The booklets that built worlds before you pressed Start
Nintendo's manual for the original Zelda did what the cartridge could not: it handed players a fully realized mythology, complete with Ganon's backstory, the Triforce's origin, and a map of Hyrule that made the world feel ancient before you pressed Start.
EarthBound's North American release came packaged with a 128-page Players' Guide masquerading as a manual, complete with scratch-and-sniff stickers, a full walkthrough, and a tone that matched the game's surreal humor perfectly.
Capcom's manual for Mega Man 2 gave each of the eight Robot Masters a full-page profile complete with serial number, weakness notation, and a prose biography that transformed what were essentially level themes into characters with histories.
The Metroid manual was unremarkable in most respects, but buried in its lore section was an unambiguous statement that Samus Aran was female — information the game concealed behind an unlock condition that most players never reached.
Metal Gear Solid's manual doubled as a gameplay resource through intentional design — the boss Psycho Mantis famously instructed players to move their controller to the second port, information delivered only to those who had read the manual's controller section.
Capcom's manual for the SNES port of Street Fighter II gave each of the eight playable fighters a full biography, move list, and illustrated portrait, establishing character backstories that the arcade version's attract mode had only sketched.
Nintendo's bundled manual for Dragon Warrior — included free with Nintendo Power subscriptions — constructed the kingdom of Alefgard with the thoroughness of a travel guide, covering history, monsters, items, and spells in a document that functioned as both lore primer and reference sheet.
The Super Mario Bros. manual established the Mushroom Kingdom's foundational mythology in sixteen pages, introducing the Koopa Tribe's transformation of citizens into bricks and stones — lore the game never referenced but that shaped how a generation of players understood what they were running through.
Sega's manual for the original Sonic was written with the same irreverent energy as the character himself, establishing Sonic's backstory and personality through prose that deliberately positioned him as cooler, faster, and more attitude-forward than anything Nintendo was publishing.
Nintendo's SNES version of SimCity came with a 118-page manual partly written as an in-fiction advisory document from Dr. Wright — the game's invented advisor character — giving city-planning guidance through a persona rather than a technical voice.
Released in North America as Final Fantasy II, the SNES manual gave extended character profiles for Cecil, Rosa, Kain, and the supporting cast that the game's compressed localization had left underdeveloped, filling gaps in characterization through documentation.
Konami's Contra manual leaned fully into the game's action-movie aesthetic, providing soldier biographies for Bill Rizer and Lance Bean that positioned the game as a specific kind of military sci-fi narrative rather than a generic run-and-gun.
The Chrono Trigger manual showcased character and monster artwork by Akira Toriyama, the legendary Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest creator whose distinctive style gave the game its instantly recognisable look and made the booklet a keepsake in its own right.
The manual that introduced Western players to the world of Pokémon, framing the adventure through Professor Oak's guidance and the fateful choice between Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander at the start of the journey to become a Pokémon Master.
The Secret of Mana manual carried the lush, painterly cover art of Hiro Isono — an intricately detailed naturalistic illustration of a vast tree and forest — pairing one of the era's most beautiful game artworks with a guide to the SNES's pioneering cooperative action-RPG.
Most of Wasteland's story was not in the game. It was printed in a booklet, and the game told you which numbered paragraph to read — including paragraphs that were deliberate lies planted to catch cheats.
MicroProse shipped a strategy game with a reference encyclopedia — and then built a second one into the game itself, with hyperlinks, years before most people had seen a hyperlink.
Falcon 4.0 did not ship with a manual. It shipped with a library — a Flight Handbook, a Cadet's Guide and a Communications Handbook, because one book could not hold an F-16.