Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #16 – I Miss Game Manuals

A bit of game-related nostalgia, as I work my way towards the ending of Mass Effect 3 (which I’ll write a post about soon, especially about the Citadel DLC…).

You’ve just been out shopping in town with your parents. Trips like these aren’t as dull as just going to the supermarket, but standing around for hours while your mum and sister try on clothes (or, worse, make you try on clothes), or your dad goes and buys shoes or widgets or whatever he needs for the garage this time, is still boring. As a small boy, there aren’t a lot of shops that are remotely interesting enough for your goldfish-like attention span.

But if you’re lucky, you might have been allowed to go off on your own for a bit. You might have been able to wander up the high street while the others were in White Stuff or Monsoon. You might have been able to go into GAME – and if you were even luckier, you had pocket money, and when your parents came to find you 10 minutes after you were supposed to meet them outside the bank, you might walk away with a shiny new/preowned video game.

Then, of course, it was back to the car for the drive home. The car, of course, is famous around the world for not having a PS2 in the back of it. (Unless you had one of those cars with the little screen in the back of the headrest, which barely anyone actually did, despite every child wanting one more than anything else in the world). Your preowned copy of Ratchet and Clank 3 (the best game of all time) was just a lump of plastic in your hands for the next 45 minutes, before you got home and could actually play it. But that didn’t matter – because when you tore off the weird sticker that held the box shut, inside the box was the most exciting thing in the world besides the actual game itself.

The manual.

It didn’t matter that you couldn’t play the game yet. It didn’t matter that the pictures were so tiny and low-res that you could barely see what they were depicting. The manual had everything you needed for the journey right there. It had the controls, it had a summary of the story. It had a list of weapons and gadgets whose descriptions set the mind on fire as efficiently as they would soon be setting enemies on fire. It had a list of instructions about how to play multiplayer, on the Internet! You’d never use them, because getting a PS2 online required eleven bits of external hardware, and it was much easier to just have your friends come to your house – but sitting in that car those instructions were the most exciting words in the world.

There was no better way to build anticipation for a game than reading the manual. I remember dozens of trips like these, dozens of car journeys with my head buried in those little booklets. By the time I got home I’d basically been playing the game in my imagination already – and as soon as I was allowed to I’d sprint upstairs to the PS2 and get playing for real. Even later when I was in high school and I had a PS3, many games still came with a proper manual. I remember devouring the instructions to Skyrim on our way home in 2011.

Not now, though. There are no manuals these days. If you do actually buy a physical game (and it’s probably just a download code), there’s never anything in the box besides the disc and a few DLC codes or whatever. Skyrim was probably the last game I bought that had a proper manual in it. My other PS3 games just had a barebones list of controls, if I was lucky. More cutting by far were the booklets of safety information and adverts for weird proprietary cloud services. When you picked up the game case, it felt like there was a manual inside… but when you opened it later, there was just useless, boring paper.

And of course these days we mostly download our games straight from the Internet, so we don’t even have that.

I miss those days. I miss manuals more than I miss old games. I can still play the games. But I’ll never read those manuals for the first time again. And I’ll probably never read a new one.