When did we decide a three-page control list was an acceptable trade for actual instructions?
There was a time when buying a game felt like getting something real. You opened the box. You pulled out the disc. Then you picked up the manual and started reading while the game installed.
Game manuals weren’t just instructions. They were the first contact. They gave the game shape before you ever saw the title screen. Some were thin, stapled leaflets with a control list and a plot summary written in five minutes. Others were packed with character bios, fake documents, lore dumps, or glossy diagrams of ships you hadn’t even unlocked yet.
The best ones gave the sense that you were entering a world that already existed. Homeworld gave you a printed history of your people, complete with dates and conflict timelines. TIE Fighter trained you like an Imperial cadet, with schematics, rank insignias, and mission logs. MechWarrior 2 handed you dossiers and technical breakdowns like you were being shipped off to a real war. Even the nonsense ones, like Daikatana, still tried. That effort made the game feel bigger than it probably deserved to be.
Today you get nothing. Maybe a health warning. Maybe a QR code linking to a support site that hasn’t been updated since launch week. No manual. No PDF. No digital equivalent. The information has been stripped down, buried in the pause menu, or worse, turned into a mandatory tutorial where some voiceover yells “Use WASD to move” like you’ve never touched a keyboard in your life.
It’s not like anyone fought to keep them. Manuals died quietly. Nobody made a fuss. There wasn’t a backlash. One day they were just gone. The excuse was cost. Then it was the shift to digital. Then the environment. What it really came down to was effort. Nobody wanted to spend the time to write them. So they didn’t.
Now you get loading screen tips. Pop-ups. Buttons that glow. And if you want to know how anything actually works, you go to YouTube or Reddit and hope someone else has figured it out. The official documentation is either missing or useless.
You used to bring the manual to school. You’d read it at lunch. You’d flip through it again before starting the game just to get yourself in the right headspace. You’d leave it on your desk next to the mousepad, because it made the whole thing feel a bit more legitimate.
Now your desk is just a screen and your mousepad is probably an Amazon box you haven’t thrown out yet.
It’s not that manuals were perfect. Most of them weren’t. But they were there. They grounded the game. They filled in gaps. They were part of the package. When a manual was good, it made the game feel bigger. When a game was bad, it was sometimes the only good thing about it.
These days, all that effort’s gone. The start of the game isn’t a thoughtful introduction, it’s a login screen. A licence agreement. A prompt to buy premium currency before you’ve even figured out how to crouch.
We didn’t just lose a booklet. We lost the lead-in. We lost the scene-setting. We lost the part of the process where the game earned your attention before it even loaded.
And nothing replaced it.
Which game manual do you still remember and do you wish you’d kept it?
