. I remember recording my playthrough on our VHS and watching it like a movie afterwards!
So, yeah - I'm an 80s kid and I miss manuals. Sid Meier's Pirates (which you showed a short clip from) had this great map of the Caribbean I had over my tv. I always loved when a game manual gave you small little trinkets and in-universe stuff.
Good old times.
My best memory for manuals in games was that whenever I got a new game, my dad would make me read the whole manual before I could play it. It was super fun and really got me excited to actually play it
I'm reminded of my favorite manual from the alternate history dieselpunk flight sim, Crimson Skies. Set in a 1930s where the US broke apart from the Great Depression, the manual was designed to look like a magazine for aviation hobbyists - including interviews with main characters, reviews of new planes you get to fly, and full ads for fictional in-setting products. The whole things is available on Internet Archive, and it is still delightful to read through.
Mark my words on this. Sometime in the next 5, perhaps 10 years there will be an extremely successful mainstream video game that brings back "feelies" as part of the game experience. Big manuals with lore, maps, diagrams, etc. and will incorporate these into the experience of the game and it will be hailed as "revolutionary" by the games media. I could easily see this happening with a VR game, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened on one of the big consoles, either.
Man, it would be crazy. Maps, manuals, spell guides, whoever would include crazy stuff like that? Madness, I say!
I forgot how much i liked manuals untill recently.
Ive been gaming PC for years but got an Xbox for christmas n ended up getting cyberpunk 2077 and rdr2.
The nostalgia i experienced when cyberpunk came with a mini lore book was so fun! Ended up sitting on my floor n just reading the entire thing!
Same with rdr2! It came with a full sized map and i ended up using it for most of my playthru instead of using the in game map, circled areas i wanted to check out, wrote where plot points happened, ect. Ended up turning into my own version of arthurs journal!
I often cite Alien Syndrome in 1987 as the first game you could classify as "horror" with a straight face, but it's still just a top-down arcade action shooter. This, this is where horror games truly got the ball rolling and laid down all the design standards central to the genre. It's like how there were "stealth" games before Metal Gear, but none of them had nailed it quite so perfectly yet.
Alien Breed is the first game I remember being scared by.. the aesthetic, the sounds, the colour palette, all of it.. granted, I was about 7 but yeah 😂
I am also saddened, that game manuals is a lost art. While now games can tutorial you, it's limited by the amount of information the game can reasonably present to you. Then you have to resort to online wikis to get more details, not covered by basic tutorials. On the other hand manuals were not limited by the amount of information, while at the same time if being done artfully and creatively could have enriched the overall experience from the game. There are many examples of great manuals, for example Fallout 1 and 2 come to mind.
I remember the one for Secret of Mana where they had the character art in the manual done in claymation style.
And no cookie recipes!
I love the texture on the walls of the station. Excellent sci-fi hallways!
Noticed the doors are very similar to the Aliens Computer Game!
A two year development cycle for a game pre-2000 is absolutely insane.
Even during the PS1, many studios were pumping out games made in a year or less.
i miss game manuals so much. every time i got a game as a kid, i'd scour through its manual until the moment i could actually play it. i loved the art, the lore, being able to easily reference controls and hints, the artistry of it all. it's why i fell in love with GOG as a platform, so many of the old games come with pdfs of all the feelies the physical game would come with, so you could still get a taste of that experience. i actually ended up printing out copies of the fallout 1 & 2 manuals to reference when i only had one monitor and i felt like a kid again (even if i hadn't actually played fallout as a kid). i love all your videos, but i'd love one on manuals especially. great vid! im gonna find firestart and give it a go.
You really pulled off the "in Minecraft" at the end of the sentence in the sponsered segment lmao
I totally agree with you.. I miss manuals! I loved reading the storyline set up in the manuals and learning little things about the enemies, the characters, the setup. There was so much detail and story building in there most of the time! And I would love to see a video on the history of complex manuals being integrated with the game🙏👍✌️
amazing! I remember seeing this game in a magazine back in the day, at that time I was obsessed with all things 'alien' and desperately wanted to play it, unfortunately, I had a speccy.
Kudos for the manual bit dude, there are manuals that I've kept and read to this day and I don't play the game at all. They were an intrinsic part of the gaming experience and I mourn the loss. A good manual added so much to the game, lore, depth, concept art... a well done manual arguably would inspire the imagination more than the game itself, and gaming as a whole, while it has grown and advanced in myriad ways, is worse for not including them anymore.
