Reflections on the Evolution of Gaming (part 1)
While having a conversation with my son, I found another thing that he didn’t really understand and required explanation due to his being born while the Wii was still in fashion. And that is the concept of the hint guide / player’s guide / gaming magazine. For almost all of the games he’s played, they have either had a tutorial and enough built-in dialogue or hints that there is never a danger of “getting stuck” in a game, or he’s playing something that I know well and can direct him, or it’s something that can be easily looked up online with ease.
What he’s never experienced is getting stuck and having no recourse. With walkthrough websites like GameFAQS, message boards like GBAtemp, and thousands of “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube, it’s really easy to accidentally find the answers to puzzles in any game.
It’s probably a safe bet that games which feature puzzle elements are made by other people who enjoy such puzzles, and the same could be said for adventure games. Part of the challenge in creating such a game is to make the puzzles challenging but still solvable. There’s always a risk that the solution is too obscure, giving the game a bad reputation for being overly difficult. But it’s also possible to make the solutions too obvious, making the game too easy. It’s quite a conundrum when trying to make a game that is accessible to all ages when certain parts of the game might “age-lock” someone out because they’re either too old or young to understand the hints required to solve the puzzle (incidentally, I found out that the Leisure Suit Larry game I got age locks kids out on purpose by requiring them to pass a test that revolves around 80’s cultural references and history, ensuring that younger kids won’t be able to play).
After some of the first puzzle games got a reputation for being impossible, several solutions came about. The first is the gaming magazine, like Nintendo Power. Many (cynically) saw its existence as another way of making additional money by making an impossible game and then charging extra money to get the required info to finish it. The same could be said about Player’s Guides or Hint Guides. Player’s Guides became a thing during the NES-era, and probably peaked around the N64-era. They could be purchased at gaming and retail stores, as well as other places where games could be purchased. Hint books came in several forms, but one such form was a book that had specific questions (such as, “How do I open the red door?”) with hidden answers that were obscured so players didn’t accidentally spoil the answer to something important while looking up a different hint. Some needed a red piece of transparent plastic to see the answer, while others needed a special kind of highlighter (Space Quest’s hint book is one such example). TV Tropes refers to this predicament as "Guide Dang It!"
But I tend to take a more forgiving approach to magazines/guides, and see them not as a soulless cashgrab, but as a measure to meet younger and/or less puzzle oriented people halfway. This allows the developers to put in difficult puzzles, but let players who are unable/unwilling to solve them solo have an avenue to get the answer.
Before these kinds of guides became so popular, sometimes games would include some supplementary material as assistance. The Legend of Zelda famously came with an almost complete map of the overworld as well as the first two dungeons, with additional hints and suggestions on how to make your own map. Maniac Mansion came with a hint sheet that resembled an old-school college campus bulletin board with cleverly disguised clues. A Link to the Past also came with a small “Top Secret” hint guide that was sealed with a Triforce sticker as well as a map with the overworld and first three dungeons. One interview I read stated that the developers were worried that the game was too hard, which is why they included the Top Secret manual. To be fair, some of the solutions like, “lighting all the torches,” weren’t as common then, whereas games these days just include them and everyone just sort of knows to try it. Razbuten has a great video about what gaming is like for non-gamers, which mentions that there are some strategies or knowledge that developers just expect players to know, but Miyamoto wanted to make sure there was an avenue for new players who hadn’t caught on yet.
Another avenue was to write letters or phone the company directly. While playing King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, my dad got stuck. I loved watching him play these games and helping him when I could, but when we were stumped, my dad wrote to Sierra Online (snail mail) and got a few answers. Nintendo set up a hotline that players could call to talk with “Game Counselors” to get help. Thankfully it wasn’t a 1-900 number, but just a regular phone number (which was still long distance to everyone outside of the Redmond, WA area). These are who Hailey is talking to on the phone near the end of the movie, The Wizard, while Jimmy is practicing in the arcade.
The final source of help were peers at school. Before the internet, the only real way of getting help or trying to spread information is to physically talk to people face-to-face. Telling each other about secrets we found dominated the conversations at the lunch table during grade school and even into middle school. It's not as efficient or effective as internet message boards, but it's the best we had back then. I sometimes see posts on gaming forums stating that someone is trying to play an NES game without a walkthrough and finding it impossible. They can't fathom how kids used to do it back then, but aren't aware of how much we crowdsourced tips and secrets like that.
Once the internet became more established, and games themselves started including more in-game tutorials and ways of obtaining help, the guides were needed less and less, and eventually became more of a collector’s item than a necessity.
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