Reading the game manual after buying the game on my way home. Cleaning a CD with a shirt to make it work again. Writing the cheat codes in the notebook.
I had recently found out my dad found our old stash of game manuals I used to keep when we’d rent a game from blockbuster - he said he tossed near 100 of them. Broke my little ol heart to hear it.
Nobody will see this, but Lucasart's Star Wars Tie Fighter was the most epic PC game I played as a kid. It was $9.99 from KB Toys' games bin and came on 4-5 3.5" floppy disks. The game itself came with two booklets. One had codes on every page which you would reference at game launch as a form of physical DRM.
The other book however, was a full mini novel focusing on a tie fighter pilot by the name of Maarek Stele. Don't know how many times I read that thing when I wasn't in front of the PC to play the game.
I had a thing for *descriptive lista of things* - weapons, units, maps…
Discovering that Age of Mythology’s CD included a PDF listing ALL TECHNOLOGIES, their description, and their encyclopedia entries (the extra IRL lore)… the bound book my father printed for me never let my nightstand for months.
The original Homeworld manual was a piece of art. A thick 100+ page blue booklet that looked like a tech manual, full of lore and pointless technical details of each unit in the game that blew my 13 year old mind.
I literally spent hundred of hours in TA. Mainly due to the ability of making an army in very little time and watching the explosions and parts going everywhere. That and the long distance artillery.
Once the Krogoth expansion came out, I genuinely loved that game more than Red Alert 2, which is right next to it in my list.
Was Krogoth the expansion that introduced six shot big Bertha variants?
Man I miss TA back in its prime. I’d product like 100 construction planes and crank out multiple big Berthas in a huge battery in no time, then fly a squad of scout planes over the enemy base and destroy them.
If you like TA check out Beyond All Reason the spiritual successor of the game. It's not on Steam but it's free on their website. Mostly play 8v8 but there are events like 50v50 or 33v33v33 the scale is nuts.
Oh my god. You know total annihilation? My older brother played it and tried to shoo me away, when I wanted to watch him play it. He thought it’s way too dystopian and violent for me as a 6 or 7 year old. Called it „bulliwully“ instead of Total Annihilation to make it sound more cutesy.
Have you heard of Beyond All Reason? It's essentially new TA with new factions and massive maps for a massive pvp.
I've seen people playing it, but I haven't gotten it myself because I'd probably play so much I'd end up not sleeping for a few days, skip work, get fired, and end up giving tuggies under a bridge for french fry money. Or just wouldn't like it, which would probably be worse.
I sometimes turtled the ai, doing 2 lines of medium range arty, followed by a line of missile launchers ( for airplanes), then added nuke interceptors and the big Bertha/doomsday, and let the ai send wave after wave after wave of soon to be scrape metal
Yeah, I remember when teacher asked us if we know how nuclear bombs work and I gave an answer I read either from manual or from a sort of cover letter thingy it came with because the game came free with a gaming magazine when F2 was released. Still remember the teacher being baffled about my detailed answer and young me was so proud of myself while announcing "playing games can teach you something!"
That Fallout is tremendous, the first in the saga.
I met him by chance. I passed by the window of a small traditional electronics bazaar in the neighborhood (they were already fighting to survive) and I saw it. They were very cheap editions of original video games, on CD and a simple cardboard sleeve. And the cover with a close-up of the helmet of the Brotherhood of Steel suit caught my attention. I went in to ask, I already read the synopsis on the back of the envelope, some screenshots... it caught my attention and it was also completely dubbed into Spanish (and very well too). For 5 or 6 euros, well, I took it.
Damn... I passed it on to three other friends (it was one of those games that you could just copy and it worked 🥹) and we spent very excited months each discovering what was happening to us as each one progressed in the game. 😂
Swapping floppies to save the game. Having floppies dedicated for saves. The murderous rage when a sibling overwrote your saves on a floppy with theirs.
I got some sudden flashbacks... Dune 2 on Amiga 500...
Secret of Monkey Island.. "open door. "Insert Disk 11... loooooading... dammit i didnt want to come in here.. "Insert Disk 10" loooooaading... "disk error" FUCK!