Anyway, just my take as an older gamer who grew up on the classics, and is now trying to appreciate modern gaming on its own terms as well.
Tunic does a phenomenal job at integrating the manual as part of the game's story and puzzles, being an indy game the manual is virtual and within the game itself, but it teaches you an entire languages and is filled with secrets, including multiple endings, when done right manuals can enhance the experience just as much as a game teaching you through gameplay
Love your take on manuals! The building anticipation and excitement reading them before starting the game, there was something almost ritualistic about it
THE horror game that got me started on my journey through them. Thankyou for giving this some love and recognition.
I'd actually love to hear you talk about old manuals! I grew up during a time when manuals still had colour printing, but they were definitely shorter, less necessary, and on the way to being phased out. I know about some older titles having mandatory maps inside but I'd be really interested to hear more about other ways they integrated with the games they were for.
I've also heard in passing about old floppy disk or cassette titles being packaged with not just manuals but also "feelies" - physical objects that tied into the game in some way. If you know of any horror/"spooky" games from that era that did that, I'd be very interested in hearing about them if you'd be so inclined to include that sort of thing in a manual video.
Thanks so much for putting games like this on my radar! I don't have the skillset to play certain kinds of horror games but I find the history of them fascinating. I really appreciate you taking the time to break them down like this and put them in the context of titles that came out before and since.
I love manuals for old games. I remember having to look up stuff in the manual for the old Zork games. Like days of the week and stuff. Return to Zork had a lot of that. Also maps. Having a printed map was cool. Old games were so charming. Figuring stuff out instead of having in ruined in a RUclips spoiler or just a quick Google search was so satisfying. I think that's part of why I can learn game mechanics so quick now tho b/c I always just had to pay attention to so many small things and learn as I went. Trying stuff to see what worked.
As for you wanting to make different types of videos - make what you want. I love watching you break down old stuff and the interest you show in it. I haven't played any of the stuff you've talked about nor plan to but I still like watching the videos. I'm not really into horror but you make it cool to watch.
I recently read through the Alpha Centauri manual, it's crazy how in-depth it is. It explains the details of game mechanics so well I don't even need to google for how things work.
I love old PC games. I love the feelies, the manuals. I liked how the books and manuals were used as a way not just to learn how the play, but to immerse yourself in the lore.
Also I love how you're seeding us with that Bioforge box. There's a lot of overlap between us at the moment and Bioforge is definitely on my list. Can't wait to see how we both cover that one! 😊
Thanks for this great retrospective! In case anyone is interested, the C64 also hosts two seminal games for the cinematic action games genre: Forbidden Forest (1983) and Beyond Forbidden Forest (1985). They a similarity with Firestarter, in that their author (Paul Norman) was a complete outsider to the game development scene, and was free of many preconceptions: as such, the games are pioneers of many staples of the horror and cinematic genres, and they struggle against some of the platform limitations. They are well worth a try and some research if you're so inclined - I heavily recommend it!
I still remember fondly how the manual of Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games explained the rules on how action points are calculated in the game very thoroughly.
Interesting. I enjoyed the recent System Shock reboot,
Perhaps they could re do this one as well.
I love the idea of the rogue agent running around sabotaging things while your trying to get through your mission.
I actually enjoy slow pace games that let you explore freely, so I would not be bored playing it before the mutants start attacking. 😊
I miss game manuals. I grew up playing a lot of JRPGs, so the thing I miss the most in the manuals is the art. Playing PS1 and PS2 games their assets were often limited in how detailed and stylized they could make the in game assets. And the limited disk space for these massive games meant concept art was often not really viable to include on the disks. So manuals were how deyailed art assets were presented and I ate them up. It helped the worlds feel more real, especially with how often the manuals were presented as beginner adventuring guides. It was just so charming
It's funny you are posting this just now, cause I just hit credits on the cryostasis video. I want more ice horror!!!
Dragon Warrior's Explorer's handbook was always in my lap when playing. I had rented StarTropics and we got to the point where you needed to wet the letter, since it was a rental the manual and letter was a photocopy. I'll never forget 747MHz.
I think my favorite manual design from back in the day was Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance. The manual was diagetically a technical Battlemech manual, and it had entries for all of the Mechs you encountered in the game. The cool bit was that it had been handed down to the player character from their father, and so the Mech models that had been produced in the interim years were all represented as pen drawings--because obviously the player character had had to hand-add the models that weren't in the original printing. It was a little thing but it was really neat.
