I remember the day Master of Orion III came out. After heading off to the mall during lunch, I returned to work, bag in hand, and ripped open the package in the car. Tucking the game itself safely under the seat, I stealthily smuggled the manual into my office where I proceeded to read it, a few pages at a time, as soon as the opportunity arose.

While I would eventually learn that the game itself left a lot to be desired, the manual was, on its own, a delight:  Long passages about the history of the Master of Orion universe, plenty of shots of all of the game’s interfaces, and discussions of strategy as you made your way through the game. I read the manual twice that afternoon, and as soon as I got home, it found a place on my bookshelf, among a collection of others.

For a lot of people, the moment they get a new game in their possession, they race home, tear off the shrink wrap, and pop it into their systems to get playing.  For me, however, there is always that one critical step in between: reading the manual.

Perhaps it is my inherent love of books of all shapes and sizes, but I genuinely find myself excited by the prospect of reading the manual to a new game.  Or, I should say, the prospect used to excite me.  Manuals, like so many other aspects of games, have gone through many changes over the years, and this is one area where they have unfortunately been almost entirely negative changes.

In truth, some of the earliest manuals I can recall were for our family’s Intellevision system.  I don’t remember much about them, as I was quite young at the time, but I know they were not particularly engrossing; just a few pages about how to put the cartridge in and which buttons press to do what.  The first ones that I recall truly grabbing my attention were for the original Metroid and Zelda.  While not particularly lengthy tomes, they each opened with the story behind the game, accompanied by hand-drawn artwork of various characters and creatures from the titles.  This, to me, was a fantastic thing to have, as it suddenly put in my mind a more concrete vision of what those little bundles of pixels on the screen were supposed to represent.  When I arrived at the haunted graveyard, the Ghini were now ghastly phantoms out to get me, not just misshapen blobs of color.

These early NES manuals served a dual purpose; not only did they tell you how to play the game, they filled information and images that the games themselves didn’t have the ability to: extra snippets of story, or artwork far more detailed than 8-bit games could hope to support.  The manuals became the gateway into the game world, giving me a fuller sense of the designers’ vision; they were yet another part of the game experience, as vital as the music or the graphics.

Where manuals really started to carve out a special place in my heart was with some of the early DOS games on PC.  Railroad Tycoon, by Sid Meier, was a lengthy read that went far beyond a simple explanation of how to play the game.  In addition to explaining how to double-track your lines for improved capacity, it had tales of the history of the railroad, and pictures and technical specifications for 100 years worth of trains.  This was a manual that held great riches for those who took the time to read it (much of this information also served as part of the copy protection, which is far more charming than certain modern methods I could name…).

There were other games that followed with equally as rich content: SimCity 2000, a game that certainly had plenty of gameplay functions that needed to be explained, also contained quotes and essays on urban planning, trying to frame some of the concepts it was built around into understandable terms.  Civilization 2 included historical tidbits about the many technologies and units in the game, as well as a Designer’s Notes section that discussed some of the design challeneges encountered in making the game.

The common thread here is pretty clear – manuals that went above and beyond the call of duty in presenting more than just the installation and  instructions.  These were manuals that had the hand of someone who cared about the game crafting them – For every page of “vital” instruction, there were 2 or 3 or even more pages of supplemental materials.  Console games during the same period were somewhat hampered by size restrictions due to smaller boxes, but many still made due as best they could, by enhancing the experience with art or story, as mentioned earlier.

As the years passed, however, manuals began to fall into decline.  The first major blow came in the form of in-game tutorials, which, as technology improved, became more and more common.  With the instructions to play included in the game itself, it suddenly seemed redundant to many developers to include more than bare-bones explanations in the manuals.

The second, and probably more critical blow, came in the form of savings.  Printing manuals is expensive, and as alternatives such as in-game tutorials and PDFs on disks became viable, it was an easy cost-cutting decision to strip them down or take them out entirely.  Beyond just the physical cost of materials, smaller or non-existent manuals meant no one had to be paid to write them; no one had to spend precious time or money researching extra materials to include. Perhaps I am being a bit cynical here, but the last decade of corporate gaming has given me plenty of reason to believe most companies will gladly save a chunk of change wherever they can.

In a way, the weighty, rich manuals of the old days were almost a gift from the developers to the gamer – they didn’t have to make them that nice, but they chose to do so at no extra cost to us.  Yes, some were used as copy protection, but there were easier methods than writing in-depth manuals that they could have used.  To me, these well-crafted volumes were a sign that someone cared, not just about the game they had created, but about the gamer who would be playing it.

These days, it seems companies begrudge giving us even the  most meager of pages.  My recent purchase of Suikoden on the DS, for instance, comes with an approximately 5 page (DS-sized pages, mind you) manual that mostly covers the WiFi.  With no in-game tutorial to speak of, I’m honestly still a little baffled by what some of the game interfaces are telling me.

And yet, not all is lost.  The occasional game still comes along with a heafty tome just waiting to be read.  Civilization 4 carried on the series tradition with a whopper, and at least Fallout 3 put a little effort into theirs, though it was still somewhat lacking in personality compared to its predecessors.  In the meantime, I still have safely stored away some of the finest manuals I’ve collected over the years, and to those that penned them I offer my utmost respect.  Perhaps the day will come again when your services are needed, and the game manual can return to its rightful place in weighing down the bags of those who eagerly await a chance to crack them open.