Shacknews: No Instructions Included

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Water Chip? Been There, Done That
Shacknews has put up a nostalgic article about old games and manuals for them. It features a pic from Fallout in the header and has a bit on it too.
<blockquote>Mixing humor with a dark, post-apocalyptic setting, Interplay's masterpiece RPG Fallout stands the test of time--and its manual is no different. Titled "Vault Dweller's Survival Guide," the book begins with extraneous statistics of the underground vault your character has inhabited since the nuclear holocaust, listing everything from budgetary sums to typical power requirements. This is followed by a detailed, multi-page synopsis of the effects of a nuclear blast. These cold facts effectively introduce the heavy, lead-laden atmosphere that pervades Fallout.</blockquote>Go take a look if you miss the game manuals too.

Link: Warning: No Instructions Included
 
I remember reading the manual in the train station after going all the way to the big smoke to get the game. I loved the cartoonish portraits of the pre-made player characters, too. A treat.
 
The polish manual got cut down - instead of a full manual we got a 52 page booklet.
 
The FO manual is a classic.

In Dutch it was titled: "Survivalgids voor bunkerbewoners" (roughly: survivalguide for inhabitants of bunkers).

I'm saying this because at the time I discovered FO and started playing it fanatically, I lived on the "ground floor (?)" of a building (in Dutch/French: parterre). That means that half of my flat was below groundlevel. My girlfriend and me referred to it as "The Bunker".

The good ol' days, gosh... :(

I've never seen a game manual as perfect as the FO one, although the manual that came with AoE 2 comes pretty close, seeing that just as with the FO manual it was something you could just read on the train or in the sofa without feeling silly as fuck.
Another one that was awesome: the Arcanum manual. A shame that one lacked a contents page. Would have made playing the game a whole lot easier, methinks.

After they stopped selling games in cardboard boxes, manuals became nothing more than stupid folders. Such a goddamn shame... :(

Damn, you fuckers, stop making me so nostalgic....

*takes his medicine*
 
Ultima series had pretty good manuals.

Yeah, Arcanum too. I still have the box and the manual.

Baldur's Gate had a good manual which was much better than the game itself.

Too bad that now they are making games for illiterates...
 
anyone remember the TOEE manual? haha, now that was a fucking thick one.

though ofc, the FO one was way better. but i think the TOEE one had the most pages.

or wait, scratch that... i think Falcon (or something) wins that by far. some F16 flightsim with a huge fucking manual. never read it though. :)
 
SuAside said:
anyone remember the TOEE manual? haha, now that was a fucking thick one.
Click to expand...
Remember? I've got it right here in my hand right now. And yeah, it's very thick. But a good read nonetheless.
 
ultima series pwns hands down. not only did they have great manuals, they had great supplements like real maps.
 
And coins, and amulets.

Edit - And you didn't have to order any damnable "Special Edition" to get it.
 
It's sad but true... making great documentation, maps, etc. is a lost art. Even most special edition "swag" doesn't compare to what you got included with the Fallouts and some of the other old games.
 
I love the Fallout manual. They really don't make manuals like that any more.

A few other good ones: The manual that came with Wing Commander I, which was in the form of a "Claw Marks" magazine. Also, a few of the old Space Quest adventure games had manuals that were presented in the form of an "in universe" magazine. Space Quest VI, for example, had a magazine called "Popular Janitronics." It was given that name only after Josh Mandel, who created it, tried to name it "Janitalia: The Magazine of Space Janitors" - a name that Sierra management shot down.

I miss the days when documentation was written from an "in universe" perspective. That was always such a fun way to introduce the player to the game universe.
 
I still have both the manuals for 1 & 2 and the original boxes. I think I also have every gift they gave out at the FO2 release party in Newport Beach. BTW, did anyone else but me try out the food recipes in the backs of the manuals. The mushroom cloud cookies were pretty good.
 
I think cloth maps and similar swag in non-SE boxes were pretty much limited to the original (read: US) market versions. They most certainly didn't often do that for the German version.

The German FO1 did however contain a faithful equivalent of the original manual. A faux-leather or plastic cover would have given it the final touch, but the paperback was good enough.

I remember how I just thought "wow" whenever I got a game like that. Crusader was pretty neat as it came with a large newspaper-like fold-out (again, the material was not the best choice, but the smooth surface added to the SciFi feel.

I liked how big Arcanum's manual was, too. It was well-written and added a little to the game universe's feel, although the cover was a fourth-wall breaker (just like the actual MANUAL parts of manuals or tutorials tend to be).

The day they started selling most new games in DVD boxes I got a bit angry at the game industry. They had always done that for console games, but it was something that distinguished the deep PC games from the shallow console games. Replacing the card-boxes with DVD boxes blurred the lines and took something from the flair of PC games.

Fallout Tactics coming in a DVD cover was a bad omen for me and it turned out to be true when I played the game (which I would have pre-ordered if the website would have had that option for Europe).

Incidentally, some games opting for the DVD box sized card-boxes later on turned out to be above-average (Splinter Cell, NWN -- at least about as good or crap as BG1/BG2).

Of course DVD boxes were a step in favour of the retailers to maximise shelf space, but it made PC games even more generic than they were becoming already. It made the transition into a mass-market painfully more obvious.
 
Raoul Duke said:
BTW, did anyone else but me try out the food recipes in the backs of the manuals. The mushroom cloud cookies were pretty good.
Click to expand...

...Serious? Post those recipes! hahah That would be a riot.
 
Anyone remember the awesome manual and supplemental maps and plane stats booklet that came with "Red Baron" back in the days of the untextured polygon 3-d engines?

I can remember spending hours pouring over maps of the front and planning my missions out on them, whilst cross-referencing the aircraft booklet to see how long I'd have to wait before the allies developed the Sopwith Camel that I needed to climb fast enough to take on vonRichtofen in a duel.. mmmm game maps and supplements.. :)
 
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