The goldbox games were ones that required the manuals (and journals) for any progress. Text seemed to take a lot of space and it seemed easier just to print it out, and it also kind of encouraged you to map the gameworld for events and such, even if you had a rudimentary map in-game.
Completely agree on the manuals and intrinsic tutorial thing
I love your videos man. Keep showing me games that I would have never known about otherwise
Yes, manuals is something I miss to this day. It was something I loved to read. Its such a shame that they have vanished.
Hell, some were full books in their own right.
It looks crazy epic this game. It seems so strange to see big detailed backgrounds and cut scenes on a C64 game. Trying to squeeze that on 2 disks must have taken a serious amount of effort. Great video. :)
I do miss manuals, as a kid one of the best parts of getting a new game was unwrapping it in the car and reading the manual on the way home. It always felt like a wonderful way to slide into the mindset that each individual game was trying to inspire -- by the time I would get home I would be completely ready to dive into whatever digital world awaited. It makes me sad that nowadays this just doesn't really happen, or if it does, it's usually a digital pdf of a manual included with the game and while I appreciate it, it's not the same. Also, manuals had blank pages in the back for note taking!! One of the reasons I became so in love with Signalis as a game was that it encouraged me to take notes!
I love(d) game manuals! I used to read through them all the time when my parents would drive me home from the shopping center. Buying a new game was an event and so was reading the manual. Because my first experience with games was accidentally saving over my brother's Pokemon Yellow file (yes, I was that sibling; but to be fair, we had been told videogames had multiple save files), I would always immediately look up the "how to save" section of every manual. I did this all the way until manuals slowly faded away.
Some of my favorite memories include learning Olimar's exact size from an in-manual size chart, reading up on all the special moves for Smash Melee's characters, and, way later, learning retroactively how the US manual for Final Fantasy Legend hilariously tried to cover up the outlandish story of that game with muscular DnD-esque costumed actors in its manual. I also saw the manuals for some PC games at the time at a friend's house. Heroes of Might and Magic's manuals were bigger than some of my fasvorite books!
Playing "Empire of the Overmind", an old text adventure game(I played on a TRS-80), without the "Rhyme of the Overmind" would be impossible. You would never guess "Call Pyro" to call a fire salamander so you can see when you wake up in pitch black darkness. "Wish blanket" was obscure enough for me hahaha. It took 25mins to load from audio cassette, 5mins to load/save. Oh the memories...
Manuals were awesome back in the day. To this day I still read my alone in the dark 2008, Zelda Wind Waker and Zelda Twilight Princess manuals just because they’re fun and pretty.
Finally the father of the genre gets some due!
I never played many games where game manuals were all that necessary, but always appreciated when there was one. My memory isn't the greatest, so having something to reference controls or other important information *within reach* and *without* having to search online, ask others, or comb through game menus is a godsend. They also tended to have tips, game balance info, lore, and so much else that's just completely absent from the game itself.
Also, as a kid that loved to draw, having clear pictures of characters, items, etc to reference was always great. As an adult that loves learning about game design and settings, all that art and extra info scratches a different itch.
Basically, I miss game manuals.
I _just_ saw this game featured on another channel just a couple of weeks ago and now I've suddenly forgotten where it was. It wasn't a channel I was subbed to, just something from the recommended list.
Yes I loved manuals, it used to be where you would get your lore, and character art, it’s what started me drawing. the gulf between detailed off-model art in the book and streamlined in-game art sparked my imagination
Going to Electronics Boutique with my mate, a tenner between us, digging through the trade-in/reduced bins and finding 2 or 3 *gems* - then excitedly reading the manuals on the bus home, drinking in _every_ single word and image, every enemy, every item..
I'm so SO happy I was a child when I was
1985 - 2001 RIP ❤🙏🏻
For some reason, I find the idea of interplanetary, orbital fax messaging to be strangely compelling.
Fascinating ! Makes me wish that some dev team would make a remastered version of Project Firestart for a brand new audience that would give it the praises it deserves.
