In those days tutorials weren't a thing. Games came with manuals that you were expected to actually read.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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And they were cool! And it was better that way! And get off my lawn!
I miss maps. I still have the map of Skyrim and various GTAs on the wall in my old room at my parent's
oh man those gorgeous maps and manuals I think I am going to cry. Sometimes I would take them to the school to read and daydream about the game.
Yup...
RTFM
The literal first thing you do is get stuck in a room that you can't get out of until you learn to use the morph ball. Tutorial as gameplay was innovative.
I'm getting flashbacks to NES Rambo seeing your comment. First ragequit, fuck that game lol
Just watched a video that talked about that game last night. Never played it myself but I can see it being a pain.
It is, the respawn rates are insane by modern standards. 0/10 would not recommend, stick to the movies instead.
When literacy was an expected trait and not a rare one.
In those days, developers largely didn't know the concept of player training through gameplay and had to resort to text dump tutorials (or worse, tutorial videos (where applicable)).
? You start in a room you where right leads to ledge you can't jump to, and left takes you over a pyramid with a power up and small hole.
It was gameplay teaching you.
Mind, this is the only such moment. The rest of this game is fucking bullshit that ate my childhood
tutorial videos
This was simply not a huge thing back then. Remember that the only way for most people to experience on-demand video back then was via VHS and the TV, and most households only had one TV that was presumably being used to play the game. To watch a tutorial video, you would have had to watch it on TV at a specific time, or you would have had to buy or rent said guide, stop your game, connect your VHS, and watch it. I can find references to game guide videos people sold in magazines, but these don't seem to have been very popular. Most people just read the manual, which isn't that crazy of a concept. All games before video games came with rule books so why shouldn't these?
I meant games that had tutorial videos built into them. Stuff like Syphon Filter; a rushed, poorly voiced video that lists your controls and tosses you into the mission. The player is told what does what and isn't given a chance to learn how to interact with the world.
Soul Reaver 1's first 20 minutes is what every game should be aiming for. You learn how to navigate the world, how health and the spectral/material realms work, how to solve the combat puzzles, and more importantly, how those systems interact; then you're on your own. If a game needs the help of extrenal resources to convey such basic information, it's a failure of game design. Not necessarily out of incompetence but because game design principles hadn't evolved to that point.
I'm not against external (including physical) resources, iff they're used in a clever way. Shenzhen IO has a thirty-page manual themed as actual technical documentation about the electronics used in the game. Through this, the manual becomes part of the game. Same for Keep talking and nobody explodes. Volo's Guide to Baldur's Gate is a fantastic example of presenting supplemental information that is good to know but isn't a roadblock in its absence. If a manual improves the game experience, it's good material. If it's necessary to make a game playable, it's bad design.
Another good example for the good implementation of external ressources into a game is EXAPUNKS, a hacking game in which the game mechanics are conveyed through 3 issues of a magazine - I really liked that one. (it's another Zachtronics game, like Shenzen IO)
I know arcanum has a manual that is themed like a late 1800's style research book, which is really cool.
or worse, tutorial videos
Deus ex HR, what a pain
Tutorial videos with your new car, sure, not with a videogame.
The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you've played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you're presented with a narrow passage you can't crawl through. At this point, you'll discover that you can also go left. There's another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you'll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can't jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.
Not to mention that at that time, games shipped with an instruction booklet that told you the controls.....
I liked the FFVII manual that gave you bios of all the characters, along with telling you that Cid is "old".
He's 32.
he's old to 13 year olds. And young enough to 40 year olds to want to sacrifice himself in the name of space flight.
And also young enough to piss off his wife.
some of them used to be really cool and detailed and they should still be a thing TBH if you're buying a physical game. my boomer opinion
I really liked the illustrations in the game guides, too. Yet another thing that Fandom stole from us 😩 /s
Yeah, the best games back then had tutorials built in. Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 is probably one of the best tutorials ever made.
The first areas of the Halo 1, 2, and 3 were all designed to have all the movement training in it and have sections for the new weapons.
I never understood why they call this genre Metroidvania. Metroid definitely came first right? Why isn't it just Metroid-like?
Metroid wasn't first. Games like Pitfall II and Montezuma's Revenge predate it.
As for the "Metroidvania" name, originally it just applied to Castlevania games in the Metroid mould (particularly in the GBA/DS days when there were a tonne of them) but people just started applying it to the entire genre. It was always a terrible name.
Neither of those are Metroidvanias. Montezuma's Revenge isn't one big interconnected world and they both lack ability-based progression.
Super Metroid + SOTN
"Which way is Firelink Shrine?"
Based! A very bold move which you don't care what other people think of it, so yea, based.
Kinda reminded me of Warframe after you finish Vor's quest and the game is like: here's a billion systems I never properly explained, go have fun.
Totally based.
Warframe is... special.
Did you make it thirty hours in? Congratulations, now you can create your character.