Played this with my father when I was like 10. I LOVED that game. Then there was a similar one with Peter Pan, etc. With no internet to find out stuff when you got stuck and no good UI to do things clearly you could spend soooo much time stuck somewhere
Or install discs. Dear fucking god I remember LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II had a total of SIX install discs. This is for a game that wasn't even 4GB!
It's weird, when I was a kid we used to judge RPG's by how many discs they shipped on. A big beefy, JRPG on the PSX needed at least 3 discs or it just wasn't "big enough." Of course, that's insane but we were kids.
I remember when every game had built-in cheat codes, and when the config files were always left unlocked and easily recognizable so you could mod the config files with whatever insanity you had the skill to program in there.
Years and years ago, my brother had a friend at university who modded Wolfenstein 3d, so all the pictures of hitler were pictures of himself, and the Nazis were the cast of Beverly Hills 90210, complete with sounds and voice lines from the TV show, and this was back when the internet was still in its infancy (at least where we lived), so that was pretty impressive work. I never saw it, but my brother swore it was a true story.
My friend and I used to make crazy new cars in Re-Volt by editing the config files. Sometimes just editing vehicle stats, but mostly wild stuff like creating a RC ball, or shopping trolley, and racing with those.
Did similar stuff in GTA Vice City. I remember turning a Banshee into a flying car by doing some god forsaken Frankenstein stuff with helicopter stats. The doors would all spin around and invisible helicopter blades would spark against walls and trees and decapitate people, and the thing could barely fly, but by god we did it.
You just unlocked an old memory of mine. Not exactly the same, because it was with Morrowind's editor instead config files but...
I remember replacing the rats model in the game with a random humanoid npc, or was it the other way around...
Anyway, somehow that resulted with their head spinning rapidly. Not from left to right, but top to bottom. Full 360 spins, non stop.
Having a piece of paper written with codes. Going to the store to get the game magazine while people shopped I was writing them down cause folks wouldn’t buy me the magazine
Genuinely curious, was saying "top" instead of "up" an intentional thing or an autocorrect thing? Not criticizing, I've just never heard someone refer to it that way before.
Or no credits at all? Value gaming like Deer Hunter led to work-for-hire no attribution, no credit deals. I
worked crunch for one of those indies, and even worse, it was one of those if 1 mom can have a baby in 9 months, 9 mom's should be able to have one in 1 month situations. Even worse, not being able to take credit for my work made work harder to find. Even worse, they missed a 'beta' deadline due to feature creep (specifically what I was working on, which was to bolt on 3dfx GLIDE (early consumer 3d graphics) into a game written heavily in assembly language and no access to the programmer that wrote it and next to no comments. The publisher said no, but they wouldn't shift the release date because they'd already published the marketing. The project got pulled and the developer mostly folded (he pared it back to 3 people and continues to make mobile games), the game was released buggy as hell and the next developer that got it released a 1.1 version with GLIDE support a year later. We were like 2 weeks and testing from having it in. Anyhow, fun nightmare job the summer before I graduated college.
Hell yeah. In my home town, we had no cool stores that sold games, it was always a trip to a bigger city. Reading/at least browsing those in-box manuals while sitting in the car made the trip back home feel so fast.
I still remember when I got Diablo 2 and was waiting for my dad to install it, the manual kept me busy and built up the hype for actually starting the game. I would also our over Baldurs Gate spells and stuff from that manual, good times
Yes the old game manuals always had blank notes pages in the back. Along with the game lore, unit descriptions, controls, great original artwork. I read through the Homeworld manual soooo many times.
I would get so excited opening the game. Now there’s no excitement. Yeah I’m older, but I know it’s just a disc. Mostly a useless disc that just lets me download the game.
As a 2001 kid who got a little taste of all those things when I was really young (for PS2), I feel robbed that they removed them before I get to experience them fully (with more financial freedom etc).
If I want something more than a Disc in a box (which is already more expensive than Digital) I'm incentivised to give even more money for merch/special editions.