Maaaan, when videogames used to provide foldout maps of the game world it made me sooo hype to explore that world in-game
Hey Ragnar, just wanted to leave you a few words in regards to your section on the importance of manuals. I was born in 2003, and it seems like I entered the world pretty much right on the cusp of manuals dying out. For me, manuals filled a very unique niche, less so as guides, and more as an extension of the game's world. I'd usually read them cover to cover when my Mom said I couldn't play that night, or on the car ride home after visiting my local game store. About a year ago, I had a conversation with a friend about manuals and box art, and she told me that she just threw those away after buying a game, because "the game was all that mattered. If I want to look at the boxart or read the manual, I'll just download it." Hearing that broke my heart and helped me to remember how important the physical component of video games is to me. The game Tunic puts a really interesting spin on the idea of manuals by feeding you individual pages of one throughout the game, acting as tutorials, maps, hints, and lore. If you do ever look at game manuals in a separate video, I'd recommend checking that out as a contemporary example of how developers are trying to keep the art from alive. Thanks for making cool videos. Cheers!
Game manuals from the great companies were amazing, the tsr gold box dungeons and dragons games, the jagged alliance games, the microprose games like Sid Meier’s pirates or airborne ranger or civilization or darklands (you showed in this video) - game manuals were then what dungeons and dragons players and monsters guides are today; namely FANTASTIC 👏🇨🇦. My friends and I would read the manuals in class, at recess, during lunch …, basically any time we weren’t playing the game (I read through the jagged alliance manual until the cover fell off, my other favourite was the sierra game ‘colonel’s bequest), it was great time to be young and into computer games!
I grew up a lot of dos games, so I don't have a lot of personal nostalgia over manuals, but they are something I treasure now in my retro games collecting. ps1 and 2 are my eras of choice most often, and so many of those manuals are packed with general tips and it was the only place you could see some of the original character art. I do miss that, basically getting a free art book with every game
Inspecting the box and reading the game manual in the car on the way home from buying a new game was part of the experience
I can recognize command and conquer ost in your video.
good taste
What can I say, I'm a Mechanical Man.
I'd also think copyright might be a major reason it didn't get many ports. Not just for taking a lot from the Alien film, but the mutant is a sprite rehash of Tendril from the Inhumanoids from 1986.
Was looking for a comment to bring this up. I loved this game as a kid but the fact that the monsters were blatant copies of a toy on my shelf kinda undercut the fear factor (I hadn't seen Alien yet so the homages to that were lost on me at the time).
Personally I always loved the game manual for Diablo 2, as it went into quite some detail about the lore of the world and had some pretty awesome artwork as well. It had details and small lore paragraphs about weapon types and otheritems and the way they worked, including something as menial as health potions. The classes and their respective skills got their own dedicated pages and it gave you an explanation about how 'Raise Skeleton' works instead of just the game giving you the skill once you hit level 5 without fanfare or explanation.
And you learned quite a bit about the different landscapes you visited in each Act, the monsters there and the overall background regarding the Horadrim, the Prime Evils and the general hows and whats and whens. I still have the booklet flying around here somewhere, still makes for great reading material.
Personally I'd appreciate it if they brought back game manuals, perhaps in a digital form for those who wish to read it. Or the overall idea could be integrated into the game as something like collectible codex entries that explain the worky bits of the world. Would actually give further reason to explore a world and fiddle around with different skills and items.
This artwork is so good! Thank you for showcasing this. I have never heard of this before
I know it isn't really an "origin" persay, but I'd love to hear something on how these very retro origin coalesced into famed titles like RE1 and Silent Hill- the games that get the credit that games like Sweet Home and Alone in the Dark pioneered. At the time of viewing, Resident Evil PS1 is 28 years old. That's a mere 4 years difference from Alone in the Dark.
Anyway, these were a treat to listen to.
I had no idea about this game, mindblown! I hope you can continue with this series, if there's not enough material for a video on an individual game, you could talk about a couple, but if you bring on obscure gems like this one, it will be worth it. Love whatever videos you release anyway!
Funnily enough.. I recall reading an ooooold article (1999-ish?) in a magazine where the author was bemoaning how much he disliked his contemporary manuals compared to the even older games, where game was packaged with various cool items, gags, thematic badges, etc.
Drawing your own maps is something I feel modern developers have overlooked a bunch.
Especially since you don't really have to draw it on paper anymore.
Think of a big, open world game with exploration like TES: Skyrim.
The in-game map is a veritable GPS system. But why?
Wouldn't it be more fun to start out with a blank map and no cursor to show where the player is on it, and let the player slap down his or her own bookmarks and notes wherever the player feel like it?
It could only enhance the sense of exploration doing this imo.
