8 Video Game Revolutions We Don't Need Anymore
4. Strategy Guides And Helplines
Time was, if a video game stumped you you had little choice but to do one of three things: bear down and push through, abandon your one-game-a-year purchase or turn to someone else for help. But where does a player do this in the pre-internet age?
Releasing a strategy guide alongside a game was fairly standard practice for a long time, especially with bigger and more complex games like RPGs. With officially licensed information, you now had access to the tips, tricks and secrets as well as, in some cases, a beautifully curated piece of memorabilia.
Owning a strategy guide just made you feel like some kind of sage. You held the sacred texts - you knew the location of every item and the weakness of every boss.
For those games that didn’t have a guide but still presented a challenge, there were video game help lines. Nestled in games magazines amongst all the other advertisements, and even sometimes in the manuals of certain games themselves, these phone numbers were sold as a lifeline. Answers to your burning questions!
And in the reverse, a lifeline to burning a hole in your parents’ wallet, most likely.
Of course, when gamers worldwide were able to connect to each other via the world wide web, they were able to share this information that had been once only been stored in guides and help lines. Websites filled with cheat codes and eventually full-on walkthroughs were some of the earliest video game pages on the internet - a death knell for the way things were.