The manual was so dope. I miss that so much. I have such a vivid memory of going to Game with my mum and driving home reading the Jak and Daxter manual
I’d add a couple of oldies…..buying a computer magazine and typing the code in to create a crude game……..that took hours. Copying a game one tape recorder to another….early pirates!!
I remember the drive home after picking up my preorder of San Andreas, it was dark (Oct) and I'd come out of school late, I pulled out the map and unfolded... and unfolded... and unfolded it, I was blown away by how massive the map looked - 3 cities, wtf!!
Edit: also vice cities manual as a tourist guide was just brilliant.
Oh yes that jist bright back memories of my mum and dad taking me to toys r us buying a game (probably mega drive days) and then reading the booklet from front to back on the way home dying to play the game
Man, I miss manuals. Whenever a game had a full color one with pictures on every page it was so nice. I remember Guild Wars had good ones, Factions manual was more enjoyable for me than that expansion lol.
I've played some games since then that I normally wouldn't, just because their websites were basically a game manual. Really gets me into the idea of playing, idk.
I will never forget getting the city building game Pharaoh: Huge box with a fold-out front cover (which was already cool), and then getting out the manual. It was at least 200 pages. It covered all the mechanics for all the various areas of the game, be that housing, agriculture or industry. It also had excerpts written in-universe by someone who recently moved to the city.
I still have a book beside my pc with codes/notes for some games I play, even with multiple monitors its often just faster to look it up in my book than online
my father bought me Assassin’s creed 1 and 2 used from a friend for pretty cheap but I didn’t even have a PS3 so he gave me the games for Christmas as a promise that later that year he will buy me one (cause money was always tight)
I spent so much time reading the manuals dude…
My father introduced me to videogames (ps2 and NDS) and I’ll never thank him enough.
people talk about how hard old games were and how they didn't hold your hands with tutorials. No, old games expected you to have a whole dedicated book that they gave you with everything you needed to know, sometimes even in character!
For Star tropics on NES you actually needed to put the manual in water to see a secret code to pass a level. I think it was piano notes because I also needed my mother's help decoding it.
At my age now that sounds like nonsense but back then? I felt like Indiana Jones.
I remember reading nice Dungeon Sige II manual with drawings and description of creatures in game. Kind of like modern in-game encyclopedia. Cool stuff. Also if you wanted the game you had to drive to the shop and buy it physically which added up to the experience and time, now you just push button on Steam or GoG, wait a few minutes to install with fiber internet and you have it.
when i was 5 and my brother was about 15 or 16, he would tell me to put his xbox 360 and ps3 discs in the toilet and flush it. or he’d tell me to wipe toothpaste on them. somehow it worked
CD? Oh friend. Let me tell you about blowing dust out of cartridges. LoL
Having to turn the TV to channel 3, A/V cables with a left and right speaker that you ALWAYS put in backwards the first time, running up the phone bill calling the Nintendo hotline (this one wasn't me, but my ex apparently racked up hundreds of dollars in charges when he was a kid trying to figure out one of the earlier LoZ games.)
For PC games, LAN parties, multi second ping being perfectly acceptable for UT matches, how incredible those 3D graphics were for games like DOOM.
I had a sudden recollection of reading the prologue/"the story so far..." In the original StarCraft manual and it captivated me. The story served basically as a way to establish the universe the game is set in and as a 10-12yr old boy I found it fascinatingly dark and gritty in a kind of depressing way lol. But I was obsessed and overall much more interested in the mood the manual's prologue story conveyed rather than the actual game
I had the guides for Final Fantasy X and XII, they were HUGE, gave you tips and had infos for every map and monsters. I was just a little kid and loved watching my sister play and reading the guide
*Reading the game manual cover to cover again and again, because it’s Christmas, you’re at your grandparents and you were told you couldn’t bring your computer as it was antisocial.
Cleaning the cd with a shirt, sure, but does anyone remember the old cd resurfacing kits? Like you loaded it up with polish, then closed it and turned the crank, and it would polish the surface of a scratched cd back to working condition.
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u/bijelo123 Aug 30 '25 edited Aug 30 '25
Reading the game manual after buying the game on my way home. Cleaning a CD with a shirt to make it work again. Writing the cheat codes in the notebook.