It dawned on me how much gaming has REALLY changed when you started explaining what game manuals are in detail with this "back in my day" context like it's an artefact from a bygone era. Really sad knowing people will never feel the joy of flipping through the manual on the way home trying to absorb as much as you can about the new world you're about to dive into. Does make me cherish those magical moments a lot more now.
there was this thing about the manuals and boxes of the games, that increased the cost of the whole package, not only by size but in weight. There's that and the fact that the late 90's and early 00's, was all the rage about taking care of the environment, and giant manuals were seen as extra pollution, besides all the plastic and cardboard. I remember looking for a manual in a newly purchased game (I can't remember if was on a console or PC), and I only found an apology for not containing/having a manual, the reason: caring for the environment. Nowadays the middle point are these super specials super expensive collector's editions, with barebones content.
Reminds me of 7 days a stranger. A homage to this. And its a whole series
Commenting for the algorithm to start giving Ragnar the love they deserve!!!!!!
Yeah.
Comment.
Well now we know where Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott got the idea of PROMETHEUS.
Yeah, the story of Prometheus the titan? The basic premise of the film is pretty good but it has been thoroughly fucked by Aliens fans and the fact that Scott can't recognise a good script from a bad one. One of the earlier scripts is much better than the retardium-fueled script we got. At least Scott always make beautiful films to watch.
Reading manual was another part of the game. A physical bridge between you and the game. It was a wonderful experince to have.
I'm late to comment on this but I would love a video about manuals and their integration into the story/themes/design of the games they accompany! It would be a great combination of design history and video game history and also just fun to see the unique ways it was done
Dynamix also called their AI Cybrid leader Prometheus in their game Earthsiege.
I loved reading through the manuals for my dad's PC games. Diablo, Quake 3, Zork. And once I started getting my own games, I made a habit of reading manuals before ever starting the games in order to go in as prepared as possible.
I distinctly remember reading the fallout 3 manual, which presented itself as a proper guide for emerging from a vault, and trying to follow it to the letter when I began the game.
I would love to see a proper dive into the history of manuals.
I'd be SUPER interested in the best "games with unique manuals" video. I wasn't playing games in the golden era of the manuals, but newer, different games - like Black Watchmen, The Secret World - requires you to do real investigation / reasearch, as they are partially ARGs. If it fits the game's themes, investigation, and finding the answer yourself is an amazing feeling, and as you mentioned it with the "faxed" report and map, fundamentally changes how the game is experienced.
I remember visiting my neighbour and playing this one as a kid. Not too long into it I was too scared to continue, but it left a huge impression on me.
I know it has been mentioned by other people but anyone who loves game manuals should definitely check out Tunic, because that game does an exceptional job at incorporating the concept of an old school manual in its actual gameplay and progressive world building. It's truly something else. Also it's worth getting the physical version of the game, since it comes with an actual printed version of a manual. Although you probably shouldn't read or even look at that before finishing the game, because of various spoilers.
Reading a game's manual would build so much anticipation! I miss reading the manual whilst a game took 45 minutes to download on our old family PC. Simpler times 😭
As a kid I would bring my game manuals to school to read during down time, Even got in trouble once for having the manual for Whiplash (2003) because my teacher thought it was too raunchy.
A video about game manuals would be super interesting because I grew up just before they were phased out.
Game manuals were definitely a huge deal for me. I remember when my mom would drive us back from Funcoland with a new game, the manual would be my Bible.
My older brother would get the first crack at it and wouldn't relinquish the game for hours, so I would hype myself up reading it over and over.
And with specific games the manual/case was part of the immersion. Like in MGS.
I can understand how some people are attached to manuals but I never really had a moment where the manual was a real help it seems to be something really of the time especially in the C64 and even up to the N64 era of games.
But I can also see what you mean when you talked about how showing the player in the game and not needing to use a manual or look thinks up in games and say that is “good game design” can be limiting, thankfully there are lots of indie horror games that have you mess with internal files to figure things out (even though they have to be modified if they get ported to consoles like Doki Doki literature plus) and I could see a big manual included with the souls games be beneficial it would help not needing to look things online but at the end of the day I feel manuals are definitely something of the time that most older gamers (probably 28 and above) have great fond memories and nothing wrong with missing those things.
Great video thanks for showing so many games that need attention!
