We asked the video game manual designers—their work was 20 years apart—how the manuals were designed and why they seemed to disappear

Fighting motion sickness in the back seat, I tore open my copy of "Crash Bandicoot 3: Warping", flipped through the enclosed thick paper pamphlet, eagerly waiting for the moment I started the CD for the first time. Until then, the black and white pages were beckoning to me, I felt sick, and I read: "Hurry up, I'm going to start!!"

I was thinking about the same thing, because the harsh reality of video game manuals is that most of us will read it once, if not. This is because most manuals are basic instructions mixed with flavored text, but now the Internet, guides, and built-in tutorials provide the same functionality, making them obsolete. New players usually learn the game through tooltips and tutorials, rather than the knowledge base that comes with every version.

Before a lot of online help and easy-to-search game solutions existed, the manual was a port of call, even if only some. This made me think about how they were designed, what they were designed to achieve, and how they changed, because there are still some unofficial manuals hanging around today. For this reason, I found a number of hand-made designers whose crafts are more than 20 years apart, and asked them about their processes.

"Jim Sangster, who was a PlayStation writer in the late 90s, said: "Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped is the place I have been begging and begging. "It's a consciousness that no one can read it, but I'm just playing with it." "

Sangster wrote text in the video game manuals of many classic PlayStation games you might own, such as Siphon Filter, Spyro the Dragon 2, Final Fantasy VII, and Crash Team Racing. Working in the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) office in Golden Square, London, Sangster will play early versions of the game on one of the highly sought-after dark blue developer PlayStation consoles and write manuals from there.

"When I get a golden disk with the title of the game, a magical day will come," Sangster told me. "Sometimes when you first started it didn't open the menu, it might have a rough wire frame. Then you start to play the first level of the game, and it will collapse in the middle of the game, because they haven't put the rest in yet."

Sometimes a more complete game will come to Sangster, but because it needs a manual in the box, he often writes a lot of things. After playing this basic version of the game and reviewing the production documentation, Sangster will focus on writing. He told me that the manual is always written for anyone who can play games, which means he needs to follow a formula. "It must be open to everyone, and it must be gradual. So you start with the biggest concept: it could be the protagonist or the storyline, and then start from there."

"I need to make sure that each manual is clear and consistent, and has the same basic process. It is within that framework that I can have some fun," Sangster continued.

"This is why most games introduce the characters to the back, or differences in vehicles or different guns or any collectibles that may exist. This is because the first thing players need to know is how the game works, not the style of the game."

This style has more creative freedom, and unless the developer issues a special notice, Sangster can almost always be crazy about the way he wants to show the game on the page. Therefore, his desk was filled with books full of movie posters as inspiration, which influenced his works, such as siphon filters. "I have been making those deep trailer sounds [for the siphon filter] in my head, so I just injected all of them into the box and the manual."

Although many "players need to know" basic knowledge, such as mechanics and menu navigation must be present in each area printing, other details and ideas may begin to diverge. For example, Sangster explained how the European and American Final Fantasy VII manuals have roughly the same text but very different designs. In the United States, the manual is complete, with color and images occupying the entire page, while in Europe, the manual is in black and white and lacks high-quality images.

"[For FFVII] I have a good translation of the original manual from Japanese to English," Sangster explained, "but there are still some things that need to be corrected, if I remember correctly, such as the character names. We are often European ones. The manual is produced in at least six languages. Therefore, although the United States and Japan can afford color and a large number of other Wizbang products, we cannot afford it."

Unofficial Nintendo Switch manual. Credit: Rowan Fox Noble

"Although the game will guide you through it now, the manual is part of the game, isn't it?" Sangster continued to think about how "Final Fantasy VII Remake" built all the information into pop-up windows and menus instead of the paper that came with the game middle.

For Sangster, this change is not necessarily a bad thing, but he still remembers playing a fairly new version and how the lack of a proper manual made him feel.

"When I got a Batman Arkham game and didn't have a proper manual, I was angry and I would kick it out," Sangster told me. "If I were allowed, I would definitely write my version of Batman. I looked at it and thought,'This is not how I approach this game.'"

If Sangster really wants to, he can write an unofficial "Batman Arkham" manual, or write a manual for any other game, with all the bells and whistles he wants. In fact, someone is actually doing this for Nintendo Switch, and there are almost no video game manuals.

Unofficial Breath of the Wild manual. Credit: Rowan Fox Noble

Rowan Fox-Noble is putting together these modern manuals, at least when he is not a part-time firefighter. He did this work entirely alone, and last year he started using the "Super Mario Odyssey" booklet he printed at home with an inkjet printer. "Compared to the current situation, this looks terrible," he told me, "but people seem to like it."

The manuals that Sangster wrote after working at PlayStation for more than two decades are very different in approach. Fox-Noble may still play the game first, but this time it has been completed. He did this to take into account that the game itself bypassed what he needed to include. "If you make a manual, anyway, many modern games have a lot of tutorials. If you explain the controls on paper, it's a bit pointless, so I make it more like an artistic reflection of the game itself."

The first is the difference between a manual and a booklet, which Fox-Noble says is very subtle: "The manual is more informative and the booklet is more creative, reflecting a specific and unique aspect of the game." Therefore, although Sangster is working in accordance with Sony's specifications, the independence of Fox-Noble means that he can accurately choose what the manual needs based on the content of the game itself.

For example, Fox-Noble told me how he put useless note pages at the back of so many video game manuals and dialed them to 11 in his "Breath of the Wild" booklet. "You can have many different control combinations in the game, but this is also a large-scale exploration game," he said. "So I gave up the rich manual content and made a booklet about exploring these areas to make it look like a diary so people can outline what they have discovered and plan their journey."

You might argue that so far, these are not manuals in the traditional sense, but games like Breath of the Wild don't really need manuals. Telling someone how to protect the surf, or how all the elements in the game interact with each other, will destroy the meaning of the game's built-in way of teaching the player and their sense of discovery.

However, this hand-designed transformation is still very popular, because Fox-Noble now officially prints his work and sells it in his Etsy store. For him, this success comes from how he blends the nostalgia of old handmade designs with more focused ideas.

"Owning old things, it feels good to be nostalgic," Fox Nobel explained. "It's what people like, but it would be nice to add new things, so these manuals of mine are not completely useless. People won't just watch it and move on."

Fox-Noble does sometimes make something more in line with traditional manuals, but his work perfectly summarizes how the design needs to be changed. For most players, the video game manual tries to be a versatile person, omniscient, full of information that most of us never need.

This means that the manual has to turn to either be about nostalgia or serve a different purpose entirely. Now to cater to a specific audience, they find the focus of the manual is very attractive, instead of including page after page of basic information.

If done well, the manual feels like an extension of the game world itself. These pages can be designed to echo the background, they can contain maps, and sometimes they can even provide context for characters and worlds that are not in the game. Of course, they usually only contain a few pages of legal terminology, control guides, and tell you how to open the console. But sometimes they will redouble their efforts. It would be great if they could do it again.

Will Nelson is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to NME. 

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