Game Manuals

[Moonface]

So I just saw Kotaku reporting that every U.S. PS2 game manual has been scanned in 4K and uploaded online, and was going to share it in General Game Chat but figured since game manuals are basically non-existent nowadays, it'd be nice to just have a thread to talk about these things as a whole instead.

I find it crazy that someone managed to get a copy of every PS2 game manual to make scans of them. I'd have thought this would have been a group effort since that's so many games and I would expect a number of them to be really hard to find, but from what I can tell that doesn't seem to be the case. The Kotaku article also mentions a SNES manual archive too but I didn't look into it at all yet to know how that was compiled. Anyway, I might check out some of the manuals of games I own to see if there's any notable differences I can find in the US manuals compared to the UK ones or if they're practically the same except for some changes to spellings or word choices due to the differences in US and UK English.

So along with that, does anyone have any fond memories of game manuals as a whole or of particular ones? Do you miss seeing them in game cases, or do you feel indifferent about that?

[Mr EliteL]

Yeah, I miss reading character bios manuals usually have. Tekken always had it up until T5 (I believe it was then), once PS3 came in, manuals were gone.

Also just to get the gist of the controls before playing for the first time, or if not played for a long while, reading a manual to refresh was good to have. Or getting a bit of backstory before the game's plot begins, I think some manuals had that too.

[Frank]

My memories of the manuals growing up, was that I typically read them on the car ride home.

Sometimes I would sneak some to school and read them during class :-P

[Moonface]

Yeah, I miss reading character bios manuals usually have. Tekken always had it up until T5 (I believe it was then), once PS3 came in, manuals were gone.

Also just to get the gist of the controls before playing for the first time, or if not played for a long while, reading a manual to refresh was good to have. Or getting a bit of backstory before the game's plot begins, I think some manuals had that too.

Nah, Tekken 6 had a manual: https://manuall.co.uk/sony-playstation-3-tekken-6/
It was the PS4 era that started phasing them out, where it originally went down to just a slip of paper and now you don't get anything in the boxes except a disc. You can see how PS3 games gradually began to put more and more tutorial content and stuff into the actual game which negated the need for manuals, and was likely put in because digital games having to require the player to switch out of the game to their digital manual was tedious. Nowadays there's not much a manual could contain that the game can't just put in itself, or just got moved over to physical guides when it comes to lore dumps and such.

My memories of the manuals growing up, was that I typically read them on the car ride home.

Sometimes I would sneak some to school and read them during class :-P

If anyone never read a game manual on the car ride home from buying a new game they didn't live.
Can't say I ever snuck one to school though, especially since I wouldn't trust someone not stealing it from my bag when I'm not looking.


It's also interesting to see how game manuals started to use colour when PS2 hit. All of the PS1 manuals I ever had were black and white, but looking through some of the manuals of PS2 games I owned on that archive site I have yet to find one that isn't colour. Funny how they were b/w to keep them cheap, then colour which makes them more expensive to produce, to gradually phasing out entirely. It gives me the impression manuals just went away because better ways were found to deliver the content in them rather than a cost measure, considering the production got better with time rather than worse. XD