I miss game manuals.. They were often REALLY cool to look at, and contained lots of information, not only about how to play the game, but also about the lore of the game's world. That kind of supplemental world-building is such a lost art. It created immersion, and really got you into it. For me, that was always important, because i've pretty much always played games for the story, the experience, the spectacle....the pure escapism of going somewhere else, being someone else, doing things i'd never get to do in my real life.
The manuals, and other assorted materials, also used to give greater value for money. Nowadays, you pay your money, and all you get is the game, in digital format..and maybe a digital manual, if the developer could be bothered to make one.. The games are often soul-less, forgettable affairs, that feature more action and explosions than story. There are some rare gems out there, but unfortunately, the gaming industry has been made so corporate and sterile, that there's no real room for genuine innovation, or passion anymore.
Another thing i miss, that old games did right, was that they came complete, extensively tested, and they just worked out of the box. None of this lazy "Fuck it, we'll release it broken, because we're up against the clock, and then we'll spend first few months post-release patching shit we should have caught during testing, and then patching stuff our previous patches broke, because we didn't bother putting the product through proper testing before releasing it" nonsense. These days, everything is rushed, publishers put studios under too much pressure, which goes back to the sterile, corporate, soul-less, no-passion thing i mentioned before. These days, unless the dev studio is one of the absolute titans, that a publisher won't dare cross, the only place you're finding titles that are truly imaginative, innovative, or fleshed out (for lack of a better term), is Indie studios....because they haven't yet been consumed by one of the big publishers, and had their souls crushed, and their creative flames extinguished.
Between all the stuff i mentioned, and all the forced woke nonsense being pushed on us by activists larping as game developers, it's getting harder and harder to find truly good games anymore. I miss the old days. The entire games industry was better before 2015. Now, it's just a hellscape, with a few rare spots of beauty scattered about.
On Manuals:
I have good memories of those - they were fun providing details and tips and tricks outside of the game, but it was a product of its time; it asked the player to invest time outside of the game itself to get better at it - to understand it, and if the developers were interested, in the game's setting and story. Like any piece of art, it depends on how it was done; if it's full of things you could easily learn in-game, then it's a waste of paper, and of the reader's time. But if it gives more information on the lore and story, and/or gives hints on how to proceed in the game you wouldn't find otherwise, it's a good inclusion.
It's also possible that manuals, back in the day, were necessary - after all, the hardware of the 80s, 90s and 2000s was much more limited than what we have today, and it couldn't fit everything the developers wanted to explain to the players, gamewise and/or storywise -- hence the need for supplementary material. In the shiny new 2020s, we have the resources to provide both of these things to the players without the need for manuals. And for those truly nostalgic, you have the option for providing online manuals (that you should have the option of printing, for those that truly long for that irreplaceable tactile feel).
Overall, while I liked manuals and appreciated them for what they could provide, I don't long for their return; we have the means to give what manuals once provided to the players in the game itself and arguably achieve the same result. But if you're referring to holding something in your hands to read through... that ventures into a different topic entirely, and I won't argue that something is lost when we transition from physical materials to digital spaces.
Yes! Please do a follow-up bits and bob's for the origins of horror series!
Also, I loved manuals the best part of renting games was reading the manual on the ride home! I now have to hope special editions of games come with a manual and, though not often, I love it when they do!
Thank you for adding tracks from the CnC Covert Operations in this vid
The comparison to star tropics with the whole "you gotta dip this letter in water" thing was there. I was expecting to hear that.
I would 100% watch a video on manuals (and probably a note on Tunic that re-contextualized how they can be used in game ).
On that same note, I would also watch a video on strategy guides. Some of them were really wild about how they went about doing it: Zelda OOT had one with an almost storytelling format, the infamous FFIX one where half of the guide ended up on a service that no longer exists, or how some guides hid things from the Player intentionally to let them discover some things by themselves.
There is something about that era of publication that has completely disappeared. These things had a life of their own and similar to manuals they are a forgotten art form that gave a strange extra context to the beauty of the medium. Everything form extra concept art to lovingly crafted tables that I've spent hours pouring over, a lot of them had something special. I carried a handful of them to school with me every week just to get stuck into them.
That might make me a gigantic nerd... but I love it all the same
Regarding the player having to chart their own map: it opened up gameplay outside the digital realm. The game knowing players are actually drawing a map and doing its best to throw them a curve ball in changing the layout of the dungeons for example, forcing the player to somehow include this in their physically drawn maps.
Really digging the series, lookint forward for the next part!