Manhunt


The concept of a field guide, or a journal or diary, is widespread, and is often incorporated rather half-heartedly as a kind of standard (although Grasshopper’s Contact took this one step further by presenting its manual as a blog). But some games go even further, and use the one physical point of contact with the player to not only inform how the game’s interactions will work, but also how they should. Myst’s manual, for example, was a journal – except in this case it really was a journal, full of blank pages for your notes throughout, and preparing the player for a sedate and cerebral experience.


F-Zero

Can a manual do that – educate players in the ways a game needs to be judged? Nowhere has Rockstar’s appreciation for the form been more brilliantly realised than with the manual for Manhunt: a ‘Winter/Spring Catalogue and Preview Guide’ to Valiant Video Enterprises’ releases. A brochure of video nasties that mirror the game’s levels, it details the hunters that ‘star’ in each feature and offers full rundowns of the game’s weapons. Barring the obligatory start-up guide, everything is presented in character and topped off with the personal and terrifying contribution of Mr Nasty himself – as well as a threat to anyone reading it who isn’t meant to. Few manuals so effectively characterise their game while suggesting the interpretation that any serious mind should bring to Manhunt’s particular take on videogame violence. It’s not a piece of supporting material so much as a mindset that the player will need to understand the level on which the game truly operates.

The very physicality of manuals, of course, can be taken to other extremes than those explored by Myst and Manhunt. Infocom’s games were typically presented with a cornucopia of remarkably realised materials, affectionately referred to as ‘feelies’. The most well-known, perhaps, was The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which came with (among other things) a ‘Don’t Panic!’ button, an official order for the destruction of Arthur Dent’s house, some ‘peril-sensitive’ sunglasses (constructed from black cardboard) and ‘How Many Times Has This Happened To You?’ – an ad for the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as well as the ‘real’ guide to the game. The Zork trilogy, meanwhile, came with ‘Zorkmid’ coins that a fan campaign attempted to get re-minted some years ago, and that had originally appeared on the Zork 1 box before Infocom actually began producing these ‘feelies’ alongside its games.

Infocom was the most notable but by no means the only company to offer supplementary goodies for players to emphasise that point of contact, and Nintendo’s Integrated R&D Division (usually responsible for hardware) offers up a unique moment with StarTropics. This manual came with a piece of faux-aged paper, a letter to main character Mike from his uncle. So far, so usual. But at a certain point in the game, the uncle desperately says, “Tell Mike to dip my letter in water” – not only conflating the player and character but providing a bridge between them. Truly, a ‘feelie’. Nintendo’s dedication to manuals hardly ends here, however: it would be easy to point to the colourful sense of fun in the likes of the Wario series (which almost without exception feature something out of the ordinary, whether that’s simply stickers or, as in WarioWare: Smooth Moves, the manual being a newspaper written by the man himself). The company’s real gift, however, lies in the more sedate area of clarity: large marked controller diagrams, maps of gameworlds, and even, in the case of Earthbound’s US release, a full-sized and super-detailed strategy guide.