First off, let’s clear one thing up. Strategy guides are not a new invention. They have not sprung up unannounced in the past year or two like weeds in your garden lawn – piggyback, PrimaGames and Brady Games are not the result of some satanic plot to corrupt gamers and erode the foundations of our lifestyle. Strategy guides have been with us for a very long time indeed, almost as long as we’ve had games. I did a little research, and the earliest reference I can find to what I think qualifies as an 'official' strategy guide, are the 'hintbooks' published by Infocom in support of their adventure games.
However, as far as I'm concerned, strategy guides have appeared a bit earlier than that. Picture the scene, two kids are hunched over the Space Invaders cabinet in the local arcade/pizza place/mall/chip shop, pumping the machine full of quarters as fast as they can. One turns to the other and mentions how much he sucks at it, or how hard it is. The other turns back to him and says something like, “No, it’s easy, all you have to do is…” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is your basic strategy guide.
Back in 'the day', a strategy guide was a sacred thing amongst my friends and I. I recall clearly the day my cousin phoned me to say that he’d bought a magazine with a Final Fantasy 7 strategy guide in it. There wasn't much to it, a four page entry in a ‘Best Of’ cheats collection, it gave a quick rundown of the ‘hidden’ Materia, where to find all the Enemy Skills, and how to defeat the Ruby and Emerald Weapons. We had no idea how we had managed to get so far in the game without the help of this article. We handled it with a reverence unknown to any clergyman. Egyptologists don’t display as much care with their treasures as we did with this guide. Granted, this was due more to the appeal of the game itself, rather than the actual guide, but I’m sure you understand the point I’m trying to make. That was either ’96 or ’97, and although strategy guides were far from new (see earlier comment), by and large they were still 3rd party, unofficial versions (except Nintendo Power).
Things are a little different now though. If you want a guide, you buy a Brady Games edition, a Prima Games edition or a piggyback edition. Production values on these things must be astronomical, they look great, they feel great, and they deliver the goods.
They're everywhere now – I can remember when a store would have a dusty, squeaking carousel in the back corner devoted to guides, or if we were lucky they had to fight for space next to the magazines, and now they're sold as a package deal with the game – they're up front, one of the first things you see when you walk in the store, and woe betide you if all you want is the game itself, as the assistant now expects you to buy the guide, it's part of the sales pitch, “And if you buy the strategy guide now, you'll save £10 off the usual price...”
Call me cynical, but it seems to me that it's become standard practice these days for developers to put secrets into games that are next to impossible to find without the official strategy guide next to you. One example that I hear about time and time again is from Final Fantasy X – finding the character's Celestial Weapons. Some of the things you have to do to get them are completely illogical, are not hinted at anywhere in the game, and would be nigh-on impossible to find without help.
Strategy guides appeal on two basic levels – completion and time saving. A good, reliable strategy guide will let you lay a game bare, and let you do it in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it alone. Unless of course you're 15 and like to claim that you pwnzd (insert ridiculously complex RPG) in less time that it would take the developers to do it, in which case, piss off and find another website to pollute.
No matter what the circumstances around your first purchase of an official strategy guide are, the second you've paid for it, you know there's a chance that you'll never go back. It's like an addiction; you buy one for whatever reason (just to see what it's like, you're busy at work and don't have the time you used to, your kids have been a handful recently and you can't get peace, your wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/husband has been bitching about the time you spend playing and you need to keep it short) and before you know it, you're buying guides for games that you thought you'd completed months ago. You're digging out copies of games that have gotten dusty because you haven't touched them in so long, just because you found a strategy guide for them.
I digress. I think that most gamers are resigned to never gaining 100% completion on most of their games – that's something I think we learn to live with at an early stage in gaming. But the time issue is the true killer. In today's world, we don't have time to spend 10 hours each day scouring the game world to find every secret ourselves, we don't have the time to write barely legible notes on every scrap of paper at hand because our memory can't keep up with the game, and it's not because out leisure time to too precious to waste on gaming – just the opposite in fact. It's simply because we don't have as much leisure time as used to. We need to know that we're getting the maximum return on the time we spend gaming, it's simple economics – we want the maximum return on our investment.
I wonder sometimes – did games become more complex as strategy guides became more popular, or did strategy guides become more popular, because games were becoming more complex? As the popularity of computer games grew and grew, people were spending more and more time gaming.
I like to think that developers and publishers realised that their customers were looking for more content, more depth to their games, more 'bang for their buck' if you will. They needed the maximum return on their investment (that phrase again). As the games became more complex, the need for strategy guides, official and unofficial, became greater. The moment that strategy guides started to become official, developers were able to place secrets into their games that would guarantee the need for a guide. It's unavoidable that these secrets would eventually be passed around online for free, but there will always be gamers, who will be seduced by the lure of a glossy 200 page strategy guide, shrink wrapped to protect its secrets, every inch of it screaming quality. And yes, I do count myself among those gamers.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll excuse myself. I need to nip down to my local Game store, they just called to remind me I've preordered a copy of GTA:Liberty City Stories for the PS2. Apparently, if I buy the strategy guide at the same time, I'll save myself £10.
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